The Learning Revolution - Chapter 6


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Book Summary
Contents Page
Learning Revolution Library
Skim-read the book
Remember the Main Points
Check your Thinking Style
Count to 10 in Japanese
Think up Great New Ideas
Personal Learning Styles
Check your Fog Index

Preview the CD-ROM

Right from the start	225

UNLIMITED Learning - the new learning revolution and the seven keys to unlock it.

  It is the same with hearing. Your inner ear is no bigger than a small nut, but it contains as many circuits as the telephone system of many cities. The ear also contains another tiny vital structure called a cochlea. It looks like a snail shell and works like a piano keyboard. But a piano has only 88 keys, while the cochlea has 20,000 hairlike sensory cells which pick up sound impulses and transmit them to the brain.
  The whole intricate hearing mechanism is obviously vital for learning language. As with sight, the basic language pathways are also laid down in the first few years of life. The full English language, for example, has only around 40 different sounds - and all the world's main languages about 70. Hear all those sounds clearly in the vital first few years of life, learn to pronounce and use them, and you'll be able to pronounce other languages much better if you learn them later in life.
  Most healthy children in a well-rounded environment also learn to speak fluently at least the 2,000 basic words of their language in the first four years of life. But if they can't hear, they'll find it much more difficult to speak fluently. And if they can't hear or speak, they'll have difficulty learning. Several surveys in New Zealand, for instance, found 20 percent of preschool children with hearing problems in one ear, and ten percent with severe hearing loss in both.10
  That's just one more reason that the most effective early childhood development programs include regular hearing and sight checks, along with major attention to nutrition and parent education.
  We are indeed what we eat - and what our mothers ate. We are also very much the result of what we do and what we think. And just as the right nutrition and exercise can provide the nourishment for a young brain's "nerve highways" and developing dendrite branches, so the right activity, involving all five senses, can produce more dendritic connections. All future learning will be based on those connections - and the early nourishment that went into their development.
  All the best educational programs around the world combine elements that stimulate both a child's physical and mental development - for in truth there is no split between the two.
  We are all a combination of what we eat, think and do. And, after good care in the nine months before birth, the best programs concentrate next on the most vital years of life: from birth to ten.


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Contents Page Preface To Chapter 7