Brain science for 10 to 16 year olds

Move to Remember

Your body is part of your memory. When you act something out, your brain stores it in more than one place, so you're more likely to find it again later. Let's test it on you.

Try the experiment ↓

Experiment · 3 minutes

Are you a better rememberer when you move?

You'll see 12 actions, one at a time. For the first 6, just read them, sitting still. For the next 6, stand up and actually do them. Then we'll see which ones you remember.

Ready when you are

Why does it work?

Three secret reasons. Tap each card.

1. More roads home

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More roads home

Reading a word makes one road to the memory. Doing it adds a movement road and a feeling road.

If one road is blocked when you're trying to remember, you can take another. Scientists call this multimodal encoding.

2. The plan is the magic

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The plan is the magic

Before you move, your brain has to plan the move: what, how, which hand. That planning makes you think hard about the meaning.

Big surprise: people whose muscles don't work well, like people with Parkinson's, still get the memory boost. The planning is doing a lot of the work.

3. Wake-up boost

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Wake-up boost

Any movement, even star jumps that have nothing to do with the lesson, wakes your brain up and helps you pay attention.

But this boost is smaller than the first two, and it fades once the moving stops feeling new.

Inside your head

Click the glowing parts of the brain

Pick a part

Each glowing area plays a different job when you move to learn.

How much does it help?

Not all moving is equal

Scientists measured how much each kind of movement helps. The longer the bar, the bigger the boost.

🎭 Acting out the exact thing

Huge. Tested in labs with lists of words and actions.

🙌 Gestures while you explain

Medium. Your own gestures help more than watching someone else's.

🏃 Active lessons at school

Small for test scores, but bigger for paying attention.

What does "huge" mean for you?

Imagine 100 kids lined up from "remembers least" to "remembers most". You start in the middle. Press a button and watch where you'd move to.

remembers leastremembers most

Myth buster

"I'm a kinaesthetic learner, so I need to move but you don't."

True or false?

For fidgeters

If you can't sit still…

Some people, especially people with ADHD, wriggle more when a task gets hard. One study tested boys aged 8 to 12 with a tricky memory game. The boys with ADHD did better when they moved more. The boys without ADHD did worse when they moved more.

So for some brains, fidgeting isn't naughtiness. It's the brain turning its own volume up. The trick is finding movement that doesn't distract everyone else, like a wobble cushion, squeezing a ball, or standing at a desk.

Good scientists doubt

What scientists still argue about

🧪 Labs vs real life

The giant boost shows up in labs with simple word lists. In real classrooms with real exams, the boost is much smaller.

👀 Is watching enough?

One review found that watching someone do a gesture helped learn foreign words about as well as doing it yourself. Other studies find doing beats watching. Not settled.

🤔 Is the body really needed?

Some scientists say the movement parts of the brain light up, but that might just be a side effect, like a car's lights flicking on when you start the engine.

Your toolkit

Try these this week. Tick them off.

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Quick quiz

Did it stick?

Where this comes from

  • [Ref: Roberts, MacLeod & Fernandes (2022). The enactment effect: a systematic review and meta-analysis of behavioral, neuroimaging, and patient studies. Psychological Bulletin]
  • [Ref: Dargue, Sweller & Jones (2019). When our hands help us understand: a meta-analysis into the effects of gesture on comprehension. Psychological Bulletin]
  • [Ref: Norris, van Steen, Direito & Stamatakis (2020). Physically active lessons in schools and their impact on physical activity, educational, health and cognition outcomes. British Journal of Sports Medicine 54:826–838]
  • [Ref: Singh et al. (2019). Effects of physical activity interventions on cognitive and academic performance in children and adolescents. British Journal of Sports Medicine 53:640–647]
  • [Ref: Mathias, Waibel, Hartwigsen, Sureth, Macedonia, Mayer & von Kriegstein. Motor cortex causally contributes to vocabulary translation following sensorimotor-enriched training]
  • [Ref: Schmidt, Benzing, Wallman-Jones, Mavilidi, Lubans & Paas (2019). Embodied learning in the classroom: effects on primary school children's attention and foreign language vocabulary learning]
  • [Ref: Sarver, Rapport, Kofler, Raiker & Friedman (2015). Hyperactivity in ADHD: impairing deficit or compensatory behavior? Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 43:1219–1232]
  • [Ref: Oppezzo & Schwartz (2014). Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition]
  • [Ref: Oppici, Mathias, Narciss & Proske (2023). Benefits of enacting and observing gestures on foreign language vocabulary learning. Behavioral Sciences 13:920]
  • [Ref: Mahon & Caramazza (2008). A critical look at the embodied cognition hypothesis and a new proposal for grounding conceptual content. Journal of Physiology–Paris]