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Did, I get that right? Just moving helps me learn quicker?!
Well, maybe, but that’s not precisely what these researchers studied.
What did they study?
Well, they used language learning — a good way to test learning because you can always find a foreign language that people don’t know. They then taught some people with classical auditory and visual techniques. And a group they taught using semantically similar gestures. E.g. for goodbye you might wave your hand.
And what did they find?
The researchers at the Technische Universität Dresden found that learning with gestures was quicker. Moreover they noted that disrupting the motor cortex (with trans cranial magnetic stimulation — blasting parts of the brain with strong magnetic waves) during translation tasks impeded translation of these words.
Is that important?
Yes, because it shows that motor regions can be activated in processing language translation, and/or recall. This has not been measured before.
So we use our movement parts of the brain to also encode words?
Yes, logical actually. We’ve previously seen activation in motor regions when imagining task or when speaking activity words and this adds to this research.
