Episode 1: Understanding the Frontal Lobe

In this episode, we explore how the frontal lobe influences movement, decision-making, and inhibition, with insights from dancers, gymnasts, and case studies. We discuss practical drills and exercises to activate the frontal lobe, improve movement initiation, and reduce unnecessary tension, enhancing athletic performance and everyday function.

Key topics:

• The anatomy of the frontal lobe: primary motor cortex, motor association cortex, prefrontal cortex, Broca's area, and the frontal eye field
• How the frontal lobe controls movement initiation, planning, and inhibition
• The relationship between the frontal lobe and movement disorders like Parkinson’s and ADHD
• Practical exercises: Stroop activity, saccades, and balance drills to activate and train the frontal lobe
• The impact of frontal lobe activity on movement fluidity, tension, and reflexive responses
• Case studies: eye movement delay in patients with brain tumors and personal experiences with initiation/inhibition challenges
• The global influence of frontal lobe function on daily habits, gait, and emotional regulation

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Introduction to the episode and the importance of studying the frontal lobe in movement
• 02:25 - Overview of the frontal lobe regions involved in movement control
• 03:06 - Primary motor cortex and inhibition versus initiation roles
• 04:01 - The motor association cortex as the brain’s navigator for movement plans
• 05:01 - Executive functions housed in the prefrontal cortex: decision-making and emotional
• regulation06:26 - The frontal lobe as the brain’s CEO in movement
• 07:06 - Coordination of brain regions for seamless responses
• 08:00 - How the brain anticipates and prepares for movement using the motor association cortex
• 09:22 - The impact of over-monitoring on movement fluidity and tension
• 10:20 - Fear, mental rehearsal, and the "frozen" states in movement execution
• 11:19 - Case study: eye movement delays post-brain tumor removal
• 12:23 - Personal experiences with initiation delays in weight training and eye pursuits
• 15:34 - Broader effects: initiation issues in habits and early signs of neurodegenerative conditions
• 19:47 - Drills to activate the frontal lobe: Stroop activity, saccades, and balance exercises
• 23:32 - Practical application in dance, gymnastics, and athletic training
• 24:33 - Using saccades and inhibitory games to enhance power and fluidity in movement
• 31:37 - Closing thoughts and reflection on the global influence of frontal lobe function

Resources & Links:

• Stroop Test Explanation
• Saccades and Eye Movement Drills

Connect with Yuka and Nikki:

• Yuka - IG @levelupneuro
• Nikki - IG: @bybee_nikki

Join our newsletters:

• LevelUp Newsletter
• Elevated Performance Newsletter

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do it again. One more time, do it again. Welcome to Performance Rewired, a podcast for movement experts seeking to unlock the secrets behind optimal performance using a brain-based lens. I'm Nikki Biby.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

And I'm Yuka Segira. We're master neurotrainers and performance coaches for elite and professional athletes and dancers. And we'll be sharing insights, tools, and a little behind the scenes of what we do. And if you want alternatives to more and more reps, this podcast is for you.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Welcome to Performance Rewired. Today we are talking about the frontal lobe. And we have had a lot on our minds about the frontal lobe. The last couple weeks, Yuca and I have been talking about that's probably from the frontal lobe. And Yuca even had an experience like a couple months ago that she told me about that she was like, oh, that's probably from this area of the frontal lobe. So today we wanted to just uh step into talking about the different parts of the brain and give a little overview of um, you know, what this podcast will be about. So, why do we even care about the frontal lobe and what is its influence on movement? And I've been thinking a lot about that because I have dancers come to me all the time and they're monitoring all the things that I used to monitor as a student. They're like, my pinky toe was touching the floor, and I prepped for my pirouette, and I could feel my buttocks engage. And when my buttocks engaged, my hips were pulling up, and then I pressed my heels, and then I did a pirouette, and then the pirouette fell apart. And now that I'm on the side of teaching and learning, I'm like, okay, you might have fallen apart because of all those things you set up before you turned, and you have stopped yourself from having some reflexive movement that you need when you execute anything that's athletic. We really want that. That's what makes us really excellent performers is our athleticism and our ability to react to the small nuances of when things don't go quite right. So, Yuka's gonna talk a little bit about um the different parts of the frontal lobe.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Okay, yes. Um that scanning situation, yes. Uh, if you're any former dancers, gymnasts out there or coaches, like this is something we want to avoid, not encourage. Um, okay, so frontal lobe. Super duper important. It's in the front of the brain, as you might imagine. It's called the frontal lobe. Um, and one of the, why is it important for movement? One of the big areas that it holds or that houses is called the primary motor cortex. So, which as you might imagine, is the part of the brain that is going to send signals down the body for voluntary movement, right? So it's initiating the movement as well as inhibiting, which we'll talk about, and that's like one of the big, big, big, big roles that the frontal lobe plays is inhibition. And then right in front of that is actually something called the motor association cortex. So they're just fancy terms, you don't really have to remember what they are unless you're interested. Um, but it's think of it as like a navigator. So it's like, okay, so if this is what we want to do, this is how you're gonna go about making that happen, right? If I want to do a peer one, if I want to balance, if I want to do a handstand, if I want to uh do a backhand spring, right? It's like this is what you want to do, this is the plan, all right, this is how it's gonna happen. Like these are the muscles that we're gonna turn on or off. And within that area, and we may want to do like, I don't know, several podcasts on this, there are other parts of that area called the supplementary motor area, pre-cor pre-motor cortex, which is like even before the planning happens. Um it's it's sort of like before you do the thing, what has to happen? We can talk about that too. Um, so we've got the primary motor cortex, cortex, motor association cortex. Um, and then we have it's so funny, like it's like everything is like pre-pre. So the pre-frontal cortex, and so this is now in front of the front, like everything. And this is where if you've heard of like executive function and the frontal lobe, like this is where that's happening. So behavior, planning, inhibition, good choices and you're making decisions, um, as well as cognitive control, like when you're learning a movement, when it's kind of that like I really have to think about what I'm doing, um, versus when you've already learned a movement, you don't want to be thinking about like, oh, I gotta push down and do this with my hips and do this with my hands or whatever. This this prefrontal cortex area also houses what's called the frontal eye field. Um, and so that's involved in vision, particularly rapid eye movements. So if you're like, what's over there, right? Or like quickly trying to orient yourself to something, uh, spotting is a big one. Um, that control so that initiates that movement. It's in charge of that. And then the last major area is called broca's area, which is language processing, and then the motor control for speech, right? So this is as infants, as toddlers, this is what is developing as they begin to actually say words. So those are the main areas, right? It's initiating moving, driving movement, planning for movement, um, not so much correcting movement, like anticipating movement, um, and then a lot of this like executive, like decision-making, um, cognitive function, emotional planning. So not emotional planning, but emotions and planning. I don't know what emotional planning is, but I'm sure that's something also. All right, so those are the yeah. I'm gonna plan. Well, I guess you could plan to be happy. Um, all right, so that's those are the main areas. Yep. And then yeah, and then Nikki can talk a little bit about a little more in depth about what each area does and sort of the consequences for movement.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Yeah, so the frontal lobe, if you were thinking of them as like employees of your mind, the uh the prefrontal cortex, I'm gonna go there first, um, is the CEO. So it's basically the one who makes the final decision about what's going on and it initiates or inhibits what we're doing, as Yuca said, and it is um coordinating with other parts of the brain, all these brain areas coordinating together to really give you a response. But the motor association cortex, as Yuca mentioned, is kind of the planner and the choreographer. So the CEO makes the final decision, but the motor association cortex kind of choreographs how it's going to happen. And then the commander, if you had a commander for your brain, would be your primary motor cortex. So when I think about, you know, okay, why do these areas matter as far as movement goes, you have your brain is working so quickly as the uh frontal eye fields are scanning your environment. Your uh oh my gosh, all my words just went into a scramble. Your primary or your motor association cortex is coming up with ways to navigate movement before you even recognize sometimes that you are going to do something, it's already come up with a way to do it. And so when you are activating um areas of the frontal lobe and kind of going through your checklist like dancers and uh gymnasts often probably do, I'm thinking, do gymnasts do that too?

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Not to the degree that dancers do, I think because they're very rarely static. There is some of it though, right? It's like I gotta like, I gotta push here and whatever, close here. Um whereas like right, the preparation phase of dancers, or if you're just standing at the bar, like I know I did this, right? And you're just like, what's my what's my supporting leg doing? What's it doing? Is it contracting? Is it tight? Is it doing this, right? Um so it's not quite as extensive, but absolutely does happen. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Yeah. So when you when you engage that process of the mind frequently, you can kind of uh lose your ability to just go with the flow and be reflexive and have the quality of movement that you want because you're creating this tension and this monitoring system that now is um very active and it's activity you're sometimes unable to inhibit. So it is inhibition and initiation, but I see dancers who get stuck in they can't do their pirouette until they do all their checkpoints. They can't do their developée until they check their supporting leg. And so it's actually slowing their movement down and it's also creating um more tension than is necessary a lot of the time, and also uh giving a more mechanical nuance.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Yeah, versus like flu, like versus fluid, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:40

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

So let me just say this so basically be so the frontal lobe is initiating and inhibiting and so is it almost like there's so much so at the point where you're overthinking and actually this happens, so it's it's it's interesting, like with the gymnast, what tends to happen sort of this fro, let's just call it frozen moment, is more when there's a little bit of fear or a lot of fear involved before doing a skill, right? And so there's like a lot of mental rehearsal or unwanted thoughts as opposed to like, okay, I gotta do maybe there is like I gotta do this, I gotta do this, I gotta make sure I do this. It's much more like, I hope I don't die, I hope I don't die. But at the same time, we're we're trying to inhibit those that thinking in order to initiate the movement that we want and to make that flip more quickly, or actually to make that flip. Is that how you would think about it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Yeah, yeah. And and I think that I mean maybe you're gonna go into this right now. So the amygdala's part in this, um, you know, how the frontal lobe and the amygdala play off of each other, and sometimes there's a lack of balance between the two areas of the brain. Um actually, you know what?

SPEAKER_01 11:05

Talk about no no no but talk about talk about the initiation and how you with your smooth pursuits, how you like your own experience with with initiating movements.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Yeah, so I have a lazy eye, my left eye is lazy, and I was on the weight floor. This happened a couple months ago, and it's hard for me to admit, but just bear with me. I was on the weight floor and I was pressing some weights from my chest, and I recognized all of a sudden that on my initiation I was stalled. I was delayed. I was trying to push, but I wasn't pushing yet, and it wasn't because the weights were too heavy, they were just like 20 or 30 pounds, and I can lift more than that. It didn't matter how light or heavy the weight was, I just had a little delay. And I started thinking now, why am I having a delay on these weights? They're not that heavy. And it's because I have an initiation and inhibition problem. So I started thinking about that in other areas. First of all, sometimes I also don't fully finish my movement. I have some thoughts as to why I'm not. Yeah, like wait, wait, what does that mean? Like I am when I'm pressing, I don't come all the way to a full rest at the end of my set. Sometimes I skip the rest, and I think it's because I'm trying to skip my initiation because then I have to initiate from zero again.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Oh, so like you don't go like so you go all the way up and then you're like, I'm gonna go like 97% of the way down and then go back up. Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

And it may have to do with this concept of time under tension. And I was working in Legris for a while, and we were always talking about time under tension, so there was no zero phase, but the zero phase actually is behavioral, and you have to be able to start from zero into a lot of areas of or z start from zero into a lot of areas of your life. So I went ahead and I started thinking about other movements that I had an initiation problem with. So back to my lazy eye. So I my lazy eye rests towards my nose, towards my midline, and I started doing a smooth pursuit, which is basically just following my finger across the horizon from left to right, just in front of my eye level. And as I was going from right to left, I recognized I don't think my lazy eye is really participating in this activity. I think, I think it's just maybe my right eye. So I closed my right eye, and sure enough, my left eye did not want to initiate the smooth pursuit past my midline.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

It was not really wait, going to wait, going from left to right.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

From right to left. I set it back to left. Yeah. So from right to left. So it didn't want to abduct. Yes, it doesn't want to abduct. Oh. So I'm like going, going, and maybe you can even see me here. I'm like going. And like right there, that's a little bit weird for me.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

And then if you see my eye, it just probably jumped, so it's not even really following. Anyway.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

So you could feel something funny was happening with your left eye. You're like, something's not correct. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

Yeah. And so I just recognize this inhibition and inhibition issue is more global than I was even really recognizing. Like I know that when we're talking about the brain, it has a global effect. But what I didn't recognize is that I would see it on the weight floor, that I would see it in my eye movements, I would also see it in my habits of my daily life. Like how fast am I able to jump out of bed in the morning? Um, how quickly do I start doing the dishes? So there's a lot of areas in my life that was showing me, yeah, I'm like a little bit delayed in my starts. But one of the most fascinating things that led me to that was working with a client who had had a brain tumor removed, and she was unable to initiate smooth pursuit action at all with her eyes. So her eyes didn't move side to side at all. Her head was taking the every motion, even when she would stop and giggle and say, Let me try that again. And she knew comprehension, she was aware that her head wasn't supposed to move. She still could not initiate the side-to-side eye movements. And I started thinking a lot about that case and what that meant because she was having a problem with her movement, and I was like, Oh, this is something at the very baseline of her movement, it's initiation and it's coming, and we can see it in the eyes, which is super fascinating to me.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Yep, that's wild. Yeah, so that's actually so in your point, basically, when so again to the global aspect of what the brain does, and this is partially why we wanted to do this podcast, also, because it's we, you know, on Instagram we're like, oh, you do this eye drill, and then you can pike or forward fold more easily, right? But the reality is, is so when you do, and we'll talk about this in a second, when you do a drill to activate the frontal lobe, right, it can have effects in your movement. Like I actually just did um uh saccades for a uh a client, a dancer who had she's had a dislocate, or she is not currently dislocated, but she dislocated her knee, she's post-PT. And we were just doing like on the reformer, like really deep, kind of approximating like a grand plie. And she's like, Oh, it hurts at this point. And I'm like, okay, tell me exactly when. It's just like just when I start to push off. And I was like, oh, initiation. So we did some saccades, which is a frontal lobe, and we'll talk about what that is. We did some saccades, um, and then she got back down and then the pain was gone. Um, but to the point of it's global, right? So if if the frontal lobe and deficiencies in the frontal lobe are also associated with things like ADHD, right? Attention, focus, um, difficulty initiating tasks, difficulty getting things done, or like starting to do things, um, that those can be indicators of frontal lobe, let you know, just say like imbalance, right? It's not as active as we want. And so from physical things, like so what Nikki was describing, what you were describing as like like start that's so interesting, by the way, that you like notice that, right? So, like this start of a movement, um right, which could be like it just takes someone a long time to either get warm or to get to like actually move, like it just looks like you would have to push them in order to get them to move. Um, our lack of arm swing, which we were texting about yesterday. This is this crazy phenomenon that I have seen because um gate is one of the things that I is one of the first things that I assess because it's a really big global indicator of what's going on with the brain. And so when if you see kids whose arms do not swing, like they're just hanging down like streamers from the ceiling, like and they don't actually swing. That's a frontal lobe as well as a little bit of brainstem, but that's a frontal lobe deficiency.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

Um yeah, so other things like it can also be unfortunately an an early indicator of things like Parkinson's disease. So arm swing is a really important part of our gate, but I also see a lot of people who are young who don't have much arm swing. And it's like, wow.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

I feel like I'm like, yeah, that's bad. And then when I do see a kid that has like regular their arm, I'm like, oh, good for you, whatever you're doing, or whatever you did as a toddler or a four-year-old or whatever. Um, so anyway, so those are just some ways of knowing, like, okay, so do they have attentional issues, like initiation issues? Are their arms not swinging? And this is hard with gymnasts and dancers because they're so used to being watched and controlling their movement that it's kind of hard to like make sure that they're actually relaxed and not just walking normal. Um, but so do you want to talk about like how you might some drills to activate the frontal lobe?

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Um okay.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

All right. Yuk and I just had a little technology hiccup. So welcome back.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

There were like seven hiccups anyway.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Seven hiccups, and we know what we're doing. We're now more experienced than we were 30 minutes ago. Um so we wanted to talk a little bit about how you can engage the frontal lobe more or how to increase the activity in the frontal lobe while you're in a movement class. And so we talked a lot about um activities like something everyone's familiar with. You could brought this up, as Simon says. And the reason that's a useful exercise is because it is focusing on inhibition and initiation and really engaging people to listen for the directions, and then before they move, they have to make sure that they are actually hearing, and that is an inhibition and initiation exercise. So you could easily take that right into the movement environment. There's also something called a Stroop S-T-R-O-O-P, and those are brain-based activities. If you're a dancer and you're like, how can I do this outside of class? You can easily Google Stroop and pull up a Stroop activity online. I also use a Stroop activity inside of movement. Sometimes I'll turn on some Irish jig music, even though I never teach Irish jig dancing. And I have this chart that has some arrows, and some of them are green or some of them are red. And the red means stop, go the other way, green means go the direction the air points, and we do a little Irish jig with one foot tapping as we are working on our initiation and inhibition. And why this matters? Well, let me let me give the mic to uh Yuka for a second because she's gonna talk about something else that we do as dancers often.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

Oh. What do we do? Oh, saccades. Like, I don't know. I'm not a dance. I used to be a dancer, I'm not a dancer anymore. Yes, saccades. So saccades, which we mentioned before. It's just basically it's S-A-C-C-A-D-E-S. It's a fancy way for like it's basically darting eyes. So it's a quick uh eye movement, think tennis match, where you have to like pop your eyes one way and then quickly to the other side. Um and it's an orange. Orienting task, right? It's an essential task that we need for survival because it helps us orient ourselves to what's around us, which is why I actually think that it's closely, or this is hypothesis, right? That it's in the frontal lobe, right next to all of this other movement stuff, right? Which is just kind of a example of how the brain knows that our eyes are so crucial to movement, right? Like where you're orienting yourself with your eyes is going to influence your movement. So saccade is, yeah, the way to use it, um, and I use this all the time uh with the gymnast that I work with. So you just hold your thumbnails out in front of you at arm distance, and I have them focused either on their thumbnail or thumbnail or on the little half moon, and you're just gonna pop your eyes to one side, then the other side, and then one side, and then the other side, and then just back and forth quickly, um, making sure that the eyes stay focused as you're doing that. Um, and that alone, um, so the dancer I was mentioning that had the knee pain when she was doing a deep squat, we did some of those, and then that because it's an she felt the pain in initiation, right? We do some saccades to activate the frontal lobe, um, and then she noticed a difference. Um the other thing, so besides, I forget if we talked about like how it's basically doing this nice inhibition of all this extra things that slow down the start of movement, but it in in a way that it actually initiates even more movement. I've used like frontal lobe activation, like a saccade game, right? In order to actually get gymnasts to produce more force. Um, because there's a whole like where the brain, where the signal comes once it leaves the frontal lobe, does all kinds of other stuff, travels down the brainstem and then to the muscles, that is now that whole signal is now amplified. Um, so you can use it for focus, for better initiation of movement, as well as for producing more strength and force, like speed and that kind of thing. Yeah. Um, yeah. So it doesn't, it's not hard to do. Yeah, and the Simon says actually the other version of the stroop that I've done before is that you basically point in different directions, like just think like all of the directions of a compass, and then the athlete has to jump or the dancer has to jump in that direction, then you switch it. You're like, okay, so now when I point this to the left, you have to jump to the right. When I point forward, you have to jump backwards. Um, so it's like an easy thing to integrate into like a warm-up or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

Yeah. And I think that sometimes when I've introduced these games to classrooms, they're wondering how this has anything to do with, you know, the technique of ballet. And when we were talking about this earlier this week, something that Yuka and I um were considering is that movement is a behavior. And so we're actually looking at the behavior of the mind and how that behavior is coming out in your movement. So it's actually the root of it is in the mind. And so if you are having someone who's initiating slowly or who's unable to inhibit some movement, because that we also see that end of it where they cannot maybe hold their head on. I I I actually know a dancer who had a really um, and there's other reasons for this that we know about that we won't get into right now, but she was almost like a bobblehead when she was going through puberty, and that is an inhibition issue. Like she's unable to inhibit this extra movement. So it can go that you're unable to inhibit or that you are inhibiting so much that you're creating a lot of tension. And so there's both ends of the spectrum that you might see this. And when we're talking about movement as a behavior, and we go to the mind that's in charge of behavior that is translated into movement, then we're gonna get really great results without a lot of like, hey, press your heel down, lift your hips up, square, la-la, you know, do it again and do it again, and do it again. Yes, yeah, you can just exactly, and you can get this holistically in the whole group. You know, I would say 80% of the people respond to these pretty quickly. And so it's like you you make better use of your time when you introduce something like this. And also the brain is really plastic when there's a sense of play in the room, and I think as you know, pr high performers sometimes we lose that sense of play because we're like, do it again, just one more time and do it perfectly, right?

SPEAKER_01 26:43

So like I have to like and and and so like the whole and ultimately the whole point of what we do and what we're saying on this podcast is that just you can do things that look nothing like ballet, that look nothing like gymnastics, and it is going to improve their dance quality, movement quality, like their skill quality. Um and that the idea is to reduce the number of reps, reduce the kind of tension and overthinking that's very typical of these like tape type A personalities that tend to gravitate towards these activities. Um and so do your cigars.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Yeah, yeah. I call those many mini spots when I'm with the dancers. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

Yeah, and spotting is crucial in gymnastics. Yeah, it's also a spot, it's a skill, right, that you need to spot um whether you're upright or upside down.

SPEAKER_00 27:39

Yeah. All right. And and I appreciate that you spelled saccades, because just a little side note when I first heard the word saccades, I thought it was your psychotic eye movement, and I was hearing psychotic. And I was like, that's so interesting. The psychotic eye movement. I had to go and look it up. So thanks for spelling that because I think yeah, I've also wondered who else thought I said psychotic instead of psychotic.

SPEAKER_01 28:06

That's pretty funny. It is funny. Um okay.

SPEAKER_00 28:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 28:09

All right. Do we have anything else?

SPEAKER_00 28:12

Uh subscribe. Yeah. Yeah. Subscribe. And if you're interested to see some of this in action, we hope to one day after we have learned to navigate this new technology that is um available to us as a podcaster person. We're hoping that we'll be able to show some of this visually. So we would love it if you subscribed. And those of you who subscribe early will um have a bonus episode available to you. Is that what we're doing, Yuka? Sure. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Quick clarification: subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss an episode, and then subscribe to our newsletters. The link to do that is in the show notes, and that way you'll get access to a bonus episode or maybe multiple bonus episodes. All right, so until next time, do your vision drills, and we'll see you on the next episode of Performance Rewired. Do it again.

SPEAKER_00 29:19

One more time, do it again. One more time, do it again. One more time, one more time, one more time, one more time, one more time.