David Hardy: Head Injuries and How to Understand & Change Your Brain through Bodily Movements | Episode 54

Brain Shaman

David Hardy is a functional neurologist and the host of The Hardy Brain podcast. In this episode, he provides a sort of crash course on the brain and nervous system. Specifically, you will learn how to use certain bodily movements (e.g. with the eyes, breath, mouth, and jaw) to both interpret and alter your brain state. A dual theme running throughout this episode is concussions, head trauma, and sports. However, this is an episode for anyone with a human nervous system. The simple behavioral tools that we discuss trace back to our early and pre-human roots and therefore can be used by anyone to quickly change how they think, feel, and act. Try some of them out, play around with them, and find the ones that work best for you. Along the way, you just might also discover some new ones or learn something new about yourself.
The first 30 minutes or so of the conversation focuses primarily on concussions, head traumas, and David's life journey. Then we start digging deeper into neurology and how our overall brain and nervous system functions. We talk about how to detect problems in our nervous system and reprogram it via behavior protocols including: breathing exercises, eye, neck, head, mouth, jaw, & vocal movements, smells, and more. The direction (vertical, horizontal, rotational, etc.) engages different parts of the brain, and we talk about that. These movements can also be used in careful combinations with one another to produce various effects. We tie all this back to sports, music, dance, communication, life, and more. By the end of this, you should have a better understanding of your brain-body and how to consciously change it through action.
RESOURCES
EXERCISES
- box breathing (used by Navy SEALs)
- breath holding (used by biathletes)
- circular breathing
- EMDR
- holotropic breathwork
- lion's breath
- smooth pursuit exercises
- Wim Hof breathing
NEUROSCIENCE TERMS
- brainstem
- cerebellum
- midbrain (mesencephalon)
- midline musculature
- mirror neurons
- optic nerve
- pons
- proprioception
- trigeminal nerve
- vestibular system

***CONNECT WITH DAVID HARDY***
LinkedIn: /dr-david-hardy-brain and /the-hardy-brain
podcast: The Hardy Brain (available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.)
website: thehardybrain.ca