“Sit Still” is Short-Sighted
Neither the environment of my schooling nor of my long-time employer were best for my mind. In both cases I was expected to sit still during any intellectual endeavor involving other people. I needed to have the self-control to keep my body from interfering with my mind or those around me.
That message, for me, is almost completely backwards.
We tend to think of the mind as an organ that sits above the neck, with the body as its transport and life support. School is built on that picture. We park the body in a chair so the mind can get to work.
But the neuroscience of the last few decades keeps telling us the body and the mind aren’t running on separate tracks. Movement isn’t the noise that interferes with thought. A lot of the time, it is the thought, or at least the machinery thought runs on. And when schools treat the urge to move as a behavior to be suppressed—or, on a good day, a tank to be drained with extra recess—they’re throwing away one of the better tools they have. Especially for the kids who need it most.
The motor brain moonlights
The tidy story we learned is that the brain divides into departments, and one of them handles movement while another, more prestigious one handles thinking. A huge fraction of the brain is involved in motor control. For example, the cerebellum, that dense knot at the back of the skull, has about half the brain’s neurons. For a century its function was filed under movement coordination because when it is damaged, movement suffers.
But that attribution was based on experiments with a “lamppost” problem. We look for the lost keys where the light is. We can see muscles contract, so we design experiments around movement and conclude the region is about movement. We can’t see abstract thought from the outside. It turns out, once the harder experiments are done (helped by new technology to image the brain functionally), that the cerebellum is also busy with abstract reasoning, emotion, and processing signals from the body. The brain, it seems, maps many different kinds of concepts onto the same circuits that steer muscles, reusing the machinery. Think about time or distance and the circuits determining the duration of muscle contraction or spatial processing get reused. Brains are stingy with space and energy, and one of their oldest tricks is making a good circuit do more than one job.
That has a critical implication. Getting better at controlling your body and getting better at abstract thought may not be separate projects. They may be the same neural skill, wearing different clothes.
Perhaps the best thing my parents did was enter me in gymnastics. This was around the same age as a nun teacher was having me spend much of class time on a kneeler as punishment for behavior problems, including squirming. The very thing I needed to do better in school was taken away. It took me decades for me to independently learn the importance of movement for my thinking.
The point of gymnastics, as far as my parents said out loud, was to make me more coordinated. (To be clear, I don’t think I was uncoordinated but a bit of a daredevil.) But I’ve come to wonder whether all that drilling of precise, whole-body motor control gymnastics fostered has helped make me the thinker I eventually became. I can’t prove it. But if motor and abstract thinking really do share circuitry, then teaching a body to move well might be one of the sneakier ways to build a mind that thinks well.
Motion is a thinking tool, not a thinking tax
Motion circuits can do more than time-share with abstract thinking. They can loosen thought.
The cleanest evidence comes from walking. A well-known set of Stanford experiments found that people generated substantially more creative and original ideas while walking than while sitting. It didn’t matter whether they walked outside in the trees or on a treadmill facing a blank wall. The walking itself did the work, and the boost lingered for a while after they sat back down. Walking primes the brain.
I feel this fairly dramatically. For decades my best thinking time has been a walk, ideally somewhere green. The repetitive motion is half-hypnotic, and it quiets the effortful, focused part of my brain enough that the wandering part can kick in. The ideas come precisely because I’ve stopped trying to force them. And walking isn’t only good for inventing things. Regular movement is one of the more reliable levers we have on mood and emotion regulation, which is critical in determining whether you can think well at all that day. Call it a meditation that happens to move. (The subject of this article came from someone asking me about mindfulness practices, and I said I struggle with a stationary practice but get a more lasting effect from walking or other exercise.)
The other aspect of motor control and thinking that has been well studied is fidgeting and repetitive movement. There are always a few kids in the class who have their body or a part of it in constant motion. As a kid I vibrated my leg and squirmed constantly, and it drove my teachers up the wall.
It turns out my leg knew something the teachers didn’t. Studies of children with ADHD find they move more exactly when a task gets harder (when working memory is taxed) and that the ones who move more intensely tend to perform better on those demanding tasks.
That conforms with my experience. It isn’t only that moving seems to help me relax into a state more conducive to certain kinds of thinking, it’s that thinking hard makes me want to move. A few hours of deep concentration at a computer and my body is tense as hell afterward, not from the seated position per se but because the thinking was inherently connected to muscle contractions.
Some people clearly have more of a leaky barrier between motion and thinking, but the overlap exists in all of us. By ignoring it, schools might be fighting biology.
Schools drain the tank instead of using it
Of course, schools do understand the importance of physical activity. The field knows that kids need to move. The research on exercise and learning has nudged some schools toward more recess, movement breaks, and “get the wiggles out” before a lesson.
Great, but I think they aren’t totally getting it. The remedies are almost always about calming the movement urge, burning off excess energy so the child can think better. The body is still cast as the problem, and movement is the pressure-release valve.
Almost nobody, as far as I can tell, is asking how we use the body better to help learning because that’s partly how the mind works. Instead of ten minutes of running around, lessons that think while moving (walking discussions, pacing, etc.) or fidget-friendly seats.
This is most crucial for many of the students we’re most concerned about. Much has been written about schooling’s “boy problem,” about boys falling behind and about a classroom structure that fits a developing boy poorly. One of a boy’s needs is simply to move, and the reflex when he falls behind is to double down on the seat work. The same goes for many autistic and ADHD kids, for whom repetitive movement isn’t a distraction from thinking but a scaffold for it.
I speculate there may be a deeper irony here. If whole-body motor control and abstract thinking really do share circuitry, boys might actually carry a latent advantage in big-picture thinking because boys tend to develop faster in gross, whole-body coordination. But the advantage rarely gets cashed in. Early schooling rewards the other motor domain, the fine-motor control of neat handwriting and typing where young boys typically lag. So we grade a boy down on the motor skill he’s behind in, while discouraging the motor skill that might feed the very thinking we claim to want. The gift goes unopened.
I’m not arguing that we replace algebra with jumping jacks, or that every squirming kid is a stifled genius. Bodies vary, and what settles one mind will scatter another. One of my daughters clearly thought better when non-lyrical music was playing. It was her auditory brain that helped her think more so than movement.
The mind is stitched into a moving body, not a brain in a jar. It borrows body control circuitry to do its most abstract work, and it often thinks best when the body is in motion.
A school that understands this stops treating the fidget, the pacing, and the restless boy as failures of self-control. It starts treating them as clues. The kid who can’t sit still isn’t refusing to think. He may be showing you exactly how he does.
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