03/16: Tackling Your Spatial Awareness

Welcome to Week 8 of Our Online Brain Fitness Class

Tackling Your Spatial Awareness Lesson

Spatial awareness is our ability to understand the space around us and respond within it and to it appropriately. Spatial awareness allows us to navigate our world, find our way, anticipate changes in the environment to react accordingly, and protect ourselves from harm. We use it every day from the most ordinary, simple tasks to some of our most significant decisions, actions and reactions. This week we will learn why it is important, where it is processed in our brain, how to improve it, and what age has to do with it. We will also learn how science and technology have partnered to take advantage of the latest discoveries in spatial cognition to expand the field of medicine, as well as artificial intelligence and virtual navigation. Click here to view the Interactive Lesson or download and print this Lesson Handout. Take the Quiz when you're done.

Note: If you have the time, you might benefit from reviewing Mary’s Basics Lesson on Navigation prior to reading this one. It is an excellent foundation for understanding spatial awareness and its relationship to navigation skills.

The BrainHQ Connection

Juggling, Spatial Awareness, and Brain Fitness

In How to Keep Your Brain Young and Slow the Process of Aging, in addition to an impressive list of brain-strengthening suggestions, juggling is recommended to increase motor skills and spatial awareness.

Foolproof Ways to Stay Brainy, another article that touts the benefits of juggling, explains that any activity that helps improve your dexterity and hand-eye coordination is good for your brain. But with juggling, you can challenge yourself by adding extra balls (increasing the difficulty - just like BrainHQ) as your skill level improves. Also in this article:

"One study scanned the brains of people who learned to juggle for 30 minutes a day over a six-week period. At the end of the study, participants had improved the white matter of the brain. The researchers thought that this was partly because jugglers had better spatial awareness and had learnt to mentally rotate objects. Juggling is also a physical activity you can do even if you’re not very mobile, and displaying your new-found skills to others builds in social engagement."

BrainHQ and Spatial Awareness

The BrainHQ exercises are now being applied to more than just cognitive enhancement for brain fitness. In a recent study "For the first time ever a highly-scalable intervention, BrainHQ, was found to improve symptoms of hemi-spatial neglect, which is a common and often intractable and debilitating problem after stroke or other acquired brain injury." Read Computerized Brain Training BrainHQ Can Reduce Neglect Symptoms of Stroke and Brain Injury if you'd like to learn more about this study.

Weekly Zoom Session

Zoom Session: This week's Zoom Session will be on Wednesday, March 18th. This week, our lessons are related, so you may like to join us for both sessions since to get another perspective of the importance of our navigational skills. Feel free to drop in to whatever sessions work best for you. Here’s our schedule of events:

6:30-7:00: For ALL! Q&A time about any of the BHQ exercises or navigating the BHQ or class websites.

7:00-7:30: We will focus on the Weekly Basics Lesson about Navigation and the Brain

7:30–8:00: We will focus on the Weekly Topics Lesson – Tackling Spatial Awareness

Just click here to follow the instructions on the Home Page by scrolling down to Weekly Zoom Sessions. Or you can go directly to the Zoom site by clicking here.

Note: If it’s your first time participating in a Zoom session, you can try getting on the site early to see how easy it is to get it set up. We begin our BHQ Zoom at 6:45, so try getting on at about 6:30 and call if you have any trouble. You can participate by video and audio, or just listen in by phone. Please let us know if you need help! Call Pat’s cell at 619-818-3953. If you’ve been on Zoom before, you will appreciate this new Zoom Video that Mary created to help you learn about some of the features available to you while on the site. See you on Wednesday.

Enjoy the lessons, and have a brain-healthy week.

Contact Us

Need help? Contact us at:

Pat Mosteller (pmostell@sdccd.edu) Cell 619-818-3953 - Online classes

Mary Burns (mburns@sdccd.edu) - Online classes

Debbie Flores (dsflores@sdccd.edu) - Cell 619-608-9001 --Online classes & Wednesday AM and PM classes at the Kroc Center

Janet Blair ( blusdbits@gmail.com ) - St Pauls Plaza. Contact for Support and Lesson Review

Yael Lorberfeld (ylorberfeld@sdccd.edu) . Mondays at the Kroc Center, Wednesdays at the College Ave Senior Center (Temple Emanu-El), and Friday mornings at the La Jolla JCC.

Marilyn Kessler (marilynk@ifssd.org) - Mondays at the College Ave Senior Center (Temple Emanu-El)