We don’t just think with our brains.

What?!

How can that possibly be true?

I struggled to understand it if myself for quite a while, until I read the fabulous English philosopher Andy Clark’s description of what happens when someone writes, which essentially involves ideas flowing down the arm and hand, through the pen and ink, across the paper, up to your eyes, and back to your brain.

The ideas don’t literally flow, of course, but the process of writing alters the process of thinking - which is why research has shown that processing traumatic memories through journaling about them is more useful just thinking about them - the act of writing about them changes our interpretation of them in a way that just thinking about them doesn’t.

The challenge with school-based learning, of course, is that it’s primarily concerned with the brain.  Our task is to remember facts and ideas so we can recount them when asked about them at a later time.  Children who fidget are told to sit still, when the research that Annie Murphy Paul cites in her new book The Extended Mind indicates that this instruction is entirely misplaced - fidgeting can be a way of managing excess energy, and movement can actually help us to remember things more effectively than we otherwise would.

In this episode we learn many of the different ways that we our brains interact with the outside world to learn in ways that we might never have considered up to now.

I think of this kind of learning as Full-Bodied Learning, and long before I’d read Annie’s book I had actually developed an entire module of content for the Learning Membership on exactly this topic.  In the module we extend the ideas in today’s episode to support our children in using their full bodies to learn both in school and outside of school as well. Enrollment will open again soon. Click the banner to learn more!

 

 

You do have to be a member to access that specific content, but you can get a taste for similar kinds of tools that you can use with your child in the FREE You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher workshop where you’ll:

 

 

So whether you’re homeschooling or not; whether you work outside the home or not, YOU really are the person who can best support your child’s learning - mostly because you know them better than anyone else so you can help them much more effectively once you gain the skills to do that.

 

 

 

 

 

Andrade, J. (2010). What does doodling do? Applied Cognitive Psychology 24, 100-106.

Bobek, E., & Tversky, B. (2016). Creating visual explanations improves learning. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 1, 27.

Church, R.B. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1986). The mismatch between gesture and speech as an index of transitional knowledge. Cognition 23, 43-71.

Fishburn, F.A., Murty, V., Hlutkowsky, C.O., MacGillivray, C.E., Bemis, L.M., Murphy, M.E., Huppert, T.J., & Perlman, S.B. (2018). Putting our heads together: Interpersonal neural synchronization as a biological mechanism for shared intentionality. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 13(8), 841-849.

Glenberg, A.M. (2011). How reading comprehension is embodied and why that matters. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education 4(1), 5-18.

Kandasamy, N., Garfinkel, S.N., Page, L., Hardy, B., Critchley, H.D., Gurnell, M., & Coates, J.M. (2016). Interoceptive ability predicts survival on a London trading floor. Scientific Reports 6, 32986.

Kelly, S.D., Singer, M., Hicks, J., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2002). A helping hand in assessing children’s knowledge: Instructing adults to attend to gesture. Cognition and Instruction 20(1), 1-26.

Knight, C., & Haslam, S.A. (2010). The relative merits of lean, enriched, and empowered offices: An experimental examination of the impact of workspace management strategies on well-being and productivity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 16(2), 158-172.

Kontra, C., Lyons, D.J., Fischer, S.M., & Beilock, S.L. (2015). Physical experience enhances science learning. Psychological Science 26(6), 737-749.

Langhanns, C., & Muller, H. (2018). Effects of trying ‘not to move’ instruction on cortical load and concurrent cognitive performance. Psychological Research 82, 167-176.

Link, T., Moeller, K., Huber, S., Fischer, U., & Nuerk, H-K. (2015). Corrigendum to ‘Walk the number line – An embodied training of numerical concepts.’ Trends in Neuroscience and Education 4(4), 112.

Link, T., Moeller, K., Huber, S., Fischer, U., & Nuerk, H-K. (2013). Walk the number line – An embodied training of numerical concepts. Trends in Neuroscience and Education 2(2), 74-84.

Lozada, M., & Carro, N. (2016). Embodied action improves cognition in children: Evidence from a study based on Piagetian conservation tasks. Frontiers in Psychology 7, 393.

Meagher, B.R. (2020). Ecologizing social psychology: The physical environment as a necessary constitutent of social processes. Personality and Social Psychology Review 24(1), 3-23.

Mehta, R.K., Shortz, A.E., & Benden, M.E. (2015). Standing up for learning: A pilot investigation on the neurocognitive benefits of stand-biased school desks. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 13, 0059.

Shteynberg, G. (2014). A social host in the machine? The case of group attention. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition 3(4), 307-311.

Zhang, T. (2017). Back to the beginning: Rediscovering inexperience helps experts give advice. Academy of Management Proceedings 2015-1, 15215.