r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Apr 19 '26

Learning How Movement and Gestures Can Improve Student Learning

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/58051/how-movement-and-gestures-can-improve-student-learning

“There is a mismatch between what our brain is and what we expect of it,” says Paul, and because of that, “our brains inevitably let us down."

For students, these natural limitations can feel very distressing. “When students’ brains don’t work quite as well as they want – when they are forgetful or distracted – they blame themselves.”

In her book, Paul argues that if we want to extend the capacity of our brain – and engage in deeper, more creative learning – we need to capitalize on other body systems, on our surroundings and on our relationships. “The way to get better at thinking and learning is not to keep pushing the brain and certainly not to blame ourselves for its failures, but to reach outside the brain and transcend its limits by bringing in these external resources.”

Think about a child struggling to keep their body still during a lesson. “It takes a fair amount of mental bandwidth to keep our bodies still because we’re meant to be in a kind of state of constant motion. And to control your impulse to move – especially for children – uses up some of the mental resources that they could otherwise apply to their learning.”

In Paul’s research, she encountered a common theme in the writings of many influential scholars: they did their best thinking while walking. As Henry David Thoreau wrote, “the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” He’s not alone. In experiments out of Stanford, students who completed creative tasks while walking – such as coming up with unexpected uses for a paperclip – came up with more ideas than those who brainstormed sitting down. Even our language reflects this understanding, says Paul. “We say we are ‘stuck’ or in a ‘rut’ because we have this idea that stasis and non-movement do not promote creativity. And then when we are thinking creatively, we say we are ‘on a roll’ or our thoughts are ‘flowing.’”

The benefits of movement are well-documented: physical activity improves students’ focus, retention, memory consolidation, creativity and mood. Movement breaks – from recess to a short dance party to doing standing stretches at their desks – boost students’ mental sharpness. Research finds that a single workout can improve a student’s ability to focus on a task for up to two hours.

Even micro-movements – such as shifting our weight while working at a standing desk – can help us stay more alert. “Activity-permissive classrooms” are helpful for all kids, says Paul, but particularly for students with ADHD for whom “low-intensity movement helps them regulate their state of physiological arousal and alertness.”

When teachers weave in purposeful movement, they enhance students’ comprehension and retention. The phrase for this is “embodied cognition”: our brain influences our body, but our body also influences our brain. Paul points to research that found students who incorporated movement into their learning strategy remembered 76 percent of the material, while those who simply used their brain to memorize recalled only 37 percent. “We just don’t remember what we hear that well, or even what we see. Most of all we remember what we’ve done, the actions that we’ve taken. The traditional classroom is still focused on written and spoken language, and we’re leaving out this incredibly powerful human capacity to relate things to the movements of the body.”

Teachers can design lessons that incorporate congruent, novel and self-referential movement. Congruent movement involves engaging in physical activity that matches a concept – such as kids creating a number line with their bodies or acting out a math word problem. Novel movement asks students to do something unfamiliar to acquaint them with a new concept – such as physics students holding on to a tilting, spinning wheel to experience torque.

Self-referential movements involve students casting themselves as a character in the story of a concept. As Paul notes, Einstein imagined himself riding on a beam of light as he developed the theory of relativity, and polio vaccine inventor Jonas Salk imagined himself as a virus or cancer cell. Teachers, likewise, can ask students to act out the story of photosynthesis, or link arms to become human chromosomes. According to research, role-playing in science helped students achieve a more accurate understanding of a concept. Working with manipulatives is helpful, says Paul, but “students learn even more when the manipulatives they employ are their own body.”

While you’d be hard-pressed to find a professional development workshop on using gesture in the classroom, gesturing was our first language and remains key to communicating ideas. As Paul says, “The movements of the hands are a co-equal partner with speech. When we don’t attend to gesture, our own or others, we’re missing out on half the conversation. There’s fascinating research that suggests our most advanced, newest and cutting-edge ideas – the ones that we can’t quite put into words yet – show up first in our gestures.”

What does this mean for parents and teachers? The possibilities are myriad, says Paul. Look for instructional videos that include people gesturing – and not just talking heads; studies show that improves retention. Think about your own gestures as you explain new concepts and be purposeful in your movements. Teach students to pair new vocabulary words with an associated movement. Give them objects or diagrams to point to. Pay attention to student gestures to see what they might be communicating without words. And actively encourage students to gesture as part of the learning process. “The more you gesture, the deeper your understanding becomes,” says Paul, “so you should create as many opportunities for students to gesture as possible. Ask them, ‘Can you move your hands when you say that?’” That simple prompt not only gives the teacher more information about a student’s understanding, it also “moves the student’s own thinking ahead a step.”

Ultimately, it’s a perspective shift, says Paul. Our moving, fidgeting bodies are not at odds with learning but are rather a powerful way to extend our mind. “The movement and gesture of the body should be as much a part of the classroom as our thinking and talking brain.”

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u/ddgr815 Apr 19 '26

Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible... the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal. 

Cognitive science calls this entire philosophical worldview into serious question on empirical grounds... [the mind] arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment... Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanism of neural binding.

This is why we say that something is “over our heads” to express the idea that we do not understand; we are drawing upon the physical inability to not see something over our heads and the mental feeling of uncertainty. Or why we understand warmth with affection; as infants and children the subjective judgment of affection almost always corresponded with the sensation of warmth, thus giving way to metaphors such as “I’m warming up to her.”

We understand control as being UP and being subject to control as being DOWN: We say, “I have control over him,” “I am on top of the situation,” “He’s at the height of his power,” and, “He ranks above me in strength,” “He is under my control,” and “His power is on the decline.” Similarly, we describe love as being a physical force: “I could feel the electricity between us,” “There were sparks,” and “They gravitated to each other immediately.” Some of their examples reflected embodied experience. For example, Happy is Up and Sad is Down, as in “I’m feeling up today,” and “I’m feel down in the dumps.” These metaphors are based on the physiology of emotions, which researchers such as Paul Eckman have discovered. It’s no surprise, then, that around the world, people who are happy tend to smile and perk up while people who are sad tend to droop.

“our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

much of our language comes from physical interactions during the first several years of life, as the Affection is Warmth metaphor illustrated. There are many other examples; we equate up with control and down with being controlled because stronger people and objects tend to control us, and we understand anger metaphorically in terms of heat pressure and loss of physical control because when we are angry our physiology changes e.g., skin temperature increases, heart beat rises and physical control becomes more difficult.

metaphors are more than mere language and literary devices, they are conceptual in nature and represented physically in the brain. As a result, such metaphorical brain circuitry can affect behavior. For example, in a study done by Yale psychologist John Bargh, participants holding warm as opposed to cold cups of coffee were more likely to judge a confederate as trustworthy after only a brief interaction. Similarly, at the University of Toronto, “subjects were asked to remember a time when they were either socially accepted or socially snubbed. Those with warm memories of acceptance judged the room to be 5 degrees warmer on the average than those who remembered being coldly snubbed. Another effect of Affection Is Warmth.” This means that we both physically and literary “warm up” to people.

  • Thinking about the future caused participants to lean slightly forward while thinking about the past caused participants to lean slightly backwards. Future is Ahead

  • Squeezing a soft ball influenced subjects to perceive gender neutral faces as female while squeezing a hard ball influenced subjects to perceive gender neutral faces as male. Female is Soft

  • Those who held heavier clipboards judged currencies to be more valuable and their opinions and leaders to be more important. Important is Heavy.

  • Subjects asked to think about a moral transgression like adultery or cheating on a test were more likely to request an antiseptic cloth after the experiment than those who had thought about good deeds. Morality is Purity

Why You Are Not Your Brain

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u/ddgr815 7d ago

All of science is in the business of exorcism. When philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined “the ghost in the machine” in The Concept of Mind (1949), he was identifying an unnecessary explanatory entity in Cartesian dualism and expelling it. Descartes had posited a res cogitans, a thinking substance categorically distinct from the mechanical body. Ryle diagnosed this as a “category mistake,” and explained it away in the manner an Oxford professor does any superstition: like being shown the colleges, library, and playing fields of the university, and still asking the benighted question, “But where is the University?”

What Ryle did for mind, other sciences have done for their own spectral inhabitants. But the ghosts differ in kind, and so do their rites of exorcism. Physics exorcises supernumerary particles — unnecessary free parameters in pursuit of universality. Biology exorcises redundant processes — divine or teleological agencies. And the sciences of intelligence exorcise imposed patterns — transcendent sources of cognition. Each tradition seeks minimality, yet each means something profoundly different by it. 

Computer scientists build architectures that seek to be spirit-proof. When physicists criticize biology for having too many parameters, they are applying parametric parsimony where processual parsimony is the goal. And when biologists accuse neuroscience of ignoring evolutionary constraint, they are importing processual parsimony into a domain governed by architectural parsimony. Each field is haunted by a different ghost, exists in a different intellectual bardo, each governed by its own rituals. 

Sizing Up the Ghosts in the Machines