Left brained, right brained learners? | Integrated Learning Therapy

In recent years, I’ve had parents phoning me with the news that they have a child who has had an assessment to find out their learning style. They usually go on to say that results showed their child to be a ‘right-brained’ learner and that they need help in convincing schools to change the curriculum. Seems that right-brained learners struggle to cope with a largely left-brained approach to schooling. What’s going on? Is there really a battle going on in children’s heads as the two brain hemispheres fight for supremacy? Are children really operating with only half a brain? Can their learning, future career and general future well-being in their careers be predicted on the basis of body and brain dominance?

It’s a moot question but despite hearing all about these evaluations and the significance of results, only two facts remain clear. Children, as with all humans, are whole-brained learners and the brain hemispheres prefer cooperating rather than conflicting with each other.

The terms ‘right brain’ and ‘left brain’ are used to oversimplify what is actually a highly complex research field. Referring to the two hemispheres as separate brains with specialized areas of functioning is more a metaphor than a fact. We would serve children better by improving our understanding of how we can sensibly apply brain research to help children use both hemispheres as an efficient and flexible system for learning and performing. To put this more simply: if a particular hemisphere is not supporting the child adequately and relies on the opposite half to do most of the learning work, the question to be asked is why? What is going on in the ‘weaker’ half and how can we encourage it to step up to the mark and do what it is supposed to do?

Distinct teammates

A view from the top of the brain will show two distinct halves – the cerebral hemispheres. These consist of two sets of cortical lobes and subcortical (lower level) structures that need to work together for all kinds of mental activities.

Joining the two hemispheres is a thick band of fibres, called the corpus callosum which conveys a constant stream of messages between the halves, allowing for rapid communication and sharing of specialisations. Brains strive for normalcy. Even in cases of extreme surgery, where one hemisphere is completely removed, the remaining hemisphere will try to take over the functions of the missing half – often with astounding success.

In an intact brain, any activity automatically engages both hemispheres. The fact is that because we are hard-wired to engage both hemispheres, it would be impossible to design a curriculum for any one side. And we wouldn’t want to. Carl Sagan emphasized this when he wrote that the corpus callosum was the ‘path to the future’ because only dynamic cooperation between the hemispheres can achieve mankind’s highest objectives.

Of course there are individual variations in the way the different areas function so we show our own personal balance of abilities and learning strategies. One child might be excellent at maths and show excellent comprehension but be careless with written work, struggles to read aloud, can’t remember multiplication tables and forgets what homework has been given. Some signs of ‘right brained’ functioning. His friend may read well and recall details of a story but misses its point; he can compute well in maths but struggles with ‘story sums’ and using graphs, charts and maps. He shows more left brained modes of handling information.

These are the signs of different hemispheric styles and there are reasons for developing particular styles, including genetic as well as environmental aspects. However, it’s important to know that the corpus callosum holds a key to brain efficiency by being able to activate and suppress hemispheric control. For example, in reading, areas in both brains are used, but if the language centres of the left hemisphere aren’t dominant, accuracy, fluency and comprehension may suffer.

We don’t change the curriculum. We retrain the brain. In the case of difficulties with reading accuracy and comprehension mentioned above, we need to help the left hemisphere come into play and enable correct interpretation and understanding of written words.

Interhemispheric integration, being the term used for connectivity between the hemispheres, begins at a young age. One of the movements helping to build the connecting bridge between the two brain is crawling – a good reason for encouraging infants to crawl for an extended time. But there are other ways of helping as well.

Parents who want to help their children build the bridge between the two brains can follow three major guidelines:

Encourage a wide variety of activities to engage all parts of the brain
Let the child’s interest direct learning. Connections develop in response to demands from the child’s brain, not from an adult’s.
Don’t expect full hemispheric integration until after puberty.

Here are some suggestions for building bridges between the hemispheres:

Games that combine visual and verbal clues (e.g. Simon Says)
Having children make a movie in their heads as you read a story
Have children draw the story you have read to them
Describing actions with words
Verbalising discoveries (‘How did you know that?” “What clues did you use?”)
Describing problem-solving experiences (‘Tell me how you did that puzzle’)
Memorising maths facts to music (e.g. singing multiplication tables)
Spelling words backwards; listening to number sequences and repeating them backwards
Keeping the score of a game in their heads
Cooking by following recipes
Writing up science experiments
Watching TV then retelling the story in sequence
Building models from directions
Reading music

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.