01 May 2010
Researchers in Britain have carried out the study and found that teaching babies how to swim actually helps develop a range of skills including balance and movement, the Daily Express reported.
For their study, the researchers analysed 19 children who had swimming classes for about five months from the age of two to three months and a control group of 19 non–swimmers.A session might involve having babies dive under water, jump from a pool edge and balance on the hand of a parent while reaching to pick up floating objects.
When the children were five years old, the swimmers had better balance and moved more easily than non–swimmers. All other factors, such as the parents’ education, housing and economic status, were the same. “It is exciting that specific training for young babies has an effect later in life,” Professor Hermundur Sigmundsson, who led the study at Lancaster University, was quoted by the British media as saying.
Blinking too much? not only your mind, your body is wandering too
Blinking eyes during a discussion usually indicate that one’s mind is wandering. Now, a new study says it’s not just the mind, it’s one’s body, too.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo have carried out the study and found that when one’s mind wanders, parts of brain which process external goings–on become less active.
“What we suggest is that when you start to mind–wander, you start to gate the information even at the sensory endings – you basically close your eyelid so there’s less information coming into the brain,” Smilek said.
This is part of a shift in how scientists are thinking about the mind, he added.
“Psychologists are realising that you can’t think about these mental processes, like attention, separately from the fact that the individual’s brain is in a body, and the body’s acting in the world,” he said.
The findings have been published in the Psychological Science journal.
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