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| Meet your
amazing brain |
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But if you grew up in a traditional
Polynesian, Melanesian or Micronesian culture in the Pacific, without either a picture or
a "sequential" written language, then your main communication would be through
sound alone - reinforced through rhyme, rhythm, song and dance, and of course by your
holistic sense of sight.
Researchers will now tell you that there are at least
three main learning-style preferences:
1. Haptic learners, from a Greek word meaning
"moving along": people who learn best when they are involved, moving,
experiencing and experimenting; often called kinesthetic-tactile learners.
2. Visual learners, who learn best when they can see
pictures of what they are studying, with a smaller percentage who are
"print-oriented" and can learn mainly by reading.
3. Auditory learners, who learn best through sound:
through music and talk.
Lynn O'Brien, Director of Specific Diagnostic Studies
Inc., of Rockville, Maryland, has found most elementary and high school students learn
best when they are involved and moving, while most adults have a visual preference.14
But most of us combine all three styles in different ways, as we explore later. We all
learn best and fastest when we link together many of our brain's great abilities. Of those
attributes, three are extremely important for learning:
1: How you store and retrieve information - quickly,
thoroughly and efficiently.
2: How you can use it to solve problems.
3: How you can use it to create new ideas.
For the first two, you use the brain's unique ability
to recognize pat-terns and associations. For the third, we learn how to break the
patterns - how to recombine information in a new way.
How your brain stores information
As a patterning device, the brain almost certainly has
no equal. It is capable of storing virtually every major piece of data it takes in.
Learn to identify and recognize a dog, for instance,
and your brain sets up a storage file for dogs. Every other type of dog you learn to
recognize is stored in a similar patterning system. And the same with birds,
horses, cars, jokes or any other subject. Many scientists now believe we store
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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