I’ve always moved my hands around quite a bit while I talk. Other kids made fun of me. I chalked it up to being Italian, since that was a common stereotype of the time that Italians talked a lot with their hands.
I never thought of using my hands as a learning aid, at least not in my early school years. Sure, I could count on my fingers (and toes) to learn simple arithmetic. But when it came to memorizing multiplication tables and such, moving wasn’t encouraged. “Sit still and memorize - that’s the ticket to learning how to handle numbers.”
Good thing they invented calculators, I think.
But it turns out that using your hands may actually help you learn how to handle numbers better. That’s at least according to a report on a new study released last week.
When learning to solve simple equations like 5+3+6= __+6, kids who were taught to move their hands under each side of the equation learned better than those who kept still. Actually, 85% of the hand-waving kids retained their ability to solve the equations a few weeks later, while only about a third of the speech-only kids remembered.
So why does the hand movement help retention? Lead author Susan Cook thinks it might help us tie what’s in our minds with what we’ve experienced in the world:
“My intuition is that gestures enhance learning because they capitalize on our experience acting in the world,” says Cook. “We have a lot of experience learning through interacting with our environment as we grow, and my guess is that gesturing taps into that need to experience.”
Life is just a moving experience, I guess.
Tags: brain learning movement feldenkrais