Revisit Your Childhood Games and Boost Your Memory!

Connect with your Inner Child: Recent Studies Reveal that adults can improve their working memory through revisiting their favourite childhood games and passtimes.

When I was a child I thought like a child...when I was a child I played like a child. Now I am an adult I forgot to be a child.

However, those echoes of childhood still haunt our memories....

Do you remember your favourite games as a child? Can you still feel the thrill of climbing the tallest tree and just sitting in the branches for ages and ages? Perhaps you loved to ride your bike for miles and miles and not get back home till tea time. Or did you go to the river and catch tadpoles and dragonflies? I can still feel the sweltering Summer days down by the River while my brother and I caught tadpoles and watched them swimming in our jars filled with brown river water.
 
Do you remember the backyard swing made with some rope and an old tyre wheel where you could swing and sing for hours and hours? Perhaps playing cricket  with the kids in your street was your daily Summer holiday ritual. I remember playing French Cricket every evening and can still hear the laughter and the fights as someone yells, "you're out!"

As a child I felt so free! Free to run through paddocks and chase rainbows feeling my legs moving strong and fast as I jumped over cow pats and pot holes. Where has this wonderful child gone?

Researcher Ross Alloway says that, 'Climbing a tree and balancing on a beam hone ‘proprioceptive’ skills – the brain’s ability to sense where the legs, arms, hands and feet are in space without looking. The brain also has to cope with fast-changing information, such as a creaky branches and wobbly beams... This research suggests that by doing activities that make us think, we can exercise our brains as well as our bodies.' Alloway's  study found that adults can boost their working memory by 50% when they play their childhood games like climbing trees, running barefoot and crawling as opposed to doing exercise such as yoga. 

Sounds like fun to me!

So what am I waiting for? Not only will I improve my working memory, fitness, health and overall enjoyment of life...I will be showing my own children that there is a world beyond gaming devices and it can be found right out their front door!


What are your memories of playing outside as a child? Do you want to recapture that child and have some healthy fun?! Leave a comment and share...

Ross G. Alloway and Tracy Packiam Alloway (2015) THE WORKING MEMORY BENEFITS OF PROPRIOCEPTIVELY DEMANDING TRAINING: A PILOT STUDY, . Perceptual and Motor Skills: Volume 120, Issue , pp. 766-775. 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3180689/Want-boost-brain-power-Try-climbing-trees-Childish-pastimes-improve-working-memories-50.html