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!

Brain Research and Education

According to Ronald Kotulak, the author of Learning How to Use the Brain, scientists learned more about the brain during the last decade than they learned during the entire century preceding it. It seems like everything we read these days having to do with education now has a link or a reference to the latest brain research.

There is much to learn about the brain, but it too must be cautiously approached and not be given a free pass. Today, most educators hear the phrase "brain research" and automatically let their guard down and prepare themselves to accept what ever comes next. As Christians, we should take this information in the same format as all information- submitting every thought captive to Christ. There are those who will take this research and manipulate it to say what they want it to say, sad, but true.

One example is the widely held assumption that infants are born with a fixed intellectual capacity. Society/culture assumes that this capacity to learn is distributed according to a bell-shaped curve. In other words, most children are born with average learning capacities, while a few are born with either enhanced or limited capacities to learn. New brain research, however, tells us that much of the "wiring" of the brain's neurons comes after birth and depends on the experiences infants and children have.

An Education Commission of the States (ECS) report, states, "Research shows [that] much of the "wiring" of the brain's neurons comes after birth and depends on the experiences infants and children have." In other words, the brain is formed, at least in part, by the environment, or so it would appear.

The report goes on to state, "Most neurologists believe some neurons in an infant brain are hard-wired by genes in the fertilized egg (we will not even get into what this says about evolution). That is, the brain knows how to control such functions as heartbeat, breathing and/or regulating body temperature. Some areas of an infant brain continue to develop rapidly after birth. Brain connections develop especially fast in the first three years of life in response to stimuli, such as someone talking to, singing to, reading to or playing with the infant or toddler. Such experiences significantly influence brain development and enhance central nervous system connections that define the capacity to learn. This brain development continues at a high rate until around age 8 or 10 and then slows, suggesting there is an optimal time for certain cognitive functions to be acquired."

Research also highlights that there is indeed a critical time period in early childhood for connecting neurons in the development of sensory abilities. Neurologists are fairly certain that neurons for vision begin connecting rapidly from the ages of 2-4 months, peak at 8 months and have matured by age 2. This and other examples point to the very real fact that connections for sensory abilities are wired as a result of activity, just like cognitive abilities.

Those in some circles that are left leaning point to these facts as concrete reasons for parents to be instructed on how to play and interact with their children. Another strong suggestion from these circles to the educational communities is a push for high quality Preschool and Day Care facilities. There is research that suggests that your children will do better academically if they attend preschool. I say... rubbish.

Brain research is valuable in ascertaining the way the brain learns, responds to stimuli and receives and packages information, but the brain should never be considered outside of the entire being. The brain is an organ that will be deemed by the medical community dead if blood is not flowing and oxygen is not received. Brain research is the same way... it is dead if not considered with other parts of the body.


This research, to me, suggests that we parents better spend as much time as possible with our children in their early years in order for them to develop the worldviews and morals we desire for them. I know I do not want my children picking up their worldview and morality at a daycare center. Children are meant to be loved inside a family unit. There is mounds of research documenting the importance of a family's love in a child's foundational development.

Marian Diamond, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Berkeley, conducted experiments on rats to learn about the effects of environment on neurons, dendrites, and intelligence. She found the following:

Rats raised in an enriched environment with opportunities for socialization and many sensory experiences grew more dendrites in the cerebral cortex -- the part of the brain where higher thinking occurs -- and demonstrated greater ability to negotiate mazes than did rats raised in an impoverished environment.

What in her experiment led her to use the phrase, "enriched environment with opportunities for socialization" instead of "an enriched loving family environment with opportunities for growth and maturity(my words)?" The tendency by those leaning left is to always move toward the societal realm and away from the familial realm. Will strangers in a daycare or a preschool provide a better environment than the actual mother and father? I think not. One must always be wary of the cultural bias in research, even brain research. (One small point of clarification: I am in no way suggesting daycare and/or preschool are evil. All I am saying is that they are a substitute for the family, and can in no way replace the family.)

As we learn more and more about the brain, may we remember the words of the great French composer, Michel Legrand who states, "The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know." Blessings!