"Smart Moves" With Dr. Carla Hannaford, PhD - Ep. 68

Today on Move Your Brain Move Your Body we welcome Dr. Carla Hannaford! Dr. Hannaford is a biologist, author, educator with more than forty years teaching experience. Dr. Hannaford is the author of Smart Moves - Why Learning is Not All In Your Head, The Dominance Factor, Awakening the Child Heart, Playing in the Unified field, Raising and Becoming Conscious, Creative Human Beings. Dr. Hannaford has worked with musicians, artists, health care professionals, social service agencies, atheletes & spiritual organizations  She has keynoted for many conferences worldwide, and been quoted in well over 1,000 books and journal articles on the importance of movement, and music for brain development, life-long learning and health.

How Dr. Carla Hannaford went down the road to becoming an expert on learning

The importance of cross lateral integrative movement 

"Crossing the midline of the body, its what we do when we take a walk"

Talking about memory & belief system

"The more we move the more brilliant we are"

Running as a high impact sport

The vestibular system and learning

The Dominance Factor 

Right Brain versus Left Brain

"Dominance starts to develop 9 weeks in utero with the moro reflex"

"What happens is our non dominant hemisphere will shut down by 75-85% (when under stress) We do not need the executive functioning that the frontal lobe does, we just need to survive."

Smart Moves

How Meghan and Aleena's dominance profiles interact and balance

How Dr. Hannaford moves her brain and body

Quotes from The Dominance Factor:

"As you might imagine, eye dominance has important implications for reading. In normal eye teaming the dominant eye orchestrates the tracking of both eyes. The right eye naturally tracks from left to right while the left eye naturally tracks from right to left. Learners with a left eye dominant pattern will initially want to look at the right side of the page first and then move to the left, thus causing difficulties in reading languages that move from left to right, like English. Because the hand and eye are so intimately connected, letter reversals are not uncommon when left eye dominant children are first learning to read and write."

Quotes from Smart Moves:

"Thinking and learning are not all in our head. On the contrary, the body plays an integral part in all our intellectual processes from our earliest moments in utero right through to old age. It is our body’s senses that feed the brain environmental information with which to form an understanding of the world and from which to draw when creating new possibilities."

"Sensations received through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, proprioceptors, and other sensory receptors we are just beginning to understand, are the foundation of knowledge. The body is the medium of this learning as it gathers all the sensations that inform us about the world and about ourselves."

"Movement and play profoundly improve—not only learning—but creativity, stress management and health."

Dr. Carla Hannaford's Website