Have a nice energy yawn
Charlie Brooker saw a ‘Newsnight’ piece on ‘Brain Gym’.
It’s essentially a series of simple exercises lumbered with names that make you want to steer a barbed wire bus into its creator’s face. One manoeuvre, in which you massage the muscles round the jaw, is called the “energy yawn”…Throughout the report I was grinding my teeth and shaking my head – a movement I call a “dismay churn”…because I care about the difference between fantasy and reality…Perhaps the Department for Children, Schools and Families confused fantasy with reality the day it endorsed Brain Gym. Because while Brain Gym’s coochy-coo exercises may well be fun or relaxing, what they’re definitely good at is increasing the flow of bullshit into children’s heads.
Well at least that way the children will feel at home in the world.
Because we, the adults, don’t just gleefully pull the wool over our own eyes – we knit permanent blindfolds. We’ve decided we hate facts. Hate, hate, hate them. Everywhere you look, we’re down on our knees, gleefully lapping up neckful after neckful of steaming, cloddish bullshit in all its forms. From crackpot conspiracy theories to fairytale nutritional advice, from alternative medicine to energy yawns – we just can’t get enough of that musky, mudlike taste.
Well, you see, that musky, mudlike taste is essential for keeping our chakras aligned with our chi so that our cosmic energy crystals will be attuned to the feng shui of our irreducible complexity. It all makes sense if you just join the dots.
Hah ! Brooker is one of the reasons I still get the Guardian. Ian Hislop said he’s one of the most intelligent people he’s met. If you want a light-relief-ish break from the sheer volume of depressing bullshit swirling around tv-culture land, check excerpts of his tv series “Screen Wipe” out on You Tube. Well pitched, highly satisfying rants against the vibrant temple of bollocks that modern tv / celebrity culture often is. And sometimes, even about why truth matters. Delightful.
(Speakers on, but not too high…)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59OJ17raqWw
>Because we, the adults, don’t just gleefully pull the wool over our own eyes – we knit permanent blindfolds. We’ve decided we hate facts… Everywhere you look, we’re down on our knees, gleefully lapping up neckful after neckful of steaming, cloddish bullshit in all its forms. From crackpot conspiracy theories to fairytale nutritional advice, from alternative medicine to energy yawns – we just can’t get enough of that musky, mudlike taste.< It really annoys me when journalists use “we” like this, when they are excluding themselves, and frequently a great many other people: http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/233/
Oh, Brain Gym.
No, please, no.
It makes me so …
I had to sit through half a day of some twerp delivering ‘training’ on this.
I could have spent that time so well.
I quite like the idea of Charlie and Ben trashing these charlartins over a pint.
Paxman was on form;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjRhYP5faTU
Jeremy Paxman treated the claims with contempt on BBC 2 Newsnight last week, as did Colin Blakemore on the same programme.
Paxman followed up with an interview with the man behind Brain Gym, Dr Paul Dennison (in California), and made a fool of him.
Oh dear, Don, poor you.
Jeremy Paxman. Colin Blakemore. Our Ben. Charlie Brooker. What a fun group. (Okay Paxman can be supercilious, but when it’s Brain Gym…)
OB – A commentator once described Paxman tackling slippery interviewees as like “a Princess Royal admonishing a clumsy footman”.
Mmph. Well exactly. I saw that notorious interview he did of Blair – very Princess Royal it was. Ooja fink youa, I wondered.
Come, come, Ophelia. Everyone knows you don’t align your chakras with your chi. It’s a physical impossibility and was discounted in the Most Sacred Writings of the Most High Chaiung Twat Song, as all primary-school kids know. You are thinking of the twonk variation on the bibbling dwinkle.
My kids’ school seems to be getting heaviliy into the idea of thinking styles (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, logical etc…) which seems to come from the same school of a little bit of common sense-and-a lot of neuro-nonsense as Brain Gym and NLP.
They haven’t sent anything home to parents about it though, so I only know what I hear from my kids
Hmm – that also sounds like the Howard Gardner school, Maya. Multiple intelligences, you know – emotional, musical, kinaesthetic, etc.
Brooker’s in fine form here. I was glad to see Shalom Auslander make his CiF debut yesterday. Hope he contributes regularly and vents some spleen on god, who’s something of a prick according to Auslander…
mirax: SA – seconded. Fine stuff.
But OB, the beauty of it is that you don’t _have_ to join the dots! It just makes sense not in a rational way, but in a spiritual way. In other words, irrationality or nonsense.
Let’s face ut, it’s cheaper and easier than spending money on schools and training teachers to actually teach properly. Gives the kids ‘flexible thinking skills’. (Bah, Humbug)
Charlie Brooker is getting a bit uneven in his G2 stuff, but on the whole I think he’s excellent. This piece about Dawkins’ “The Enemies Of Reason” is pretty good:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/columnists/story/0,,2145124,00.html
Thomas –
Brooker can be a bit hit-or-miss (and is quite repetitive in his choice of insulting imagery, I found), but it might not be entirely his fault – let’s not forget, when analysing journalistic output, the curse of the (sub) editor.
Dr. Ben Goldacre (over at http://www.badscience.net) has illustrated very nicely what the Grauniad does to his column from time to time, occasionally affecting it quite badly.
On a much smaller scale, a mate of mine writes pieces for a (reasonably large) local newspaper, and he’s had work edited to the point of entirely changing the meaning, because that’s what the editor had wanted him to say all along…!
:-)