A perfect example of the kind of unmitigated rubbish spouted by 'brain-friendly' educators, who fail to acknowledge the sheer complexity of the brain, and the need for multiple modules of the brain to be employed in a simple task such as discerning differences in a picture.
Left / Right Brain bollocks.
A study shows fairly conclusively that the idea one side of our brain is more dominant than the other - and by extension, that this dictates what kind of person you are - is little more than a myth.
I am a girl whose mushy head is "hardwired" for girly things.
neuroscience is actually a mass of disciplines: neurology, physiology, psychology, molecular biology and genetics, all of them ramped up by new ways of imaging the brain
The interaction between the hemispheres is what counts, but this is less marketable stuff.
All of them confirm what we already know, not what we could know.
brain scans are still blunt intruments
very clever doctors were more than happy to talk about what they did not know about the brain.
quasi-religious status
"neurosexism"
The truth is our brains are much more similar than they are different. That's not a headline you will ever read, is it? "Men and women: much the same!"
Podcast on the Bilingual Brain - children learning two languages, mapping the linguistic brain, code switching, benefits of bilingualism to the cognitive reserve
Further study revealed that the FOXP2 gene is relevant to multiple mental abilities and is not strictly a language gene at all.
The same gene that regulated language so strongly also regulated other mental faculties, so its very existence appeared to contradict rather than strengthen the idea that language commands its own territory separate from other areas of the brain.
the language-as-island idea is also inconsistent with the way evolution typically works. “What I don’t like about the ‘module’ is the idea that it evolved from scratch somehow. In my view, it’s more that existing neural circuits have been adapted for language and speech.
language relies on a surprisingly broad neural support system
-month-old babies show activation in a number of different brain regions when they hear speech, inclu
ding in the cerebellum, which is important for coordinating motor movements
The problem with ‘gene for x’ or ‘grammar module y’ is they ignore how something that is the property of an individual is linked to something that is the property of a community
language is a distributed object
across the human brain and across generations of people
A personal story of plasticity. Barbara Arrowsmith Young had severe learning disabilities but trained herself out of them when she realised that the brain can and does change.
the brain sees with its ears and touch, and hears with its eyes.
as primates, we are predominantly processors of visual information.
Eating does not engage just taste, but smell, tactile (inside the mouth), auditory and visual sensations
Learning a language, and the practice of it, requires the coordinated use of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic modalities, in addition to memory, emotion, will, thinking and imagination
There is indeed such a neural concourse, in the parieto-temporo-occipital ‘association’ cortex in each cerebral hemisphere
Fortunately, many teachers have not been taken in. Ironically, VAK has become, in the hands of practitioners, a recipe for a mixed-modality pedagogy where lessons have explicit presentations of material in V, A and K modes. Teachers quickly observed that their pupils' so-called learning styles were not stable, that the expressions of V-, A- and K-ness varied with the demands of the lessons, as they should
extrapolations from the lab to the classroom need to be made with considerable caution
The coloured blobs on brain maps representing areas of significant activation (so-called ‘lighting up’) are like the peaks of sub-oceanic mountains which rise above sea level
considerable complexity.
(fMRI),
the images are the end-result of many years' work on understanding the quantum mechanics of nuclear magnetic resonance phenomena, the development of the engineering of superconducting magnets, the application of inverse fast Fourier transforms to large data sets and the refinement of high-speed computing hardware and software to analyse large data sets across multiple parameters.
these neural contributions to intelligence are necessary for all school subjects, and all other aspects of cognition
no individual modules in the brain which correspond directly to the school curriculum
Neuromyths typically ignore such interconnectivity in their pursuit of simplicity