How the Brain Thinks and Learns

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The brain is a very remarkable organ. The way it gathers and processes information is complex, to say the least. There are four regions of the brain that are responsible for gathering and interpreting information: frontal lobe, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, and occipital lobe. Each lobe is responsible for a different function, but they have to work together. Aside from the regions or parts of the brain, the brain has a specific process that occurs each time someone is learning. Neural synapses run the brain, and the more learning that occurs means there are numerous synapses occurring in the brain. Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain, written by Janet Nay Zadina (2014), has a chapter devoted to how the brain thinks and learns. Zadina's remarks about synapses are that they are "...the firing of chemicals and communication between neurons [which] enables thinking to take place." (pp. 16). Teachers' responsibilities should be to find what makes each individual student learn the best, using a combination of how the lobes process information and what makes the students neural synapses occur more, which could occur from something as simple as a student reading a book they like.

Resources:

Zadina, J. N. (2014) How the brain thinks and learns. In Multiple pathways to the student brain (pp. 9-33). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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