Martha Beck Quotes

I tested in the top percentile for IQ, but I couldn't tie my shoes or really ride a bike without training wheels until I was almost 7.

The world we live in is not purely visual. For me it's totally poly-sensorial so the tactile, sensual aspect of living in the work that I do is brought to the fore.

I look at it somewhat as a way - when you learn juggling, what you learn is how to feel with your eyes and see with your hands because you're not looking at your hands, you're looking at where the balls are, or you're looking at the audience.

But through experience I learned to control my body and locate the ball.

Practice puts brains in your muscles.

The body is something absolutely miraculous. It's amazing, the five senses.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

I think sighted people let their eyes cheat them out of certain things. People who can see don't have a great sense of smell because they don't use it.

I'm a visual learner, so with hand-eye coordination, I was a natural.

I have a very good sense of my body and where it's at. Although I don't feel the ground in the same way that somebody else would, I'm very aware... I can feel pressure, and I know exactly where my toes are and exactly where my heel is.

Physical development fosters learning.

Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes through his movements.

Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

What will a child learn sooner than a song?

If we allow our one-and-a-half year old to "help" us fold laundry he will learn something about buttons, zippers, snaps, where things go, the physical properties of cloth, what happens when you drop it, how easy or hard it is to carry compared with everything else he has ever carried, what clean clothes smell like, how a big towel can turn into a small bundle, how the small bundle you just folded can turn into a big towel again, plus any songs we care to sing or stories or related or unrelated facts we care to pass on.

When mental development is under discussion, there are many who say, 'How does movement come into it? We are talking about the mind.' And when we think of intellectual activity, we always imagine people sitting still, motionless. But mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it. It is vital that educational theory and practice should be informed by that idea.

First the education of the senses, then the education of the intellect.

The development of the mind comes through movement

Mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it. It is vital that educational theory and practice should be informed by that idea.

Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas.

If I, deaf, blind, find life rich and interesting, how much more can you gain by the use of your five senses!

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

The water crumbles on it's way down as my hands and feet push me forward. The world is lightening, taking shape, and turning to color. It feels like it's being painted around me.

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.

Our real reality is beyond the five senses.