“Movement is the door to learning” Paul Dennison
In our quest to understand ourselves we are still intrigued by our mind as being the source of human potential throughout history, culture and current reality.
By focusing our attention and research to our brain, we search for explanations of the mind’s working, concentrating mainly on the different brain regions
While adding pieces and new insights to the puzzle we missed the most fundamental part of learning: creativity, thoughts and learning are processes of the whole body, as it functions as the means to ground all sensations, movements and emotions and integrates them for future use.
Without the body and its movements none of the human qualities that we normally associate with the mind, can ever exist.
From our early days of science lessons in school we know that our bodies and our brains are connected and communicate via an intricate and endless web of neural pathways and neural connections.
The act of thinking on the other hand is seen as a kind of disembodied process and this reflects even in the way we look for ways to improve thinking, by supposedly making conditions favorable to creative thought and learning.
Thinking is thinking and avenue (scope) of the brain and movement is movement and avenue of the body, whose basically main role seemed to be to carry the brain around so that the brain could do its thinking wherever needed.
And never the twain would meet.
However maverick scientists who advertised for years the links between thinking and movements received little support from the public. A basic idea deeply rooted in our culture that forms the basis of many educational theories and practices is the notion of intellectual activity able to exist apart from our bodies.
And on the other end of this spectrum reside our bodily, life-sustaining functions, emotions and sensations, all of them considered to be of lower value and less distinctly human, as we share them with many species of the animal world.
As a result of this idea learning is made unnecessary hard and less successful than it could be.
But learning and especially learning are not at all taking part solely in our heads.
From our earliest time in the uterus and through our whole life our bodies play a crucial role and an integral part in all of our intellectual processes.
Through our senses spread all over our bodies, we take in information in order to understand the world and the environment we live in and it is the understanding we draw from to form new ideas and create new possibilities.
Our entire brain structure growths through movement increase the brain’s complexity and facilitate greater cognitive function.
Movement elicits dendritic growth, strengthens synaptic connections between the nerve cells, thus leading to faster information processing and deepening of memory formation.
The first presupposition (prerequisite) for learning by taking in information via our senses is safety and survival.
The first determinant for our perception of the level of safety is the quality of our relationships with our parents, caregivers and siblings.
A stressed mother for example may cause the unborn baby to concentrate responding with basic reflexive movements for survival, thus strengthening all connections in the nerve networks responsible for survival and safety; leaving little room to develop and deepen connections to the higher functional areas of the brain designated to creativity and cognitive functions – the area most needed for academic learning.
As long as the child does not feel safe if will continue to move in ways that mainly strengthen the networks, the connections and the functions of lower brain areas while at the same time avoiding movements that enable the child to open itself to new challenges, thus eventually leading to growth in higher brain areas.
Fortunately more and more movement based intervention program are offered and may assist a person to achieve a level of feeling safe, thus enabling her/him to feel free to explore her/his body and her/his environment through constant movements and repeated sensory challenges.
The intervention program lead the learner from a basic survival ensuring movement pattern to more complex movement sequences thus offering a fertile ground for growing and developing all areas of the brain, as well as the integration of different cognitive and other functions.
The latest neuro-scientific research supports these findings with ever-richer detail.
There is a great deal of knowledge still to be learned about our brain/body/mind connection and there is a tremendous amount of information we have acquired over the recent years.
We can all benefit from it by implementing the new knowledge in the way we see ourselves, our environment and it offers a powerful new possibility to raise and teach our children.
It is time we all become more aware of our body’s role and movement in learning as it is so dramatically clarified by scientific research.
