Nov 2, 2026 · 12 min · 12 segments
Does swinging a lightsaber help us learn? New research from Florida Atlantic University and Brown University found that movement dramatically helps with certain kinds of complex learning. The research…
Emily KwongHost
Ari DanielGuest
Juana SummersGuest
Please tell me that there's some sort of like scientist lightsaber battle in a lab somewhere.
Okay, so the idea for this study, published in the journal Science Advances, came from Luke Rosedahl, now based at Florida Atlantic University.
During the COVID lockdown, Luke was playing a lot of virtual reality video games.
Oh, those are the ones where players put on a headset that totally covers their eyes, and then they're plunged into this, like, 3D environment, right? Yeah.
And at the time, Luke was studying the striatum, a region of the brain that controls both motor movement and decision-making.
Could big movement help people figure out how to sort things, what's known as category learning?
They were then showed striped objects, and the stripes were a different angle and thickness.
And as the game went along, participants learned how to categorize the stripes, how to sort them into one bucket or another.
And while some participants pressed buttons to learn, others did much bigger motions like swinging a lightsaber to hit the stripes or punching a response box in front of them.
With the larger movements like punching, people learned somewhere between four and six times faster, which is just absolutely incredible.
That is a huge difference, but this was just for sorting stripes in a lab, right? I mean, as we all can attest, the real world is a lot more complicated.
Please tell me that there's some sort of like scientist lightsaber battle in a lab somewhere.
Okay, so the idea for this study, published in the journal Science Advances, came from Luke Rosedahl, now based at Florida Atlantic University.
During the COVID lockdown, Luke was playing a lot of virtual reality video games.
Oh, those are the ones where players put on a headset that totally covers their eyes, and then they're plunged into this, like, 3D environment, right? Yeah.
And at the time, Luke was studying the striatum, a region of the brain that controls both motor movement and decision-making.
Could big movement help people figure out how to sort things, what's known as category learning?
They were then showed striped objects, and the stripes were a different angle and thickness.
And as the game went along, participants learned how to categorize the stripes, how to sort them into one bucket or another.
And while some participants pressed buttons to learn, others did much bigger motions like swinging a lightsaber to hit the stripes or punching a response box in front of them.
With the larger movements like punching, people learned somewhere between four and six times faster, which is just absolutely incredible.
That is a huge difference, but this was just for sorting stripes in a lab, right? I mean, as we all can attest, the real world is a lot more complicated.
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