Want to remember something? Clenching your fist doesn't help!

Image Credits: fist and brain.You might have seen this news story the other day:Want to remember something? Clench your fists!Giving a speech and need to remember what to say? Just clench your right fist while rehearsing. Then, when it's time to give the speech, clench your left fist, and voila, you’ll recall what you rehearsed! That's what a new study found, which was published April 24 online at PLOS ONE. Sounds too easy now, doesn't it? And if you're exclaiming, "that's just too good to be true!" — then you'd be correct.The new study by Propper et al. (2013) has unleashed a torrent of criticism on Twitter, including this starter by @js_simons.What motivated such a study in the first place? I'll try to run through the authors' rationale here, starting with statements from the abstract, which are followed by my commentary.Unilateral hand clenching increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe of the contralateral hemisphere. It's true that unilateral hand movement is executed via motor cortex activity in the opposite hemisphere, so the right hemisphere controls the left hand and vice versa.Such hand clenching is also associated with increased experiencing of a given hemisphere’s “mode of processing.”This statement is based on EEG studies that have looked at alpha power suppression recorded at scalp electrodes over left and right frontal cortex (Harmon-Jones, 2006). The hypothesis is that left hand contractions "activate" (i.e., suppress alpha waves in) ...
Source: The Neurocritic - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs