In Beijing, a friend and I were talking about how to improve high-school teaching. I said two things would help: more personalization, and more movement. Movement really helps learning, I said. I read something about that recently, my friend said. She meant this post of mine (treadmill walking made it pleasant to study Chinese)!
Paul Sas has drawn my attention to a man with a remarkable memory:
JB is an active, articulate septuagenarian who began memorizing Paradise Lost at the age of 58 in 1993 as a form of mental activity to accompany his physical exercise at the gym. Although he had memorized various poems in earlier years, he never attempted anything of this magnitude. JB stated that he wanted to do something special to commemorate the then-upcoming millennium. “Why not something really challenging like, oh, ‘Paradise Lost’?” he said. He began by walking on a treadmill one day while trying to memorize the opening lines of the poem.
He eventually memorized the whole poem, about 11,000 lines. Apparently the scientists who studied him ignored the treadmill.
A learning psychologist might say that walking provides mental activation, we learn better when we’re stimulated. (For example, we learn better when we’re scared.) My point is treadmill walking produced an hedonic change: I found learning more enjoyable when I was walking.
Seth,
You might find this interesting. Polyglot Alexander Arguelles recommends learning to speak a language while walking briskly. The description is here: https://foreignlanguageexpertise.com/foreign_language_study.html#svd, and a video demonstration here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdheWK7u11w. I think that he claims to have discovered the value of this on his own, although I can’t say for sure (it’s been a while since I read his site). It seems to track your conjectures on learning while moving.
Thanks,
I love walking and thinking. But my wife hates when I pace! I try to think of excuses to walk around the warehouse to figure out problems at work!
Just saw this article in J. Neurosci and thought of this post: https://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/23/7845
I’m not that familiar with all the biochemistry stuff, but even I can spell “LTP.”
Here’s what neuroscientist (and educator) John Medina has to say about exercise and learning:
The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting in unstable meteorological conditions and to do so in near constant motion. As I was writing Brain Rules, it hit me [that] if you wanted to design a learning environment that was directly opposed to what the brain is naturally good at doing, you would design something like a classroom.
We know from our evolutionary history that [our ancestors] probably were walking anywhere between 10 to 20 kilometers per day. We grew up and made our really fancy, really big fat brains based on the single idea that we were constantly in motion, aerobic motion.
If you were to sit still for as little as 15 minutes in the Serengeti, from which we evolved, you’d probably become someone’s lunch. Well, if we were moving 10 to 20 kilometers per day and the brain is used to getting that experience, yet we don’t allow a lot of exercise in the classroom, you might hypothesize that we are sub-optimizing the performance ability of the organ. And that’s exactly what you see: The first research literature that came out of this actually came from asking questions about aging populations. It was shown that in aging populations, people who lead a sedentary lifestyle were not able to mobilize their IQ as effectively. That’s particularly true of something we call “executive function,” which is the ability to problem solve and plan. The people who had a sedentary lifestyle did not have as good executive function and could not mobilize their IQ in the same way that somebody who had an active lifestyle could.