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Knowledge Through Motion

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As a KMer, you probably know about knowledge flows within and across organizations and how to enable, catalyze, and support them. This includes identifying and removing bottlenecks and choke points inhibiting those flows. We might refer to such flows as knowledge in motion.

But there’s another aspect with a slightly different twist that involves knowledge through motion. You could consider it a spinoff from the science of kinesthetics, which includes things like muscle memory, proprioceptors, neurogenesis, and brain plasticity.

In a world becoming increasingly obsessed with offloading manual work to automation and AI, we face the very real threat of reducing our human capacity for learning and self-discovery, critical thinking, and even memory. Think of it as a luxury that’s deceiving us into becoming lazy. This is beginning to appear in critical fields such as law, healthcare, finance, and engineering, all of which have the potential for an adverse impact on public safety. A growing body of research bears this out. A June 2024 Smart Learning Environments article, “The Effects of Over-Reliance on AI Dialogue Systems on Students’ Cognitive Abilities: A Systematic Review” (slejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40561-024-00316-7), is just one of many recent studies addressing this topic.

It’s time to step back and think about how we can reverse this trend and start investing in our own human evolution version of Moore’s Law. One step is to start getting back in touch with and reactivating our wondrously complex neurophysiology and treating it as an integrated whole. Movement plays an important role. It increases oxygen and blood flow, which boosts metabolism and improves neural processes. This includes the all-important executive function responsible for critical systems thinking and creative problem-solving. Welcome to the wild, wonderful world of knowledge kinesthetics.

Not All Learning Happens While Sitting in a Chair

Recently, I was speaking with an athlete-turned-high school coach/administrator about his early secondary and post-secondary school learning experiences, especially in STEM-related subjects. Like many athletically inclined students, he struggled with being forced to sit still, crammed into a desk too small for his athletic build, while having calculus theorems rammed down his throat. Semester after semester, he barely passed his math courses.

But suddenly one day during track and field practice, it all clicked. In a flash of insight, he realized that in many ways, his athletic performance was directly related to the mathematical principles he had been trying to understand for so many years. Running, jumping, and throwing were actually the physical embodiment of derivatives—rates of change, mass, acceleration, and momentum. At that very moment, his attitude toward math went from apprehension to appreciation.

Learning through motion applies to many other subjects besides math. In the early 1900s, Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori introduced a less athletically oriented approach toward incorporating physical activity into the learning experience. Her approach stimulated creativity through drawing, cutting, attaching, and painting. It enhanced coordination, spatial awareness, orientation, and problem-solving skills through climbing and navigating obstacles. It developed sensory and environmental awareness through gardening, baking, and even yoga. These are all far more experiential than pointing and clicking on a flat screen. During the past century, Montessori students have continually outperformed their mainstream counterparts. Yet mainstream education keeps students locked in learning environments that are mostly two-dimensional.

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