QBI Seminar: Coupling movement and creative discovery to transform health and learning landscapes.
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- Full Description:
- Speaker:
Dr Danielle Wilde
Sidney Myer Creative Fellow and visiting Research Fellow RMIT University, Melbourne
Title:
Coupling movement and creative discovery to transform health and learning landscapes.
Abstract:
Dramatic improvements in cognitive function have been reported when using interactive technologies to target neurological change in children with learning difficulties; people with autism, with age, illness or accident-related cognitive decline; and people with physical pathologies, including vestibular disorder, and the sight-impaired or blind. Importantly, unless specific physical pathologies are being addressed, this research typically remains screen-based, overlooking the rich multi-modal capacities of the human body. Yet embodied interaction affords multi-sensory experiences and heightened engagement. Such engagement may, in certain cases, be more effective than the screen-based neuroplasticity exercises currently garnering dramatic results. Enriched embodied engagement allows for a more inclusive palette of activities, as well as powerful leverage of the indelible intertwining of body and mind. It also offers opportunities for REST, or Random, Episodic, Silent Thought, which has been identified as important in creative processes.
Wilde will present a range of curious leisure activities that enrich embodied engagement by tightly coupling cognitive and kinaesthetic load. She will demonstrate how these activities heighten attention, prolong engagement, and suggest surprising outcomes in learning, health, and creative thinking.
Wilde’s research points to value in understanding the neural impact of enriched embodied engagement, as well as how this impact might be effectively leveraged to address or mitigate physical and potentially motorically-unrelated cognitive challenges in targeted health contexts, as well as in the general population who are free to engage in curious leisure activities. Engagement (or lack of) is acknowledged to be a key factor in the effectiveness of health, learning and abilitation strategies. Wilde posits that intertwining kinaesthetic, imaginative and creative discovery may transform such outcomes, not only by enhancing engagement, but by effectively supporting and stimulating targeted neuroplastic change. The purpose of this research presentation is not simply to demonstrate the strong anecdotal evidence for her claims, but rather, she hopes, it will be the beginning of a conversation that can assist her to extend her research with robust neuro- and cognitive science methodologies.
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