Friday, October 18, 2019

Research able to change our relationship to food in the United States

Food is surprisingly often a controversial topic, especially when it comes to eating habits and the consequences of how much we eat, when eat, and what we eat. It is a necessity for life, thus everyone in the world has a personal connection to it and is affected causing for a variety of opinions on the matter. However, through research we are able to make more well informed decisions regarding both larger issues such as how food is being distributed and what food is made up of by large companies to more personal issues such as what we should eating and buying for our families and ourselves and when we should be eating it.

The United States is often looked at when a discussion of food is happening, as the United States is becoming an increasingly more obese nation, with related health problems on the rise as a result. “New data shows that nearly 40 percent of them were obese in 2015 and 2016, a sharp increase from a decade earlier,” and this increase comes with correlated increases in health risks of “heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers.” There are many reasons for this increase in obesity over the last decade. “Nutritionists and other experts cite lifestyle, genetics, and, most importantly, a poor diet as factors” for this as Americans have increased the amount of processed and trans fat rich food that they eat. Fast food is an example of this kind of diet and “fast food sales in the United States rose 22.7 percent from 2012 to 2017. Grocery stores in the U.S. are also stocked full of packaged and processed food and  “packaged food sales rose 8.8 percent,” from 2012 to 2017. All of this is in spite of attempts to educate the public regarding poor diet and its consequences.

While it may seem that education is not working to help reduce and eliminate this epidemic, I believe that shifts in research that help us understand how this diet actually effects the human body on a cellular level will be the most beneficial, as it is this type of education on the matter that will allow for better medication, push for legislative action, and provide the public a better understanding of how their body is really reacting to this type of diet and help to overcome the media’s detrimental depiction of how simple, easy, effective fast or packaged food can be for a meal.

One of the researchers, doing such research is Jennifer Beshel. In The research article, A Leptin Analog Locally Produced in the Brain Acts via a Conserved Neural Circuit to Modulate Obesity- Linked Behaviors in Drosophila, by Dr. Jennifer Beshel, focuses on this obesity problem that has affected so many. Beshel’s research focuses on Drosophila eating behavior as they resemble the feeding behavior of humans and their system while comparative is much simpler and easier to manage. The research looks at feeding behavior after the deletion of a leptin analog by the name of upd1. This upd1, was responsible for a neuropeptide F that was responsible for regulation of food intake. This knockout upd1 flies,w hen compared to the control group counterparts showed higher levels of fat storage and excess weight when consuming a high fat and high sugar diets. We are able to use such research to understand how leptin might behave in humans, especially their response to high fat and high sugar diet, which is the primary type of diet for many in the U.S. It is through research such as Beschel’s that we may be better understand how are body functions in this new food climate and find ways to change the way we think about food and what we eat from a personal level of what we put on our tables to a national and international level for pushing for labeling of food in a certain way by governmental organizations.

Gestation effects on Learning and Attention

In Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield’s article on gesture effects and learning, she highlights that visual attention and gestures are influential in helping learning and retaining attention. Another component necessary to guide visual attention is speech synchronization which can predict learning outcomes within the gesture condition. Eye-tracking measures have proven that children are better to experience greater learning retention and likelihood problems when the instructors associate gestures with the speech vs. just speech alone. Her findings indicate that children can perform better with the addition of hand movements from instructors when lecturing or teaching their students. Ultimately, hand gestures are powerful and have beneficial effects since learners can retain more information when it is associated with the instructor's speech vs. speech alone. In Wakefield’s study, she recruits 50 young participants who were recruited, 26 children in the speech+gesture condition vs 24 children in the speech alone condition. All participants were given a math pre-test and all received a sample score of zero due to a lack of knowledge of solving the problems at the start of the study. However, six instructional videos which use gestures to explain the math problem, and specifically referring to direction and sides, was influential on the children as 38.5% of the children in the Speech+Gesture condition were able to answer the math problem accurately when it was readministered. Therefore, this condition indicates rapid learning. Dr. Wakefield describes two ways that gestures have a positive influence in terms of enhanced visual attention when learning. The first manner is that patterns that are obtained from verbal instruction may be heightened or encouraged by adding gestures. Second, gesture may impact learning by working synergistically, by encouraging learners to combine and integrate information from speech and gesture to produce more enhanced learning.

Researcher Pilar Prieto at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona also explains how gestures not only have a positive effect on visual engagement but have an important task in terms of human communication. Speakers All ages tend to gesticulate, and rhythmic gestures when storytelling enhance children’s oral speaking skills. In Prieto’s study, there were 44 participants with an age range of 5-6 from various geographical areas from Spain. Six full narrative stories were told to each participant under two different conditions. One condition involved rhythmic gestures, while the second condition involved no rhythmic gestures for narration of the story. The results of the study indicate that rhymed gestures produced better stories with better narrative structure in the children compared to none.

From both articles, it is concluded that hand gestures enhance learners' ability to learn and retain knowledge. From Wakefield’s study, we learn that gestures learning effects come from not only visual attention but from synchronizing the visual attention with speech. From Prieto’s study, we can see how rhythmic gestures while storytelling improves our oral skills. Ultimately, hand movements seem to have a positive correlation with enhancing learners' cognitive development, and it will be interesting to further study how changes through different cognitive domains.




Works Cited:

Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona. "Telling stories using rhythmic gesture helps children improve their oral skills." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 17 January 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190117142234.htm>.

Wakefield, ENovack, MACongdon, ELFranconeri, SGoldin‐Meadow, SGesture helps learners learn, but not merely by guiding their visual attentionDev Sci201821:e12664. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12664


URL TO BLOG: https://morebrainpoints.blogspot.com/2019/10/gestation-effects-on-learning-and.html






Could Cancer be a Manageable Disease with Hormone Treatments?

Progesterone is produced in both men and women in adrenal glands and the
brain, and additionally in the ovaries and placenta in women.  This hormone
has “its production in the brain, by oligodendrocytes…[which] provides
clues to itscritical role in neural homeostasis” (Espinoza, 2018).  The large
increase of progesterone in fetal development is a strong sign of its
importance in neuronal development (Espinoza, 2018). Additionally, “there
is evidence that it also plays a much broader role in correcting and maintaining
homeostasis after physiologic stress and injury beyond the central nervous
system” (Espinoza, 2018).  Due to its proteomic and receptor-mediated
systems, progesterone treatment is proving to be more resilient compared
to other therapies (Espinoza, 2018). One of the most exciting parts of
rogesterone therapy for brain injury is that it is effective after the injury
has occurred as well as a good neuroprotectant.  A study was done to test
progesterone’s effect on rats that had experimentally induced brain injury
versus a placebo group and a sham surgery (Stein, 2010). They found that
“the brain-injured rats treated with progesterone performed significantly
better on spatial learning tasks than the placebo group and did nearly as
well as the rats in the sham surgery group that did not sustain any brain
injury” (Espinoza, 2018).

Progesterone treatment has been shown to reduce the swelling in injured
areas, reduced loss of neurons, increasing in remyelination, and a general
speedier and stronger recovery process (Espinoza, 2018).  One way
scientists think progesterone allows for better neuronal recovery is by
blocking the synthesis of the cytokine TNF-alpha, IL-1, and IL-6, which
normally increases inflammation. Some other ways progesterone aids the
neuronal recovery process is by limiting microglial cells  Progesterone is
also used to treat fibroid tumors (noncancerous growths on the uterus),
poly-cystic ovary syndrome. How can a hormone that is thought to promote
cell vitality also help with cysts and growths? Progesterone needs to be
thought of as a hormone that helps maintain neuronal homeostasis and
handles damage control whether that means too many cells (growths)
or not enough from damage.  The other side to progesterone is its
semi-counterpart testosterone/androgens, and another type of hormone
treatment is the blocking of testosterone and its production for cancer
patients.


It was found that for some prostate cancers, drugs traditionally used to treat
breast and ovarian cancer were more effective.  The treatment was able to
slow progression as well as increase survival rates in patients. The drugs
used are abiraterone, enzalutamide, and olaparib.  They are considered “adrenal
inhibitors”since they inhibit enzymes necessary for androgen synthesis.
These treatments are typically used with patients that are in the advanced stages
of prostate cancer and have defective DNA repair genes (same genes correlated
with breast cancer).  The results showed “ the efficacy of olaparib in men with
advanced prostate cancer and gene defects involved in a cell’s ability to repair
its DNA” (ICR, 2019). In addition to the obvious benefits of this treatment,
there were also less extreme side-effects that occur with chemotherapy. 
Furthermore, “olaparib is able to kill cancer cells with faulty DNA repair genes
while sparing normal cells” (ICR, 2019). This type of treatment is leading some
doctors to consider the possibility that cancer could be treated as a long-term,
controllable disease.

Works cited:



“Breast Cancer Drugs More Effective Than Hormone Therapy For Some
Prostate Cancers.” Drug Discovery from Technology Networks,


de Bono, Johann, and Maha Hussain. “ESMO 2019: Breast and Ovarian
Cancer Drug Outperforms Targeted Hormone Therapy in Some Men
with Advanced Prostate Cancer.” The Institute of Cancer Research, 2019, 
-drug-outperforms-targeted-hormone-therapy-in-some-men-with-
advanced-prostate-cancer.


Espinoza, Tamara R, and David W Wright. “The Role of Progesterone in
Traumatic Brain Injury.” The Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation,
U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2011,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6025750/#R7.

The Female Brain



Earlier this semester on September 10th, Dr. Meharvan Singh, Vice Dean of research for Stritch School of Medicine came in to present his research on the effects of estrogen on neurodegenerative diseases in women. He explained that in his research he looked in to the effects of the deprivation of BDNF, a protein that impacts cognitive performance and acts as a neuroprotectant, caused by the removal of ovaries in rats. Ovaries provide estrogen and progesterone to the body and the removal of ovaries was used to simulate a menopausal state in the rats. This resulted in a dramatic drop in BDNF which was then connected to a higher rate of neurodegenerative diseases. Connecting this with the impact that low estrogen and progesterone have of BDNF levels it shows that menopausal women, who have lowered estrogen and progesterone, are more susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases.

In the article, “How Pregnancy May Affect the Risk of Alzheimer’s,” by Alice Park it goes into how the higher levels of estrogen and progesterone that women are exposed to during pregnancy can impact the risk of Alzheimer’s later in life. Two different studies are referenced. The first one, done by Rachel Whitmer, showed that women who had given birth to three or more kids had a 12% lower risk of dementia, while those who had miscarriages had an 8% higher risk per miscarriage. They also found that those who received their period after the age of 16 were 22% less likely to develop dementia. In the second study, performed by Dr. Ki Woong Kim, they found that women who had more than five children showed twice the risk of developing Alzheimers. Kim suggests that while at certain levels, these hormones can be protective but at high levels they can be harmful.



From what was found in Dr Singh’s research, it would make sense that women who have been exposed to more estrogen, through pregnancy or longer fertility periods, would be less likely to develop neurodegenerative diseases. Further research must be done to clear up the contradictions between the two studies and, if multiple pregnancies and/or miscarriages do increase risk, what is the link between then high level exposure to estrogen and progesterone and neurodegenerative diseases.

Work Cited:
Park, Alice. “How Pregnancy May Affect the Risk of Alzheimer's.” Time, Time, 23 July 2018, time.com/5344603/pregnancy-risk-alzheimers-disease/.

Production and Research of Medications to Treat Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease is known as the “memory-robbing” disease. It affects five million people in the U.S. and millions more around the world. There are few medications that treat Alzheimer’s by slowing the progression of the disease but there is not one medication that can cure it. The release of new medications to fight Alzheimer’s disease seems to be a long process due to the little amount of medications approved. This is due to the multiple steps that researchers and drug companies have to go through in the process to release a medication onto the market. The steps, which are explained in the article, “Drug discovery and development: the Role of basic biological research," written by Mohs and Greig, are explained and give an outline as to what qualifications the drug must have in order to proceed to the next step. Unfortunately, most drugs barely make it through the initial stages due to their properties or potential harm it can pose onto humans. Once a medication does make it to the final stages, drug companies are not as willing to fund the production of the medication, especially Alzheimer’s medication, due to the risk that the drug companies could lose out on a lot of profit due to the medication not working as planned. Currently, many drugs for Alzheimer’s aim to stop the progression of the disease, but most of these types of drugs have failed. The entire process can take a total of 14 years, and most of the time, the success rate of the medications passing and being approved is under 5%. 

Recently in March of 2019, the drug company Biogen, terminated two of their late-stage studies for an experimental drug for a new Alzheimer’s disease treatment. This was due to the conclusion that the drug would not help Alzheimer’s patients. The drug which was named Aducanumab, was supposed to be a hope in the process to help those with early symptoms of  Alzheimer’s disease. Aducanumb, created in 2017, was designed to target Beta amyloid, which plays a key role in Alzheimer’s. As patients who had early symptoms of Alzheimer’s were enrolled in the late-stage studies, the researchers realized that Aducanumb was not working as planned in patients. Although discouraged, the researchers at Biogen looked at the failure in a good light, noting that the failed clinical trials were a way to help advance future research into new ways that Alzheimer’s could be treated. The researcher’s believe that the trials may indicate that the role of amyloid in Alzheimer’s should be reevaluated, due to its little success. This setback has made drugmakers hesitate in the investment of amyloid hypothesis testing. The hesitation is not uncommon in the drug making industry. Most drug making companies are moving away from the production of Alzheimer’s drugs due to the high failure rate. With more research and new hypotheses for targets in Alzheimer’s disease, drug companies can find substantial data and have higher success rates in new medications.

More research is being done every day and the hope for finding a cure for Alzheimer’s, or even a way to treat the underlying symptoms, has not stopped. With new information, researchers may finally be able to make a medication to fight the disease. We can only hope for the best, but I am positive that there will one day be a cure. 

Obesity and how to go about Combatting it

 Obesity has become a growing, global issue in today's day and age. While there may be many reasons to blame such as individuals living more sedentary lifestyles, or the availability and preference of food,  there are definitely some overlapping, biological factors that can be taken into consideration when combatting this epidemic. Consequently, obesity has become a focal research topic in health care, with Dr. Jennifer Beshel’s research dealing with understanding the neural framework behind obesity.  
In Beshel’s lab, house flies were studied by looking at the process relating to how they encode odors when they are in different hunger states. Both satiated and hungry flies were exposed to food odors and non food odors; it was found that neurons that expressed Drosophila neuropeptide F (dNPF) and another neuropeptide called the Y homolog were activated upon exposure. Both of these neuropeptides play a role in determining the relationship between how hungry one is and how attractive a food’s odor may seem to them. One finding of Beshel’s lab was that when neurons that expressed dnPF were inactivated, flies did not find food odor to be attractive and their behavior was not affected. Likewise, if generations of flies were altered genetically to have stronger expressions of dNPF, food odors had stronger effects on their behavior. Furthermore, Beshel’s lab found that hunger has varying levels of effect when it comes to the type of odors that are being presented, where strictly food odors evoked the strongest behavior and non food odors correlated to the weakest. 
The Wall Street Journal article: “Weight-Loss Surgery Has Other Benefits: Easing Diabetes and Heart Disease” explores a possible solution to obesity. While Beshel’s approach was neurological, this article discusses the implications of a certain procedure called bariatric surgery, where the stomach is either reduced by rerouting the small intestine to a pouch within the stomach , or where a band is placed over the stomach, reducing how much food can stay inside. While the procedure may seem to focus on the physical aspect of reducing food, the article goes on to talk about the biological implications from which a parallel can be drawn to Beshel’s research. Dr. Aminian first goes on to state that diseases relating to the heart and diabetes seem to be reduced in patients who undergo bariatric surgery. Many patients were on insulin prior to this surgery and afterwards, did not need it. This is due to the finding that this surgery can cause the body to release more gut hormones that can affect the release of insulin according to researchers. While the cause and effect relationship is not very clear, Dr. Aminian who was interviewed in the article speculates that lower parts of the small intestine are reached by food upon removal of part of the stomach, which allows the gut to consequently release more hormones. 
How the two articles correlate, I found, was that they both deal with the aspect of being in a satiated state. When flies were satiated in Beshel’s lab, the effect of food odors was not as strong, and their feeding behavior was therefore not affected as strongly. When dNPF expression is increased, food odor seems to be more attractive, leading to more feeding. Insulin, as a hormone, similarly has a role in controlling feeding behavior. Perhaps, there is a possibility that when the hormone insulin is regulated, feeding behaviors may vary in a way where flies do not feed despite finding food odors to be attractive. Afterall, the hormone insulin in a way has a similar way of working, where when it is upregulated in the body, patients do not feel hungry. With patients who have diabetes, their cells are not able to take up sugar, making them feel hungry and less full. Regulating both hormones in the gut and neuropeptides in the brain together may be an effective means in combating obesity and its health implications. Often times, it seems that only one approach is taken, but perhaps it is most effective to combine these two aspects of research. There is still much to be discovered regarding obesity and its associated health risks, but combining these two aspects of research may be the key to finding the most effective solution. 

Refrences:
Beshel, J.,Dubnau, J. and Zhong, Y. (2017) A leptin analog locally produced in the brain acts via a conserved neural circuit to modulate obesity-linked behaviors in Drosophila. Cell Metabolism, 25:208-217.                
McKay, B. (2019, September 2). Weight-Loss Surgery Has Other Benefits: Easing Diabetes and Heart Disease. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/weight-loss-surgery-has-other-benefits-easing-diabetes-and-heart-disease-11567405800?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2.

The Brain as a Computer
In a world constantly growing in technological advances, researchers use all kinds of progressive methods to study the field of science. One interesting observation by several scientists involves comparing the brain to a computer, both essentially functioning through a series of networks, connections, and “wiring.” This noteworthy comparison could be taken to the next level, and after reading Cade Metz’s article “Facial Recognition Tech Is Growing Stronger, Thanks to Your Face” in the New York Times, it’s possible technology recognizes faces in a similar processing system as the brain. The article outlines the complex ways in which tech companies, such as Google and Facebook, have been compiling data about people’s faces everyday for more than a decade, allowing the computer to recognize specific details about facial features and becoming an expert on distinguishing one face from another. Metz discussed how the technology analyzes pictures using “neural networks,” which are complex mathematical systems that require vast amounts of data to build pattern recognition. The simple fact that this system is named after the extensive networking of the brain reiterates the similarities between these two processing centers.

Greg Reynolds, a professor at the University of Tennessee, does research on facial recognition in infants, examining how they begin to develop the skills to recognize faces. In one of his published papers, “The Development of Attentional Biases for Faces in Infancy: A Developmental Systems Perspective,” he finds that newborn infants show a preference for face-like stimuli over non-face stimuli, suggesting the ability of the newborn brain to detect facial features well enough that they can distinguish a face from something that is not a face. In this sense, a computer most likely uses “similar” processing systems and feature-recognition in order to collect data about facial constructs.

Metz, Cade. “Facial Recognition Tech Is Growing Stronger, Thanks to Your Face.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 13 July 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/technology/databases-faces-facial-recognition-technology.html?searchResultPosition=3.
Reynolds G, Roth K. The Development of Attentional Biases for Faces in Infancy: A Developmental Systems Perspective. Front. Psychol., 28 February 2018. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00222

Gesture learning in improving children's comprehension


On September 24th, Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield led a discussion that tackled the idea of gesture learning as a functional tool in understanding mathematics. In this study, she sought to understand more about gestures as a mechanism in learning for grade school children. In the study she conducted, she followed the eye movements of the children and studied the effects of gestures related to how a math problem was explained. The gestures were used to guide attention to specific regions of the problem to help the children better comprehend what the set of questions were asking. These children in the gesture led study were also seen to focus more on the problem than on the instructor unlike their counterparts in the control. This led them to better interpret what the instructor was saying and ultimately understand how to do the problem. After the gesture training, they improved in their problem solving on the math equation and were seen explaining how to solve the problem incorporating the newly learned gestures. This properly depicts the benefits of gesture learning when interpreting new materials since the students were able to focus on the problem-solving technique rather than diverting their attention elsewhere.

Similarly in the article “Telling stories using rhythmic gesture helps children improve their oral skills”, we see Ingrid Vilá-Giménez, et al. facilitate a similar study on gesture learning. Instead of trying to learn how it helps with arithmetic, they sought to understand the influence of gestures on narration. This narrative discourse is described as the ability for children to comprehend and rephrase a story given to them. Ingrid Vilá-Giménez, et al. used the idea of rhythmic gesture learning to help in the comprehension and overall structure of the narrative the children relayed about the cartoons.
The authors used a pretest-posttest design to compare the impact of rhythmic gestures on narration. In this study, the researchers took a group of children ages 5-6 and showed them 4 cartoons and then asked them to explain what the cartoons were about. In the pretest, the participants simply watched cartoons and then narrated what they believed to be happening. There was then a training session given that went over different stories but were now being facilitated by a storyteller. The storyteller used a series of rhythmic gestures that put emphasis on keywords in the story through a series of hand and eye movements. A posttest then was done replicating the pretest to see if there was a change in the way that the children explained the story based around the cartoons. The results of this study found that after viewing the rhythmic gestures the children improved on the way that they depicted the story. The structure surrounding their narration had changed and was more fluent the second time around showing better comprehension of the plot in each cartoon. Ingrid Vilá-Giménez, et al. concluded that there are immediate benefits of rhythmic gesture training in comprehension and emulation when it comes to narrated speech production. 

In both experiments gestures allowed the children to gain a better comprehension of material to access their potential skillsets. It is seen in both cases that gesture learning helps to promote better understanding and interpretation of new concepts. Both groups of children resembled the behavior that they witnessed in the gesture learning to further their knowledge. It shows that gestures have a greater impact on learning than what was initially assumed of it. Even though gestures can be a very passive action in a conversation, it leads us to interpret information in a way that helps us to promote our cognitive growth. 

Work Cited

Telling stories using rhythmic gesture helps children improve their oral skills. (2019, January 17). Retrieved from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190117142234.htm.

Wakefield, E., Novack M.A., Congdon, E.L., Franconeri, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. Gesture helps learners learn, but not merely by guiding their visual attention. (2018, February 13). Retrieved from: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/13j3ka06799we8d/AACV4ZHAqmmM3iXbYqe8HVTQa/(09.24.19)%20-%20Elizabeth%20Wakefield-Connell/Wakefield%20et%20al.%2C%202018%20copy.pdf?dl=0

Vilà-Giménez, I., Igualada, A., & Prieto, P. (2019). Observing storytellers who use rhythmic beat gestures improves children’s narrative discourse performance. Developmental Psychology55(2), 250–262. https://doi-org.flagship.luc.edu/10.1037/dev0000604

The Importance of Gestures in Learning and its Mechanism



          The process of learning is complex and versatile because of the ability to communicate and comprehend meaning without the use of speech or words. Gestures are one such non-verbal communication that makes use of hand movements to convey information. Gestures are a universal and inherent phenomenon in humans that are used in various forms in people of all ages. A recent study led by Pilar Prieto, a researcher at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, examined the use of gestures on the development of children’s narrative discourse. In the study, children are read stories with the use of rhythmic gestures that accompanied keywords. The results of the experiment showed that the children who learned stories with rhythmic gestures showed significantly better narrative discourse, which includes their speech, description, and also their ability to recall events of the story. The study suggests the gestures, specifically rhythmic gestures, has the ability to improve the narrative capabilities of children. These findings can have a major impact on improving teaching methods and in possibly supporting children with learning disabilities. Furthermore, gestures have been found to significantly improve learning and remembering new words in children for both the first language and in a new language. While the research demonstrates the numerous benefits of learning with gestures, it raises the question of how and why gestures have such effects.

           Gestures are known to be important in learning, however, the mechanisms through which it has this impact has not been studied sufficiently. In the presentation of her research, “Learning math by hand: The neural effects of gesture-based instruction in 8-year-old children,” Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield explained the underlying neural impact of learning math through speech and gesture on children. The researchers used fMRI to compare the neural patterns of children who learned math through speech alone and children who learned with speech and gesture together. The experiments revealed that children who learned math with the use of both speech and gestures displayed significantly greater activation in large regions of the prefrontal cortex and frontal motor regions of the brain. This corresponds with the fact that the children were able to incorporate the use of gesture in solving the math problems into their understanding and showed greater retention of information.
           These findings shed light on how and why gestures are a vital tool in learning. The results also demonstrate that learning with gestures share a similar mechanism and characteristics as learning with actions. Furthermore, there has been a significant amount of research that proves the benefit of active learning and its importance in teaching. Dr. Wakefield explained that learning through action on objects has a direct impact on the external world, however, gestures simulate this effect through the representation of information and subsequently promote learning. The similar activation of motor regions in the brain with learning through gestures and active learning suggests that the children are likely viewing that math problems as objects and recalling the gestures as actions. Further research on this relationship would greatly expand our understanding of the importance of gestures. In conclusion, the research demonstrates the vital role of gestures in improving learning in children and this information could be particularly valuable in refining the childhood education system.

References:

Wakefield, E. M., Congdon, E. L., Novack, M. A., Goldin-Meadow, S., & James, K. H. (2019). Learning math by hand: The neural effects of gesture-based instruction in 8-year-old children. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. doi: 10.3758/s13414-019-01755-y  https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01755-y

Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona. (2019, January 17). Telling stories using rhythmic gesture helps children improve their oral skills. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 17, 2019 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190117142234.htm

Vilà-Giménez, I., & Prieto, P. (2018). Encouraging children to produce rhythmic beat gestures leads to better narrative discourse performances. 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018. doi: 10.21437/speechprosody.2018-143