Are you aware that you think not only with your brain, but also with your body? That your body plays a role in what and how you think? Have you ever noticed how your body affects your thinking? In today’s article, let’s gain a better understanding of the mind-body connection and how you can direct your body to guide your thoughts in more conducive ways.

Becoming aware of the body-mind connection

In his two da Vinci biographies, Michael Gelb relates that Leonardo’s intellectual and artistic genius was complemented by extraordinary physical gifts: “His great personal strength was joined to dexterity” and “his great physical beauty … and more than infinite grace in every movement.” In contrast, Leonardo commented that the average human “moves without physical awareness.” Clearly, da Vinci was acutely aware of the body-mind connection — of how our bodies affect our thinking, and vice versa. Are you?

Let’s do a little experiment together now. Stand up, slouch your shoulders forward, let your head fall forward, look down to the floor and monitor your thoughts in this posture for half a minute. If you remain longer in posture one, you may feel sad, depressed and worthless, and encounter limiting, disempowering thoughts like “I can’t do it”; no wonder that around the world and across the ages, henchmen of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes typically make captured opponents look down after they arrest them…

Next, again for half a minute, assume a second posture: Now stand straight by putting your shoulders back and pressing your back through, open your arms out to the side, and look up. What do you think and feel now?

When you stand straight and look up (posture two), you’re likely to feel good and positive, worthy and empowered, and become aware of the unlimited potential that resides in you. Do you agree?

In my Business Creativity course at Mahidol University, we have enough time for a very insightful exercise: Together, my students and I replay and experience the different stages of evolutionary development, and how it affects our thinking and use of senses. Starting to move on the floor like reptiles, we next become mammals and then primates before finally arriving at the apex of evolution and becoming aware of what it means to be human. This bodily exercise allows my master’s students to appreciate the importance of our upright body posture for our thinking, that it is one of the defining aspects of being human that played a pivotal role in our brain development and in how we use our senses to perceive our environment.

Lesson: Pay attention to your posture and how it affects your mind. Throughout your day, whenever possible, assume an upright posture and stand or sit straight to better your attitude and thoughts.

Exercise the weaker sides of your body

Psychological studies of the lives of extraordinary thinkers revealed that many creative geniuses were left-handers, with da Vinci being one of them. If you’re right-handed like me, don’t feel discouraged: It is not left-handedness as such that amplifies creative thinking, but rather the fact that left-handers grow up in a world that forces kids to write with their right hand. Putting your weaker extremities to use for bodily activities seems to build more and new, unusual neural connections in your brain that later allow you to produce new, unusual thoughts and ideas.

Lesson: When you exercise or use your body for work, don’t forget to occasionally add in some weird, unusual coordinative activities that strengthen the weaker sides of you and thus your creative thinking. So, train your brain by doing unusual activities, such as regularly writing or drawing with your weak hand, shooting or throwing a ball with your weak foot or hand, or running half a mile backward like I occasionally do to increase my bodily coordination and further the growth of new unusual neural connections in my brain.

Move your body to improve or change your thinking

“With a few exceptions, the great geniuses of history were gifted with remarkable physical energy and aptitude, none more so than Da Vinci,” noted Michael Gelb. Like da Vinci, whose preferred forms of regular exercise were walking, swimming, riding and fencing, many other extraordinary thinkers were aware of the importance of movement and exercise for learning and augmenting your thinking, too. For example, Mahatma Gandhi believed that “No matter what amount of work one has, one should always find some time for exercise, just as one does for one’s meals. It is my humble opinion that, far from taking away from one’s capacity to work, it adds to it.” Similarly, Lord Buddha asserts that: “To keep the body in good health is a duty. Otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.”

Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of business people nowadays neglect their bodies — at least, if I take my master’s students as a yardstick: When asked who regularly exercises, fewer than ten percent of my students do. But this is exactly the wrong approach to a busy work life, as brain scientist John Ratey explains in his book Spark: “The body was designed to be pushed, and in pushing our bodies, we push our brains too. Learning and memory evolved in concert with the motor functions that allowed our ancestors to track down food, so as far as our brains are concerned, if we’re not moving, there’s no need to learn anything.”

According to Ratey’s review of recent brain research studies, the findings suggest that sport — and aerobic exercises such as running in particular — positively affects the release of hormones and neurotransmitters that improve our mood and thinking, further our learning, and grow the brain through the creation of new neurons and neural connections. It seems that the old Roman saying is right indeed: Mens sana in corpore sano — a healthy mind in a healthy body.

Lesson: Move your body to improve your learning and thinking. Make time available to regularly exercise during the week to engage nerve cells throughout the brain and build up more neurons and neural connections.

Where you look is what you think

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), practitioners noticed a link between what we think and where the pupils in our eyes move. For example, when you imagine or ideate, your eyes will look to the upper right (or what in NLP is called ‘visual constructing’); or when you recall images or a situation from the past, your eyes move to the upper left side (‘visual remembered’), among others.

Lesson: Being aware of the automatic eye-movement-thought connection allows you to consciously make use of it in two ways: For one, observe and guess what kind of thinking your counterparts (e.g., in a negotiation) currently engage in. For two, and more importantly for our purposes, actively look to the upper right corner whenever you want to imagine or need some ideas.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2011. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 7 July 2011.