How the Brain Thinks and Learns

-
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.

Related image

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sensory Motor Pathway

-
Image
The sensory motor pathway is the trajectory a sensory takes from being inflicted on the body to its' processing in the brain and body. Each of the five senses is introduced to the body in a different way: sight for the eyes, smell for the nose, taste for the tongue, touch for any appendages, and hearing for the ears. One the sense is detected by the body, how it travels through is differently. For example, according the Janet Nay Zadina book Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain (2014), "The eyes are the conduit for visual information sent to the thalamus, the relay station. The thalamus evaluates the information. If it is recognized as visual stimuli, it is sent to the visual cortex in the back of the brain for further processing." (pp. 36) Like vision, the other senses follow a similar path. Everything is relayed at the thalamus to determine what type of stimuli it is. If you look at the visual below, you will see that the thalamus is located at the center of all of th...
Read more

The Emotion Pathway

-
Image
Like other information processed by the body, emotions follow the same trajectory. All of the regions of the brain that are associated with emotions include: thalamus, hypothalamus, cingulate gyrus, amygdala, hippocampus, and basal ganglia. The frontal lobe is involved, but it only controls the emotion and evaluates potential threats made to the person. As educators, it is our job to make sure students have a healthy emotional standing because it heavily affects their learning. Emotion can affect memory and attention, two things heavily relied upon in education. Zadina's Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain has a chapter that evaluates the effects on emotion on learning. Zadina (2014) states, "Emotion can have positive or negative effects on learning. The effect we most often think about in regard to learning is that strong negative emotions impair thinking and, therefore, learning in general." (pp. 66) Educators need to remind themselves to model positive emotion and i...
Read more