Brain gym exercises: an approach in improving the psychological perception in graduate students

Vaishnavi V Siroya, Waqar M Naqvi*, Pratik Phansopkar

Ravi Nair Physiotherapy College, Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha, Maharashtra, India

ABSTRACT

Brain Gym is an academic kinesiological program that is promoted and applied with a consistent learning purpose that aims at enhancing performance such as memory, psychological perception and cognitive skills. The technique requires the participant to communicate with a series of activities that help the body to understand the primary behaviour and learn how to coordinate the brain and entire body. Brain Gym activities includes of 26 basic motions, which are believed to improve perception and stimulates brain hemisphere by neural re-modelling to facilitate whole brain learning. By ways of balancing both the side of brain, behavioural difficulties, social and intellectual burdens are expected to be reduced. This study aims to improve the psychological perception and decrease depression in the undergraduate physiotherapy students. Here's an idea we suggest to check the psychological perception with brain gym intervention and the duration for practices comprises of three days a week session, duration of 25 minutes, which is completed in one hour. The study design is of pre- post type with simple randomized sampling. Before the treatment the mean stress showed a mean score of 33.87, anxiety showed a mean score of 32.43, depression showed a mean score of 32.34; an improvement was seen after the treatment where the mean score was 18.42, 17.26, 19. 46. The final mean difference was 43.49±17.33 and t -value 30.42 (p=0.0001,S). The data analysis shows that after the Brain Gym Activity intervention there was marked reduction in the score of DASS. The participants involved in the study showed significant improvement in their psychological perceptions.

Keywords:

Psychological perception, Depression, Stress, Anxiety, DASS-21, Brain gym