the boringwork.

Making the Brain Body Connection (Promislow): Book Notes

Roman Kalugin

TL;DR

  • The book packages two very different things: plain, useful habits (move, breathe slowly, drink water, take breaks) and a branded theory called Educational Kinesiology, also known as Brain Gym.
  • The plain habits are real and independently supported. The branded theory — that specific wiggles «repattern» the brain and «integrate» hemispheres, tested by pressing on a muscle — is not.
  • The named moves («Brain Buttons», «Cross Crawl», «Hook-ups») are just movement and self-soothing with a mythology bolted on top.
  • Muscle-testing as a diagnostic tool has failed controlled trials. Treat it as theatre, not information.
  • Verdict: «Skip it». Take the movement and the breathing, which you can get for free, and leave the theory.
Making the Brain Body Connection by Sharon Promislow — cover

Verdict

«Making the Brain Body Connection» is a friendly, well-meaning stress manual built on a foundation that does not hold. Sharon Promislow writes warmly and the exercises are harmless, but the engine underneath — Educational Kinesiology and «Specialized Kinesiology» — is a pseudoscience that peer review has repeatedly failed to support. When the book works, it works for reasons the book gets wrong.

You do not need the theory to get the benefit, and the theory is where the health-adjacent risk lives. One disclaimer up front: muscle-testing is presented here as a way to «read» your body and diagnose blocks. It cannot do that, and no one should use it to make a health decision. Our rating: «Skip it». Keep reading and we will hand you the working parts for free.

The big idea

Promislow’s thesis is that stress pushes you into a reactive, «survival» mode that scrambles clear thinking, and that a short menu of physical movements can switch you back into an integrated, learning-ready state. She sorts stress into five buckets — emotional, chemical, environmental, physical and behavioural — and offers a «Quick Six» routine you can run discreetly at a desk.

The framing is seductive because half of it is true. Bodies and minds are connected, and a stressed body does think worse. The book’s error is the mechanism it invents to explain why its particular moves help.

Key ideas

  • Stress narrows cognition. Under acute stress you lean on automatic reactions and lose access to flexible, deliberate thought. This part is uncontroversial and matches the wider literature on stress and performance.
  • The «Quick Six» reset. A compact sequence — water, a couple of postural moves, some crossing-the-midline motion, slow breathing — meant to be done before hard mental work. As a calm-down ritual it is fine; the claimed neurology is the problem.
  • «Brain Buttons». Rubbing points below the collarbone while touching the navel, said to «wake up» the brain. There is no mechanism here beyond touch and a pause.
  • «Cross Crawl». Touching opposite hand to knee in a marching motion, claimed to «integrate» the two hemispheres. It is light coordinated movement, which is genuinely good for you, for ordinary reasons.
  • «Hook-ups». Crossing ankles and hands in a folded posture to «defuse» stress. Functionally this is a self-holding pose plus slow breathing, and slow breathing does calm the nervous system.
  • Muscle-testing. Pressing on an outstretched arm to «ask the body» what stresses it or what it needs. This is the load-bearing claim of the whole method, and it is the weakest.
  • Hydration and breaks. Drink water, pause, move. Plain, correct, and the most defensible advice in the book.

What holds up

Strip the branding and a real toolkit remains, because the generic ingredients have evidence behind them.

Movement helps cognition. A 2025 meta-review of 30 systematic reviews found that acute bouts of physical activity produce small but reliable improvements in cognitive function (Effects of acute exercise on cognitive function, 2025). So «Cross Crawl» can leave you sharper — not because it wires your hemispheres, but because it is movement.

Slow breathing calms you. A systematic review and meta-analysis found that voluntary slow breathing shifts heart rate and heart-rate variability in the direction associated with lower stress (Laborde et al., 2022). «Hook-ups» works to the extent that it slows your breath.

Hydration matters. Even mild dehydration measurably degrades mood and some cognitive tasks (Ganio et al., British Journal of Nutrition, 2011). The book’s instruction to drink water is simply good advice.

Grade these as confirmed. The catch: none of them is unique to this book, and none needs the kinesiology story to be true.

What doesn’t

The theory that makes this book distinctive is the theory that failed.

Brain Gym’s specific claims are not supported. Keith Hyatt’s review, pointedly titled «Building Stronger Brains or Wishful Thinking?», found the neurological rationale unfounded and the supporting research methodologically poor (Hyatt, Remedial and Special Education, 2007). A later review reached the same conclusion, finding no credible evidence that the program improves academic outcomes (Spaulding, Mostert and Beam, Exceptionality, 2010).

The «hemisphere integration» and «repatterning» language is folklore. The idea traces back to psychomotor patterning theories discredited decades ago. Science writer Ben Goldacre spent years documenting how Brain Gym taught children physiological nonsense in UK schools (Goldacre, Bad Science). The Skeptic’s Dictionary reaches the same verdict on educational kinesiology (Carroll, The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Muscle-testing does not detect anything. Applied-kinesiology muscle-testing, the diagnostic core here, performs no better than chance in controlled tests and cannot diagnose deficiencies, stresses or «blocks». The broader assessment is blunt: the specific mechanisms are pseudoscientific (Brain Gym International, overview and citations). Grade the theory as refuted, not merely dated.

Why the tools outlive the theory

Here is the honest reconciliation. Readers report that the exercises help, and many are not lying. The moves deliver a real effect through boring, well-understood channels:

  • «Cross Crawl» = movement. Coordinated motion raises arousal and mood. The hemisphere story is decoration.
  • «Hook-ups» = slow breathing plus a self-soothing posture. The calm is the exhale, not the ankle-crossing.
  • «Brain Buttons» = a pause and a touch. Stopping to attend to your body interrupts a stress spiral. That is real, and it is not electromagnetism.
  • Water and breaks = water and breaks. No translation needed.

Once you see the mechanisms, you can build the same routine without the mythology — and without paying for muscle-testing you cannot trust. If you want a grounded version of this, our note on protecting your energy covers movement, breaks and boundaries without the pseudoscience, and the wider energy cluster does the same.

Who should actually read it

Read it if you are a collector of self-help history and want a primary example of how a real physiological insight — bodies affect minds — gets wrapped in an unfalsifiable brand. As a curiosity, it is instructive.

Do not read it as a manual for how your brain works, and especially do not adopt muscle-testing to make decisions about health, learning or your children. Parents and teachers looking for evidence-based cognitive support should skip it entirely. If you simply want to think more clearly under load, our thinking cluster and the wider book notes hub will serve you better.

One thing to try

The shift: stop treating any single ritual as a switch that «unblocks» your brain, and start treating stress relief as a few plain inputs your body responds to — movement, slow breathing, water, a pause. Keep the inputs, drop the story.

First move: before your next hard task, stand up, move for sixty seconds, drink a glass of water, then take six slow breaths with a longer exhale than inhale. That is the working core of the whole book, and it costs nothing.

Get the book

Find «Making the Brain Body Connection» on Amazon — as an Amazon Associate, The Boring Work earns from qualifying purchases (disclosure).

The boring bottom line

«Making the Brain Body Connection» is kind, readable and built on sand. The parts that help are the parts you already knew — move, breathe, hydrate, rest — and the parts that make it special are the parts that failed peer review. You can keep the toolkit and lose the theory in a single afternoon. That is the whole review.

Sources

The Russian-language predecessor of this article (2008) is preserved in the archive.

Предыдущая запись
Следующая запись

Leave a Reply