Movement and Learning

The picture to the left is called "Movement in Squares" and is an optical illusion of sorts. My point for using it is to bring emphasis to an important concept in education - movement!

Just how important is movement to learning? According to neurophysiologist Carla Hannaford, it is very important. She believes that we have always known that movement had a place in education, but in recent years, research is starting to expose just how important movement is to learning. Dr. Hannaford provides us just one example from her work that supports the idea of movement and learning.

According to Dr. Hannaford, "the vestibular (inner ear) and cerebellar system (motor activity) is the first sensory system to mature. In this system, the inner ear's semicircular canals and the vestibular nuclei are an information gathering and feedback source for movements. Those impulses travel through nerve tracts back and forth from the cerebellum to the rest of the brain, including the visual system and the sensory cortex. The vestibular nuclei are closely modulated by the cerebellum and also activate the reticular activating system (RAS), near the top of the brain stem. This area is critical to our attentional system, since it regulates incoming sensory data. This interaction helps us keep our balance, turns thinking into actions, and coordinates moves. There is value in all those playground games that stimulate inner ear motion like swinging, rolling, and jumping." But, that is not all.

Peter Strick at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center of Syracuse, New York, made another link. His staff traced a pathway from the cerebellum back to parts of the brain involving memory, attention, and spatial perception. The part of the brain that processes movement is the same part of the brain that's processing learning. Many suspected this, but now Peter Strick has provided proof.

Our brain is amazing as it creates movements by sending a deluge of nerve impulses to either muscles or the larynx. It is always sending these impulses, but because each muscle has to get the message at a slightly different time in order to coordinate with the other muscles, it takes place a bit like a well-timed explosion created by a special effects team. This amazing brain-body sequence is often referred to as a spatiotemporal (space-time) pattern. Researcher William Calvin calls it "a cerebral code." While simple movements like gum chewing are controlled by basic brain circuits nearest the spinal cord, complex movements -- like dance steps, throwing a ball, or doing a science experiment -- are quite different and require more complex sequences. Some simple movements like those with simple sequences, are controlled at the subcortical levels, like the basic ganglia and cerebellum. But, novel movements like dance steps shift focus in the brain and require more complex sequencing because it has no memories to rely on for execution and must create new ones. This is why it is difficult to learn something new and much easier to do for the young than the old. All of these movements are like cognitive aerobics for the brain and are vital to brain development in our younger students.

There is so much more to examine in this field; if you are an educator, I encourage you to begin to do some reading on this subject. It will make you that much better in your field. Blessings!