Movement enhances learning

Attention

What we attend to determines what we perceive and thus drives learning, problem-solving, and behavior.

Emotions filter incoming sensory input. Modulates what the cerebral cortex attends to, processes, and stores in long-term memory.

Environment

Safety: Ensure an absence of threat for students, both perceived and real.

Create a sense of community. Encourage and foster interrelationships between students.

Brain

Emotion is processed through the ENTIRE brain. Particularly the interconnected structures of the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, hypothalamus, and cingulate gyrus (the limbic system)

Girls

More likely to do homework in general.

Stress: Tend to do worse with increased stress.

Fighting: Girls tend to flight under the surface of relationships, allowing tension to build up and eventually explode.

Perceive center of vision more easily

Larger, more expressive vocabulary

Boys

More likely not to do homework unless they are directly interested in the topic.

Stress: tend to do better with some stress.

Fighting: Boys would rather punch each other and confront each other directly.

Perceive movement more due to eye composition

self-expression is often physical

Key findings

Frontal cortex is devoted to organizing ACTION, both physical and mental. "Higher" brain functions evolved from movement and are still dependent on it!

Planning and executing plans, memory, emotion, language,
and learning all hinge on movement.

Movement is FUNDAMENTAL to the very existence of a brain. Creatures that don't move, do not possess a brain. Therefore we should move to grow our brains.

The ability to mimic is movement based, and is one of a young humans most powerful avenues of learning.

Aerobic exercise

Releases chemicals essential in forming new memories, and wiring into long-term memory.

Serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine are some of the chemicals that are created and balanced when doing aerobic exercise. This VASTLY improves depression, anxiety, and ADD.

- stimulates growth of stem cells
- spurs new stem cells to develop into new nerve cells
- Elevates brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that builds, protects, and maintains neuron circuitry, giving them the tools they need to learn, process, associate, put in context, and remember.
- The more complex the exercise, the more complex the synaptic connections.

AEROBIC EXERCISE = FASTER PROCESSING SPEED =
BETTER ATTENTION