Weekly articles related to brain-based learning and learning styles, problem-solving and creativity, kids, families, and parenting, gifted and visual learners, dyslexia, attention deficit disorders, autism, and more.
"When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do." - Walt Disney
From Psychology Today, "Decades before Evan Schaeffer started practicing law, he developed an interest so all-consuming it verged on obsession: snakes. By the time he entered the fourth grade, he had so many reptile books that they took up an entire shelf, and he counted the gloves, golf putter and pillowcase he used for snake-hunting among his most prized possessions.
The snake fascination gradually faded, but Schaeffer's determination to learn as much as he could about everything that interested him remained. "I never have to try to have hobbies—they just seem to find me," he says."
Sound like anyone that you know?Put Cal Tech students in a scanner reading trivia questions and you might learn a thing or two about curiosity. Curiosity is its own reward (caudate) and it does seem to boost memory and learning (parahippocampus). The inferior frontal gyrus' role may involve a little bit of both (reward and memory and learning) as well as something else like risk.
Jonah Lehrer adds this additional interesting reflection: "the scientists found is that curiosity obeys an inverted U-shaped curve, so that we’re most curious when we know a little about a subject (our curiosity has been piqued) but not too much (we’re still uncertain about the answer). This supports the information gap theory of curiosity, which was first developed by George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon in the early 90s. According to Loewenstein, curiosity is rather simple: It comes when we feel a gap “between what we know and what we want to know”. This gap has emotional consequences: it feels like a mental itch, a mosquito bite on the brain. We seek out new knowledge because we that’s how we scratch the itch."
Maybe this curiosity drive should be what we trying harder to harness? If the Harvard / MIT -Light Bulb research applies, it may not be that hard to find out where knowledge stops. At least when it comes to science, most people's knowledge seems to be skin-deep. Curiosity and the Brain - fMRI
There's a viral video channel on Youtube that beautifully illustrates the writing problems of visual thinkers. Youtube maven Tobuscus has made literal versions of video game and movie trailers.
What looks good in pictures, can really look pretty silly in print (see Assassin's Creed or Harry Potter trailers below).
But these problems are exactly the problems that visual thinkers struggle with as they try to put vivid pictures and sensory impression into words. At some level of understanding there is overlap, but there are great differences as well. Until these very visual thinkers learn words and phrases that evoke vivid sensory imagery, they will be terribly frustrated by what they can put down on paper.
Einstein's reflections on his nonverbal way of thinking are well known ("The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanisms of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily combined.") As are many others like Nikola Tesla ("He was conscious of certain phenomena before his eyes which other people could not see. He envisioned objects and hypothetical situations and day dreams with such reality and clarity that he was uncertain whether they did, or did not, exist. When these visions became so real, he confided his dilemma to his sister, who tried to help him distinguish the real from the imaginative."- Lightning in His Hand [Hunt and Draper]).
This imagery might seem to be wonderful to have and as a general rule, many of us will lose it as we become adults, but like many differences, the gift is not without its burdens - and the school years, one of the greatest burdens for strong visual thinkers is that what they say may seem overly simplistic and jumbled.
At left, a study that shows that the meanings of words and pictures seem to converge onto a similar language areas in the brain, but also there are areas that remain distinct.
The Visual-Verbal Divide is much more common than educators seem to think. It may be we see this difficult especially often because of our interest in dyslexia; we can't tell you how many times that wonderfully bright visual thinkers are thought to be somewhat simpletons because their words convey so little of the richness of their understanding and experience.
A Few Quick Tips for Helping Visual Thinkers with Writing:
1. Check out Gerald Grow's article.
2. Elaborate - Recognize that what you frequently need to do is help with elaboration. What do you see? What is the scene? Are there feelings or sensory details that you can put into words (thesaurus!)
3. Audience - Remember your audience - what haven't you told them? Because visual thinkers may be so into a story, they may forget that there's an audience that is relying only on what was said. Often if you read through a young visual thinkers skimpy writing sample, you can point to every sentence and say, "What do you mean by this word? What do you mean by that word? etc."
4. Mindmap, then Sequence. Because visual thinkers may be in their story, they aren't thinking about a conventional introduction, middle, and end. Instead they may write like a web, relating characters and events, but not forming a logical narrative.
5. Visual Modes of Expression and Dialogue Use visual modes of expression like film, drawing, and diagramming. For storytelling, visual thinkers who are 'in' a story may be able to express themselves more naturally in first-person dialogue than third-person narration.
6. Be Patient Young visual thinkers are classic late bloomers. Yes, there are ways to help, but it's also a good idea to understand big picture view of their growth and development
From the Bunge Lab, computer and non-computer-based game training using 'smart' commercially available games resulted in dramatic improvements in reasoning and processing speed scores (or both) as measured on the TONI-3 (Test of Non Verbal Intelligence) or WISC-IV Coding.
Pretty cool. Just in time for Christmas. Thanks, Bunge lab.
Examples of Spatial Reasoning games - Rush Hour, Set. Examples of Speed games, Monkey Ball and Mario Kart. The kids were ages 7-10 years and the kids played about one hour twice a week for 8 weeks. During game time, they rotated between computer games, board games, and Nintendo DS. Testing took place at an economically-disadvantage school with low test scores.
It is true that many kids we see with very slow processing speeds don't like video games. But maybe these are just the ones to encourage to play...
