Tom’s Wordpress Blog

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 say.

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.

We all know some who can resist the pressure of our friends doing this or that, and overtly or implicitly urging us to do the same thing. A recent widely reported study even suggests that obesity gets transmitted this way, from friend to friend. Not any organic thing, but as ideas about what’s acceptable body image and behavior stuff. Not really that surprising when you stop to think about it.

But what is it that makes some of us so eager to go along with the crowd? Another recent study looked into what was happening in the brains of kids who described themselves as resistant to peer pressure and those who said they weren’t resistant. Turns out the peer-resistant kids had less brain activity, but a more coordinated brain pattern than those who said they weren’t peer-resistant. So there is at least some neurological component at work here, at least as far as kids looking at pictures inside an fMRI. That is, until someone comes along with another study that says just the opposite. (It happens.)

What this really opens up for me is a nature/nurture question. If you really can resist peer pressure, is it because of structural things going on inside your brain, or because your environment has provided opportunities to learn to just say no when the overwhelming sentiment is to say yes. Probably it’s some combination.

I’m hoping that The Agile Gene will be able to shed some light on this sort of thing. Author Matt Ridley writes with a kind of clarity and flair that makes reading about science and philosophy more fun than you’d think it would be.

Interestingly, I first head of Ridley while driving and listening to a podcast of All in the Mind from ABC radio in Australia. Unable to resist the pressure to get his book, I veered into the parking lot of a Borders bookstore that happened to have it in stock.

I just couldn’t say no.

The Bicycling Paradox tells us how and why older and heavier athletes can thrive on the bicycle, but wilt in a pair of running shoes.

I find this interesting because I’m in the second month of a new fitness program. Seems as though the year I took off from working out had caught up with me - girth-wise and stamina-wise. With the help of a wonderful trainer, I’m hefting weights, walking on the treadmill and riding a challenging exercise bike.

I had thought I wouldn’t like the bike, maybe find it too boring to continue for very long. But the bike turns out to be kind of a pleasant experience, even when I’m drenched in sweat and furiously pumping the pedals for all I’m worth.

Turns out that I’m not the only older, heavier athlete favoring the bike as fitness machine. And the Times article provides a clue as to why plump codgers like me might find it more forgiving to pedal than to run or even walk long distances.

It’s got something to do with how you use your center of gravity in cycling rather than running.

“In running, when you see someone who is obviously overweight, they will be in trouble,” Dr. Hagberg said. “The more you weigh, the more the center of gravity moves and the more energy it costs. But in cycling, there are different aerodynamics — your center of gravity is not moving up and down.”

The difference between cycling and running is like the difference between moving forward on a pogo stick and rolling along on wheels. And that is why Robert Fitts, an exercise physiologist at Marquette University who was a competitive runner, once said good runners run so smoothly they can almost balance an apple on their heads.

And I’m thinking it doesn’t matter a heck of a lot if the wheels are rolling or stationary - as long as you can adjust the tension to pedal a little harder.

Cool. That worked to post from a mobile phone, even with one html tag. So let me try a link to my main blog.

trying to post from iPhone again, this time using the code setting. Which seems to work fairly well, with full use of the predictive typing on the keyboard. Not sure how I’d handle HTML tags though. Better than the last time I tried it, so that’s good.Grown to love the predictive typing. It would be nice to have for any keyboard Any day.

Demonstrate and imitate. That’s the time honored method of teaching and learning lots of performance or athletic skills. Sometimes it works, and most times not, in my opinion.

But for sure imitation is not going to work for someone who actually lacks physical capacity to perform the movement being demonstrated. If you don’t have arms, it’s impossible to imitate raising your arm.

Only the brain doesn’t really work that way, at least according to a just-released research study. What happens instead has to do with goals rather than just duplicating a given movement.

The researchers ask people without hands or arms to mimic video of various hand movements, as they watched scanned images of what was happening in the aplasic brains. The aplasic brains lit up with activity all right, but it was in areas associated with their feet instead of hands.

The results underscore that the mirror neuron system isn’t mindlessly imitating, but working toward a goal, he says. The two people without hands or arms recognized they could lift a cup with their feet–and their brain lit up accordingly.

That’s pretty interesting, and maybe even a bit amazing. But it go me wondering about using demonstration and imitation in learning skills more complex than such simple movements.

I’ve never been a real big fan of the demonstration and imitation approach to learning performance or athletic skills. And especially if you’re paying big bucks by the hour to have some expert show you how it done.

Maybe I’m not alone here.

Music professor Robert Duke offers a kinder, gentler approach:

In teaching, often a student will do something, then the teacher tries to fix it by simplifying it a little, then having the student try again, Duke said. If that doesn’t work, we make it a little more simple, and try again. This can keep going: simplify, try, simplify try. Maybe we do it eight times before it’s simple enough for the student to accomplish. Then once they get it, we go back to the passage and have them try again.

During this process, with each failed attempt, “the learner is thinking: wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong….,” Duke said. “Rather than inch back and then leap forward, we should leap back, and then inch forward,” Duke said. “Leap back to a task that is very accomplishable.” This doesn’t always mean to play something slower. It can mean to play it in rhythms, or to work on the fundamentals of the technique involved. Either way, the student needs to be able to achieve success, there in the lesson. “How is a student going to do, ALONE, what you can’t get them to do in your studio in 20 minutes?” Duke said. “This principle goes across all levels: set them up in a way that they can do the thing we demonstrate.”

From: http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20076/7046/

So how does this tie into the research study talked about earlier? I’m not really sure if there is any kind of direct tie here. It might be interesting to look at brain scans of students using Duke’s approach. But, hey, it’d probably be hard to get the piano into a scanner.

Probably similar brain patterns are at work, though.

What’s most interesting is the piano students are imitating to learn. Only they are imitating themselves in earlier successful situations.

As Yogi Berra says, “you can observe a lot just by watching.” And you can learn a lot from yourself, if you know what to pay attention to.

So I’m giving it a go - posting from an iphone, that is. Not the easiest thing I’ve ever done.

Something new. I’ve added an iPhone-friendly template for this blog. No, you don’t see it if you aren’t visiting on an iPhone. The template and plug in come from iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme by ContentRobot.

Content robot’s site indicates that they’ll release a future version that allows admin access. Wonder how easy it would be to actually post more than just a few words or lines of text from an iPhone?