Forward and backward eye movement exercises increase creativity , Elizabeth Shobe and her colleagues at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey have shown. Details of the study are published in the December issue of the journal Brain and cognition .
To demonstrate this, Shobe subjected 62 participants to a version of the "Alternative Uses Test", a test in which subjects are challenged to imagine unconventional uses of everyday objects such as bricks or newspapers. Before taking the test a second time, half of the subjects performed a horizontal forward and backward eye movement exercise for 30 seconds, which until now was suspected of increasing communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain . The results revealed that after the exercise creativity increased significantly, especially the originality of the proposed ideas. Of course, the effect was temporary , and did not last more than 9 minutes.
The experiment also revealed that ambidextrous people offered more creative responses right out of the box, and that the eye movement exercise was only effective on right- and left-handed subjects, that is, with a dominant hand.
