Neuroscience for Learning and Development: How to Apply Neuroscience and Psychology for Improved Learning and Training by Stella Collins

Author:Stella Collins
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 2015-11-02T14:00:00+00:00

Increase levels of exercise

John Medina in his book Brain Rules (2008) makes exercise his number one Brain Rule, and if you haven’t read somewhere that exercise is going to keep your brain going, increase your life span or do something amazing for you, I’ll be very surprised. More and more evidence shows that exercise is good for us and sitting down is bad and it doesn’t all have to be about donning running shoes and taking serious exercise.

Students asked to read e-mails and text whilst walking at 2.25 km/h at a treadmill desk improved their memory for the material and also said they felt they were able to concentrate better during the 40-minute reading task (Labonté-LeMoyne et al, 2015). Their brainwaves were also measured using EEG and showed signs of lower theta frequency and higher alpha frequencies which the researchers interpreted as superior mental functioning. Researchers have found that students who engaged in moderate physical exercise before taking a test that measured attention spans performed better than students who didn’t exercise. The researchers found that exercise primarily helps our brain’s ability to ignore distractions, although they weren’t exactly sure why.

So instead of asking people to sit down during any form of study, why not encourage them to move or at the very least stand up.

As anecdotal evidence I regularly have people standing up to view, discuss or share information and believe the quality and quantity of questions that people ask are far superior to when they are sitting down.

We’ve done this even more since an incident where I was talking to a group about the neuroscience of memory. They all seemed pretty interested and engaged; certainly everyone looked alert and as if they were paying attention. One colleague, Carole Elam, came in late and indicated she was just going to grab a coffee before she sat down and so she busied herself at the back of the room getting coffee and didn’t really even seem to be concentrating particularly on what I was saying. And then she sat down and ‘paid attention’. Later that day, as part of the session, we did a test as to what people had remembered. Carole came up to me afterwards and explained she’d done better in the test for the section whilst she’d been making coffee than when she’d sat down. Her experience was that as she was making coffee she’d felt alert and needed to concentrate in case she missed anything but as she sat down she felt herself slip into ‘sponge mode’. Of course we can’t measure what it was about the experience that actually increased her attention but we both believe a strong factor was because she was moving rather than sitting. Of course coffee helps with attention levels too, so don’t forget that when you’re training.

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