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.

 

While we're all trying to figure out what's really behind rising teen anxiety and whether phones are the problem, there's something we can do right now that helps nurture our children's natural curiosity and intrinsic motivation to learn.

 

The You Are Your Child's Best Teacher masterclass shows you how to do exactly that without adding pressure or creating elaborate activities that exhaust you.

 

When children feel competent and engaged in learning that matters to them, they develop resilience that serves them well, whether they're facing social media pressures, academic stress, or the general challenges of growing up in today's world.

 

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Do you want to turn your child’s interests into learning opportunities? The Learning Membership is here to help you. Make learning a fun adventure that not only strengthens your bond, but also nurtures your child’s intrinsic love of learning—an essential foundation for success in an AI-driven world.

 

Get tools and strategies to support your child’s love of learning and future-proof their success in navigating whatever comes their way. No special skills needed—just a willingness to explore alongside them.

 

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01:00 Looking at the idea that our mind isn't actually only located inside of our brains

01:46 An open invitation to join the free You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher Workshop

05:30 Learning does not just happen within the brain, but with things and people that are outside of it

06:44 The metaphor of how our brains are like magpies nest: we draw raw material available to us as resources for our thinking process just like how magpies incorporate materials available in their environment when building their nests

09:22 The movements and gestures of our bodies, the internal sensations of our bodies are part of the thinking process

10:34 Interoceptive sensitivity

13:07 The gut feeling is your body tugging at your sleeve saying that you’ve encountered this situation before and this is how you should respond

14:53 Moving the body is a way to stimulate mental processes in specific ways and you can use different kinds of movements to produce different kinds of thoughts

16:53 Recess -  the great invention that allows students to move and break the monotony of sitting down all day in school

17:49 Fidgeting is  a very subtle way to calibrate our arousal level so that we're in this optimal state of alertness

19:00 We're creatures who are good at moving our bodies and navigating through space and interacting with other people

20:23 We rely on our surroundings to shape our sense of ourselves

26:48 We can interact with our environment in a way that supports our learning

28:33 What are some ways that we can support children in using the space around them in their learning

31:49 Journaling and sketching as a tool to process learning deeper

36:47 Thinking with relationships; encouraging children to learn from and with other people

45:25 Allowing your children to genuinely work together so that parents don’t need to support their learning individually

46:29 We tend to think of learning as when a person sits down at a desk but in fact there are all these cognitive processes that get activated in social interactions

48:08 Argument is very valuable and can be a really effective way of solving problems

52:43 It is a different cognitive process when we do learning with other people

55:45 Human thinking works best when we are able to create “loops” and the best way for parents to support their children’s learning is to look for those loops

 

 

 

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