The brain isn’t separate from the body–here’s what that means for learning.

We’ve been taught to think of the brain as the control center, the part of us that really matters for learning. But the body is not just along for the ride, carrying our brains from place to place.

Caroline Williams, science journalist and three-time author (including of the book Inner Sense) has spent years digging into the research on how our brains and bodies actually work together. Turns out they’re in constant conversation, sending signals back and forth in ways that shape how we think, feel, learn, and remember.

And that means the brain isn’t calling all the shots from up there in your head: your body has a lot more to say than we’ve been giving it credit for.

Caroline and I talk about why we’ve been trained to override our body’s signals, what happens when kids learn to tune in instead of push through, and how this changes what it means to teach the whole child.

This conversation might shift how you see everything from behavior issues to why certain kids struggle to focus. You’ll learn:

• Why emotions don’t actually start in your brain
• How body awareness connects to emotional intelligence and self-regulation
• What’s really happening when we say “trust your gut”
• Why teaching kids to tune into their bodies might be one of the most important things we can do
• How understanding this changes the way we think about learning

If our bodies are constantly feeding information to our brains, then a lot of what we do in classrooms starts to make less sense…and there are easy, small shifts that can help.

Sponsored by Retreats

Use the player or your favorite podcast app to listen above, or read the condensed transcript that follows.

The brain and body are constantly communicating

ANGELA: So Caroline, you have done a ton of research, and you have written multiple books about different aspects of the mind-body connection and neuroscience. But one running thread that I notice is your attention to the role of movement and physical activity in relation to the brain. What makes this particular aspect of brain science so interesting to you?

CAROLINE:  I guess there’s two ways that got me into it. One was literally just because that’s the way the science was moving. I’ve been covering psychology and neuroscience for many years and then it started to be the case that people started to look beyond the brain for answers about why we think the way we do, why we act the way we do, and to consider that – it sounds obvious when you say it – that the brain is attached to the body and that there’s a lot of crosstalk back and forth that goes on.

And so there was that aspect of it, but there’s also my own personal experience because I’ve always been very active, always had something on the go, whether it’s ballet or trapeze or gymnastics or horse riding, it doesn’t matter, always into something. And I noticed that I always feel better.

I started wondering, why do my best ideas come on a walk? Why do I never feel more calm and focused than after I’ve done yoga? What’s going on? It must be more than just endorphins, happy hormones, the simple stories everyone gets.

And so I started looking into it and thinking, well, I wonder what the science is saying. Is there any science out there that explains this? And it turned out there were absolutely loads. And that’s what took me down the path of movement, because I wanted to know, okay, this is such a powerful thing we can do for our minds. What should we do, and why does it work? Trying to trace the connections in both directions.

Why we’ve been taught to ignore body signals

It’s such a good point about how it seems obvious that there’s a mind-body connection, but I mean, I didn’t learn that growing up at all. And in fact, I felt like my brain was supposed to override my body. If my body wanted to rest, no, you keep going. You push yourself. My body is not really wanting to concentrate. No, you keep doing it anyway. And I feel like not listening to my body was actually part of how I was trained to be.

I think there’s a lot of that. The pushing-through culture is really bad. And there’s a balance to be struck because what the research seems to be showing about listening to your body signals, understanding them and using them as a source of information.

We shouldn’t be totally ignoring our body signals because they have something important to say, but we also shouldn’t be listening to them above everything else. We should be using them as a source of information along with what’s going on in the outside world, what you’ve learned from experience, and what you need to do now.

So it’s a piece of information that we’ve been taught to just disregard because it’s mind over matter, to get on with it. And actually, we’ve been missing something quite important along the way.

Why movement is essential for brain health

Yes, and I love that we’re not going to just do whatever we feel like, but we’re going to use it as a piece of information.  I think a lot about how people in our modern Western society have to build in time for movement and for physical activity because our lifestyles are otherwise too sedentary.

I live in a high-rise building in New York City that was built in 1964, and it was designed without any kind of fitness center or gym because working out was not yet a commonplace activity. So a space had to be reconfigured, I think, around the late 80s when they included a gym. So I mean, this is within my lifetime. And the idea of needing to create this artificial means of physical activity is such a new concept in the span of human history, and I think we take that for granted.

Can you share a little bit about humans’ relationship to movement and how that has changed our brains as society has changed?

Back when we evolved as hunter-gatherers, and for most of our history really until quite recently, movement has been non-negotiable. If you wanted to get food, you had to go out and find it. If you wanted to find someone to start a family with, you had to go and find them. You had to run around and do everything yourself.

Nowadays, we can do everything. I mean technology is a wonderful thing, but we are at a point where we can literally move nothing but our fingers and thumbs and get everything we want, including a partner. We can date, I mean, it’s great because we can connect across oceans and talk. But on the other hand, if we want movement in our lives and if we think that’s important, which it definitely seems to be, then we need to seek it out.

And so our ancestors, and until quite recently, little and often, movement was a part of our lives. Whereas now we tend to shoehorn it in around long blocks of sitting still. And what’s interesting is some of the research is showing that while going to the gym and exercising is great, it’s not as protective for our brain’s long-term health as little and often. So even if you go to the gym every night after work, it doesn’t necessarily offset the cost of that sedentary time. So reducing sedentary time is more important than getting more exercise, if you see what I mean.

So that’s the way I think we need to start thinking about it to get the full benefits of what we were built for, which is moving and thinking on our feet. One researcher, David Raichlen, calls us cognitively engaged endurance athletes. Our bodies and brains, we exist to be up on our feet and moving and thinking. Hunter-gathering isn’t for dummies. It’s something that you need to plan ahead, you need to work together. There’s all this stuff that goes into it, which means that if we don’t exercise, we lose some of the benefits to our brain.

So if we don’t exercise, we not only lose tone in our muscles and all that physical side, the brain doesn’t invest so much in making new connections and maintaining what it already has. So there’s a real link between moving enough and having a healthy brain for the long haul.

Why “movement snacks” matter more than workouts

It’s interesting when I juxtapose that with what we were saying earlier about how we’re in some ways taught to push beyond what our bodies want, not listen to our bodies as information. And I’m thinking about how that kind of applies with the movement, too. Like, no, we’re just going to work as hard as we possibly can. Go do a spin class after work and then sit. I’ve sat all day, I do a spin class, and then I’m sitting all evening on my couch.

And you’re saying the research is talking about little and often. So I’m guessing this is maybe where some of the ideas about watching your steps, trying to get your steps in, or standing up once an hour, those standing reminders are coming from. Is that the little and often?

Movement breaks are really important. And also just making – I mean, this is easier to do if, like me, you work at home, but I sit at my desk here, and then at some point I will take my laptop downstairs and sit on the floor. And the good thing about sitting on the floor is that you have to stand up again. And if you’re like me, you’ve forgotten your pen, so you’re up and down and up and down. And then you’re getting this movement, strengthening your legs, which is just as good as sitting on a leg press and doing reps because you’re doing your whole body weight every time you get up.

So it’s finding ways to get movement into your life, and all of it counts as well. So I think we have this idea that if you don’t change into something lycra and you don’t put trainers on, sneakers on, and get out the door, that it doesn’t count. But dancing around the kitchen counts. Being late and rushing count. It all counts. And so it’s trying to build that stuff into your life and just remembering to do it.

There’s a new book out, I’m not sure if it’s out in the States yet, it’s called Move Well for Life by Wendy Welton. And she takes this idea of getting movement into your everyday life, showing how if you just squat when you’re getting the laundry out of the machine, or sit on the floor when you’re doing chores. And it’s really nice because it just shows how easy it is to insert movement in ways that add up.

So movement snacks. I like the idea of, we think of food snacks and calorie-wise they tend to build up and add up without you really noticing what’s happened. Well, movement snacks are the same, but in a good way. All this movement adds up, and if you get in the habit of doing it regularly, you get some of the benefits. So gym’s good. I’m not saying everyone stop going to the gym, stop going spinning, that’s all great for lots of reasons, but I think we just need to rethink our relationship with movement around the exercise piece.

How to bring movement into the classroom

Right. When you talk about movement snacks, those little bursts of activity that add up without really noticing. And that’s what kids want to do all day long.

I’m thinking about what that might look like in school. A lot of teachers are doing what we call brain breaks, which is get up, stretch, breathe, that sort of thing. What does the research tell us about movement snacks that could be useful for teachers?

Well, interestingly, I’ve actually got a little pilot project going on with a friend and colleague. We’ve got this little program we’re developing called Move4Three, which is just getting kids up in the classroom. They don’t have to change, they don’t have to go anywhere – just doing three minutes of movement.

So the first minute is getting the blood pumping around the body, wake them up, get the focus. The second minute is skills-based, building their confidence in new ways of moving, whether that’s swimming movements standing up, or volleyball or whatever, trying to introduce them to new ways of moving that they may or may not otherwise come across. And then the last minute is mindful stretching, breathing to bring them back down, and hopefully send them back into their next bit of learning feeling a bit more energized, but calm-energized.

So we’ve done a couple of rounds of pilot already, and it seems to be something that the kids quite like. The teachers found it relatively easy to fit into the day, so we’re suggesting a minimum of three to four a day. The videos are starting next week, and crucially, they’re led by secondary school students, kids that are 14, 15, 16. So it’s like peer learning, and it’s fun and engaging.

And so we’re hoping to roll this out as widely as possible so that we can get kids moving. And the idea is to take work away from teachers. So we’re not trying to give them something else to do. It’s something that they can either do at set points throughout the day, or they can just go, okay, everyone’s bored and fidgety, Right, let’s get up, let’s do one of these, and then get back to it.

So it’ll be interesting to see how that pans out because I think that’s something that could be quite easily rolled out by teachers without too much effort. For the first pilot, we did get some data showing that children were more confident in trying things like dance. Their confidence in dance increased by 40% or something. And they enjoyed it. They found it boosted their confidence, and the teachers quite enjoyed it too. So maybe that’s the way forward.

Why body awareness matters for kids

Yeah, when you’re talking about how it increased their confidence in dance, I’m thinking about the importance of body awareness and how that’s something that I feel like previous generations, mine included, got naturally because we were outside, we were running and jumping and exploring and playing with things in the woods, kind of seeing what our bodies could do and testing them out.

Do you see that as more of a challenge for kids today, given the types of activities and entertainment and the amount of autonomy that kids can have in today’s world?

Well, from speaking to teachers, I have heard that especially after the pandemic, there was a real difference in children’s physical ability, even with their core strength, to hold themselves up sitting on the carpet for story time or whatever. I don’t know whether that’s still carrying on. I think it’s not as bad as some people would have you believe. Kids still want to run around in the playground and stuff.

But yeah, you’re right, they’re not learning about their own sense of balance by climbing a tree and falling out and breaking their arm so much as maybe they used to.

So I think confidence is a really important thing because, for better or worse, the PE that they get in school are very sports-based. And if you don’t happen to be somebody who’s into the main sports, then you can go through school and come out the other end and think, Oh, well, that whole movement, exercise thing is not for me.

And I was never particularly sporty, but I’ve always been active. Luckily, I was sent to gymnastics and ballet lessons and did lots of stuff outside of school. But not all kids have that.

I think it’s really nice to be able to introduce children to lots of different ways of moving and to help them discover how it’s a way of self-regulating and feeling better and dealing with emotions. They only learn that by doing it.

So if you can introduce as many different ways of moving as possible at a young age, then hopefully they will be more likely to try more things as they get older and not just shut the whole thing down and assume it’s not for them.

Yeah, that’s exactly what happened to me. I thought that playing sports was the only way to be active, and I confused athletics with being active. And it took me a long time to realize there are actually a lot of things that I enjoy doing with moving my body that are apart from sports. So I think that’s a really important point.

Yeah, and it also doesn’t have to be the same thing every week or three times a week.

I’ve always had something on the go, and at the moment it happens to be Ashtanga yoga, and then I have a dance class, and I have my dog that I like to walk, and I go out bike riding with my friends when I can.

So there’s always some stuff going on and always regular activity, but it’s not like, well, I must do this three times a week and get better at it. It doesn’t have to be about that. It can just be about getting out there, feeling better. And I rarely feel worse after doing something active, whatever it is.

How the body shapes emotions and behavior

Yes, absolutely. You’ve described this idea of a global emotional moment, which is basically the brain’s picture of how you feel right now based on all of your body signals. Tell us about how that works.

Well, I can’t claim to have coined that phrase. So that was a scientist called Bud Craig, who sadly died a few years ago. But he was a real pioneer in the study of interoception, which is the sense of changes, signals, and sensations that originate within our own bodies. So they are fundamental for emotions. Imagine feeling angry without having some kind of tension and pounding in your chest.

So these sensations and changes in them tell us what’s going on in the world, how we should react to it, how things are going for us on the inside. Because as a full animal brain and body, what we want is to be able to stay alive despite changing conditions.

And so what Craig did is he did a lot of tracing of pathways from body to brain and back again. And so he identified there’s one part of the brain on both sides, behind our ears, just deep, called the insula, where the bottom-up information, the signals from our body come up, and information from memory and emotional information gets put together to come up with this sense of how I feel now, which he called the global emotional moment.

And so that basically tells you what’s going on. What do I need to do? Am I safe? Do I have energy? Am I looked after? Am I with supportive friends? How do I feel right now? And so that’s kind of like a foundation really of everything that we think and do and feel from there on in. We need to know how we are to know what we have to do and how to react, and these feelings motivate us to do a certain thing.

So if you’re feeling hungry, you’re motivated to go and find food. If you’re feeling scared, you’re motivated to run away or fight or whatever. So these kinds of internal back and forth, body and brain, which make up our sense of interoception, which is something people haven’t really heard of but is really fundamental to how we think and feel. That informs everything we do, basically.

If a kid walks into the first class of the day and they’re already carrying this stressed-out global emotional moment from home, are there physical things that they could be taught to do in order to shift that, or maybe things that we could try ourselves when we have those moments?

I think one of the most important things to instill in children in a classroom is a sense of safety and support, and that they have help to regulate themselves. Because whatever’s happening on the outside, if they can feel that they are safe and looked after, and they can fail and try and try again in that space.

Then the good thing about these global emotional moments is that they’re not static. You can come in feeling really angry, something’s happened at home, and you’re really frustrated, and you come into work, and everything’s great, or vice versa.

And so one thing we can do, especially for young children, is help them identify what they’re feeling and then teach them skills to self-regulate. Whether that’s through breathing exercises or a get up and wake up, shake up type situation or something, or just to take a moment or distract them by doing something fun or whatever, but trying to change the internal record for them. Because if that doesn’t happen, then they’re going to carry that state forward, and they’re not going to be able to properly settle in and do their best learning.

And I think we can all take a pause for ourselves sometimes and think, Okay, what is happening here? Did I not sleep well? Or am I a little bit hungry, or what’s going on? And then you can, the idea is that, so I talk about interoception and interoceptive awareness, I talk about emotional potty training.

So it’s almost like we’ve all learned to detect sensations that mean we need to go to the bathroom. Then you go and you deal with that situation, and you come back, and you get on with your day. You don’t spend the whole day thinking and going over it and beating yourself up for it.

So the same can be true for our emotional state, and be like, Okay, what’s going on? Just be a little bit curious. Okay, right. Is there anything I can do to help this? Can I do something to change my state or change the situation and then move on? I’m saying it like it’s an easy thing to do. It’s not, but that’s the ideal because these signals are there to tell us something. If we can just sometimes tune in and listen, then maybe we can deal with it and move on.

How movement can shift mood and stress

One of the most interesting things to me personally that you’ve talked about in your research is using our bodies to shift our mental and emotional state.

So rather than trying to change our thoughts so we feel better and thinking our way out of the negative feeling, which can work too, but not always, as another tool, as another strategy, we can try doing something different in our bodies and then observing as the mental and emotional states shift on their own. And this is due to the neural pathways between the adrenal glands that pump out the stress hormones and the part of the brain that controls the core movement.

You say that rather than thinking our way out of stress, we might be able to use our bodies to tell the brain basically to stand down. So what might that look like?

The good thing about the core research, and there’s lots more going on, is that it isn’t just this core-adrenal-brain link, although that is really fascinating research.

The main thing about moving to change your mental state is basically you’re changing those bottom-up signals, which in turn changes how the brain interprets what’s going on in the body. You’re changing the whole story of what’s feeding into that global emotional moment (how you feel right now.)

And the core stuff is fascinating to me because you can’t move in any way without your core being involved, because it’s what keeps your body upright. So even if you’re just getting up and leaning over, you’re tensing your core. So no matter how you prefer to get your movement, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re getting some regular movement in that will maybe help to regulate the stress response.

But you can also do things like, when you’re stressed, that signal is telling you that there’s something, there’s a threat, whether it’s in your head, whether it’s real, your body wants to deal with that. And so exercise can be great because it can almost burn that tension off and reset the signals to a state of okay, I’ve dealt with it, I can calm down now. Or you can choose to calm the whole nervous system down by doing slow breathing.

But either way, what you’re doing is you’re changing the bottom-up signals, which changes the top-down interpretations, which changes the whole conversation to things are a bit more under control than they might have felt five, ten minutes ago.

And the core stuff I think is also interesting when we think about posture because there’s a lot of research showing that when people are upright, that posture is linked to feeling more in control, more positive. Like you’ve got this, whereas slouching gives the impression to other people and also to yourself that you’re defeated.

So just engaging the core and sitting up really does do something to the way we’re thinking about ourselves and what we’re capable of. So it can be quite simple; it doesn’t have to be complicated. But I think it would be useful if we could all think of not just how I feel, Oh yeah, it’s all from my neck up. I need to think differently to feel differently. You can use your body to access a different way of feeling from within.

Movement, creativity, and learning

That’s really powerful, and I’ve not heard a lot of people talk about that, so I’m glad that you mentioned it. What are some other things that you’ve learned about movement in the brain that might be helpful for teachers?

Well, one of the things that I think everyone should know is the link between creativity and relaxed walking, moving forward through space at a fairly relaxed pace. There’s been research, and we know from great thinkers of old that wandering the hills is a great way to think about solving the world’s problems. And we don’t really do that so much anymore, but there’s research.

So, for example, at Stanford University, they did some experiments where people were sent off for a couple of minutes just to walk around the campus. And then they came back and did some standardized creativity tests where you have to come up with some new ideas that’s been shown on the screen, new ways to use familiar objects. And compared to a group of people who weren’t walking, they were just sitting quietly in a room waiting for their turn, they came up with significantly more ideas, I think something like 60% more ideas. And they came up with the ideas faster, and they were more unusual, more creative. And there was a spillover effect of about 20 minutes after the walk.

So, I mean, I don’t have to look after 20, 30 children in a classroom, so it’s easy for me to say this, but if you were going to start to do a creative exercise, could you get the children to go out on a walk? You know, just get in pairs and walk and think, walk and talk, come up with some ideas, come back, and then try and get it all down when you get back. Because if that’s going to be, you have to take the time out to go and do the walk. But what you get, they’ll probably come up with it faster, and it will be better, and they’ll have enjoyed themselves and taken a movement break. So it’s kind of like win, win, win.

So to me, creativity and relaxed movement, especially walking, is a really important one. I did a project in one school, and one of the children said we should have a walking path set up in the school, that we can just go, a thinking path and go and walk around the thinking path. I thought it was brilliant.

The other thing that I think is really interesting is there’s loads of research on synchronized movement and cooperation and working together. So there are experiments in everything from toddlers up to CEOs that if you get them to tap together or drum together, something where they’re moving in synchrony or dancing. This is why we dance in some ways, to bond with each other. If you’ve moved in synchrony with another person afterwards, and then you play a game where you either stab them in the back or you cooperate, people are far more likely to cooperate if they’ve been moving in synchrony beforehand.

That’s even little toddlers who can’t speak to you. You can be bouncing them on your knee. If you do it in time and then you put them down and you drop something, they’re more likely to pick it up and give it back to you if they’ve been moving in synchrony with you than if they haven’t. It’s great. There’s something wired into our physiology that when we’re moving together, and one of the explanations for that is that when we’re moving our own bodies, we get the sense from inside of where our bodies are in space, but we can also see where they are in space.

When somebody’s moving in synchrony with us, the feelings from the inside are the same, but because what we see from the outside is that they’re moving along with us, we start to feel almost like the dividing line between what’s me and what’s you sort of gets a bit fuzzy. And so because we literally feel as one, we care more about each other, and so we’re more likely to help each other.

And I think that’s really important, I think for kids, well, for everybody. But you know, if you want kids to work together in a classroom, maybe get them to do some drumming first. It’s a movement break. It’ll get some energy out, and they’ll cooperate better at the end of it. So I think that’s a really nice thing.

Why physical strength builds confidence

Yeah, that’s really cool. Your research on strength training really stood out to me, too. You said that it improves what psychologists call global self-efficacy, which is basically feeling like you can handle stuff. And when I think about youth anxiety right now, and teachers noticing decreased resilience and stamina in students for pushing through difficult tasks, they tend to give up. Should we be thinking about physical strength as a mental health intervention for kids?

Absolutely. And this research goes back to the 80s. So there was one study that really stood out to me in a group of teenage girls where they increased their physical strength by doing weight training by I think it was 40% over 12 weeks to the point they didn’t necessarily look different on the outside, which I think is important, but they started reporting that they felt more capable in difficult conversations and they felt they could stand up for themselves better. They felt better in themselves, which is important. I think in this society, you need to have that inner confidence.

And the fact that you don’t need to have bulging muscles for this to work, it truly is an inside job. And the idea, this is interoceptive signals again. So these signals from your muscles and bones are telling your brain on the down low, unconsciously, Yeah, you’ve got this, it’s fine. You don’t need to be so much on the lookout for danger because whatever happens, you’re more likely to be able to handle it. And so there’s quite worrying statistics about children’s physical strength declining. So yeah, for sure, we should be working on the kids’ strength.

It doesn’t have to be weightlifting. Again, it can be anything. It can be teach them parkour, you can teach them jiu-jitsu, whatever, dance, yoga, it doesn’t matter. Whatever gets them going. Or just get more movement into their day, and that will build the strength up without them even noticing. So I think that’s really something that we’re missing out on in modern society.

What schools get wrong about movement

If you could change one thing about how we structure our school days based on everything that you’ve learned in your research, what would you change?

I think more movement, more incidental movement. And also, I think in the early years education, it happens a lot because 4, 5, 6-year-olds need to be moving free-flow around the classroom. But it starts to peter out quite early, at least it does in the UK from what I gather, and I think it’s the same in the US. And because as I say, we have this idea that it’s either health, fitness, sport, which is a nice to have, or it’s academic success. And what we’re missing is that these two things are connected.

And so if you can get them moving more throughout the day and also making a real effort to put break times, more recess time, more sports clubs and funding and everything, throw everything at it, get them moving as much as possible, then you can boost their confidence, reduce anxiety, improve cognitive skills, including focus, ability to focus, and that altogether will increase their achievement. So we don’t have to choose between kids who are smart and kids who are healthy, because these two things are very much connected.

How you–and your students–can use movement to increase work quality, focus, and creativity

Do kids need structured movement to benefit?

I have a question about recess. Teachers, obviously, and anyone who understands children, have been pushing for more recess even as we’ve seen recess getting taken out of the classroom. I am a huge believer in unstructured time for kids, that everything can’t be this orchestrated adult-led group activity. Kids need to be playing on their own.

One thing that teachers observe is when we give the kids recess, some of them do run around, but some of them just sort of stand there or talk to each other and don’t really get a lot of movement in. Are there still benefits to that? Do we need to encourage kids to use recess in a certain way for them to really get the full advantage of it?

It’s tricky, isn’t it, because you don’t want to go into those groups of children who are huddling around having conversations and say, right, run around, drop and give me 20. You don’t want to be shouting at them.

But I think if we managed to get more into the school day, if we have more movement breaks, if we had different ways of moving, you might find that kids start spontaneously doing more in their breaks. So when we had the last stage of our little experiment in the local school, these were year six children. So they’re 10, 11, they’re just about to go up to senior school. So they’re a bit cool, the top of the school.

But even they, when they’d had some of these sessions, when they’d learned things like volleyball that they’d never come across, the teacher said, “Oh, we saw them at break time, they were all going over and practicing their volleyball skills. They found a ball, and they were practicing”. So just by introducing this stuff and making it fun, then you don’t need to say, “Oi, you kids”, because the last thing a child wants, I remember being a child and sitting around watching Saturday morning TV, and my dad coming in saying, “Oi, get up, it’s a lovely day, get outside”. I’d be like, it has to come from them.

And so, but we can show them, we can structure it into their day, and then hopefully they’ll take it and run with it. It might be the girls are like, “Oh, that dance thing we did in class, let’s make up a routine”. It could be anything. That’s what I would love to see happening.

“You’re teaching whole humans.”

That’s great. I want to close out the show with a takeaway truth, something for people to remember in the week ahead. What’s something that you wish every teacher understood about the relationship between our brains and our bodies?

Well, I think the most important thing is the connection. We don’t have the language for it, really, because no matter how you talk about body-brain connections, it sounds like you’re talking about two separate things.

And it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of blood vessels, there are a lot of nerves. I could show you a really detailed diagram showing all the body-brain connections back and forth all the time. And these are always talking in lots of directions. There’s more going on in the body, and the body is smarter than we think.

And so I think if people can just keep in mind that they’re not teaching brains, they’re teaching whole people. And that would really help, I think, to get away from this idea of we just must cram stuff into these brains. Because you’re not cramming stuff into brains, you’re trying to develop whole humans.

And I think it’s one of those things, it sounds so obvious when someone points it out, and people will probably be saying, Well, I do that already. Of course, I don’t just teach brains. But it’s so drilled into us from an early age that everything mental is from the neck up that we forget to challenge it sometimes.