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| Meet your
amazing brain |
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The two sides of your
brain
Look at an electronic scan of your brain and you'll see
how parts of it process different types of information. We take in information through our
five major senses: by what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste.
In general terms the left-hand side of your
brain plays a major part in processing logic, words, mathematics and sequence - the
so-called academic parts of learning.
The right-hand side of the brain deals with
rhythm, rhyme, music, pictures and day-dreaming - the so-called creative activities.
The split is not, however, as simple as that. Both
sides of the brain are linked by the corpus callosum. This is a highly complex switching
system with its 300 million active neurons. It is constantly balancing the incoming
messages, and linking together the abstract, holistic picture with the concrete, logical
messages.
British businessman and researcher Colin Rose, author
of Accelerated Learning and developer of several rapid-learning foreign language
courses, gives a simple example of how different aspects of the brain can work together in
an integrated way. "If you're listening to a song, the left brain would be processing
the words and the right brain would be processing the music. So it's no accident that we
learn the words of popular songs very easily. You don't have to make any effort to do
that. You learn very quickly because the left brain and the right brain are both involved
- and so is the emotional center of the brain in the limbic system."10
The emotional center of your brain is also very closely
connected with your long-term memory storage system. That's why we all remember easiest
any information with a high emotional content. Almost anyone can remember his or her first
major sexual experience. Millions of people can also recall precisely where they were when
they heard the news of the death of President John F. Kennedy or Princess Diana. Music and
the words to songs trigger deep memories - if the music is associated with personal
elation or pleasurable experiences. Discovering how the brain processes such information
is a vital key to more effective learning.
Leading brain researcher Professor Marian Diamond11
took a day out at the University of California at Berkeley to demonstrate precisely how
the brain works; and how it's much more complex than any simple left-side-right-side
explanation. Slicing into a human brain delivered from a nearby morgue, she starts with
the stem or base. "This little area here
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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