How Wilder Penfield's Brain Maps Can Help Us To Relax ( Scroll down to Yesterday's post for the T'ai Chi Lessons)

                                    Wilder Penfield                

Wilder Penfield, is the legendary Canadian neurosurgeon who pionered neuropsychological studies on the awake patient during brain surgery.
Penfield is most famous for his experiments where he electrically stimulated the brain of patients who had part of their skull removed during surgery to record what thoughts, behaviours and sensations arose from the excitation of specific parts of the cortex
Here is a very short You tube movie  Here ( 1 minute ) to that shows how he worked.
Wilder Penfield was a cartographer he mapped the brain. This technique allowed him to create maps of the sensory and motor cortices of the brain ( more detail on this link  Cortical_homunculus ) showing their connections to the various limbs and organs of the body. These maps are still used today.

The reason I'm so grateful to Wilder  ( really love the man ) is that his insights have helped me so much in my training to relax and in my work teaching people how to relax.
Let me explain, Penfield 's maps show that a very large amount of brain space is occupied by our hands and our head as shown in the photo of the ' Penfield ' model below.

                                     Notice the huge hands and head

When  this information was first revealed there were many objections , people felt that the genital organs  were miss represented. People just couldn't believe that the hands and the face occupied much more ' nerve  space ' than the penis and the vagina.  But Penfield's findings are correct and we can use them , knowing that such a large amount of brain space is occupied by our face and our hands we can focus our relaxation exercises to pay special attention to relaxing these parts of our bodies and greatly amplify our sense of relaxation.
By learning to  paying attention to your face and regularly relaxing the muscles around the eyes and the jaw , by softening the forehead and relaxing the lips and mouth you can greatly enhance your relaxation .
 When you can remain more relaxed you will be more productive during the day and less tired in the evening. You will not need a drink to wind down in the evening because you will be  relaxed already.
You will notice that you have a lot more energy to do things you enjoy,  and being relaxed you will enjoy what you do all the more.
Practice it today you will immediately feel the difference in your energy and the more you practice the better it gets.