Paul Dennison, PhD, is a remedial educational specialist and founder of the Educational Kinesiology Foundation. He developed the Brain Gym® programme over a period of 25 years, including as director of California's Valley Remedial Group Learning Centres in California. These nine learning centres offered Dr Dennison students with whom he could actively explore the effects of specific movements on the ability to learn various academic skills helping children and adults turn their learning difficulties into successful growth. During this time, he drew from a broad spectrum of innovative work in the fields of education, developmental vision, and personal development as he focused on the causes and treatment of learning disabilities. Working alongside developmental optometrists, Dr Dennison offered his students a full programme in sensory development, including a few simple movements that seemed to help with equilibrium and perceptual skills. These movements would someday spark the idea for Brain Gym.

Dr Dennison served as director of the Valley Remedial Group Learning Centres for 19 years. In 1980, he synthesised his work and began travelling and teaching internationally. Since that time, the Edu-K processes and applications have continued to evolve.

Dr Dennison has been an educator for all of his professional life. His work is based on an understanding of the interdependence of physical movement, language acquisition and academic achievement. He and Gail Dennison have published fourteen books and manuals, beginning with Switching On: A Guide to Edu-Kinesthetics, published in 1980, and most recently Brain Gym® for Business: Instant Brain Boosters for On-The-Job Success published in 1994 with Jerry V Teplitz, JD, PhD.

After receiving his undergraduate education at Boston University, Dr Dennison moved to California to teach elementary students in the Los Angeles public schools. There he assisted in the implementation of Dr Constance Amsden’s Malabar Reading Programme, well known as an innovative approach to teaching reading.

Dr Dennison established his first reading clinic in 1969. Two years later, after studying the seminal work of Dr Samuel T Orton in neurology and Drs Doman and Delacato, specialists in language development, he began introducing perceptual-motor training to his students. Over the next three years, he worked closely with Louis Jacques, OD, a leading pioneer in vision training, and Samuel Herr, OD, with whom he shared a learning centre. In 1975, Dr Dennison received the Phi Delta Kappa award from the University of Southern California for outstanding research where he earned his PhD in Education with a major in Curriculum Development and a minor in Experimental Psychology. His research study for his doctoral dissertation focused on the relationship of covert speech (thinking skills) to the acquisition of the skills of beginning reading.

In 1976, Dr Dennison began working closely with Chiropractor Richard Tyler and Sports Kinesiologist Bud Gibbs. Dr Dennison continued an active chiropractic and optometric referral programme for students through his nine learning centres. In 1978, Dr Tyler helped him to implement a longitudinal research study at the centres to see how Dr Dennison’s specific movement interventions might affect learning (see Switching On). In 1979, Dr Dennison took the Touch for Health course and, modelling that workshop format, began to outline the Edu-K programme.

His first book, Switching On, was published in 1981. He discovered his Laterality Repatterning in 1982 and began focussing on the adult population. In 1983, he developed Educational Kinesiology: Seven Dimensions of Intelligence (previously titled the “Edu-Kinesthetics In Depth” course). In 1984, he began working with Gail Hargrove Dennison with whom he developed other elective courses. Gail Dennison helped to systematise the Edu-K materials and developed the Creative Vision material, Vision Gym™ activities and Visioncircles programme.

In 1986, sensing the need for a self-teaching element in their work, Paul and Gail Dennison wrote about some of the activities they had been using in a small book called Brain Gym®: Simple Activities for Whole Brain Learning. Together, they have authored a number of books on Brain Gym and Educational Kinesiology.

Many of the Brain Gym® activities, like The Owl, The Elephant and the Alphabet 8s, were developed from Dr Dennison’s knowledge of the relationship of movement to perception and the impact of these on fine motor and academic skills. Others were learned during his training as a marathon runner, his study of vision training, his study of Jin Shin Jitsu (a form of acupressure), and his study of Applied Kinesiology (taught to the public as the Touch for Health synthesis).

Dr Dennison has taught in more than fifteen countries and is known for his leading-edge thinking, gentle humour and heartfelt presentations. He and Gail travel internationally, teaching and developing the Educational Kinesiology work further. They are committed to a renewal and redefinition of the learning process for people of all ages and abilities.