This is Your Brain on Learning

Ever wonder how our brains work? The brain is such an amazing thing that controls everything in our bodies. We all learn in the way our brains "think." We have three well known learning styles, Auditory, Visual-Spatial, and Kinesthetic.

Auditory: You learn by listening. You process information best by hearing and reading language.

Visual-Spatial: You learn by seeing. You process information best if you can "see" the information in a 3Dimensional way.

Kinesthetic: You learn by feeling. You process information best if you can "feel" the information, not just with the touch of your hands, but also with the emotional aspect.

So much is known about these learning styles and our educational facilities are learning to "differentiate" their teaching styles to support these learning styles. Truth is, we all experience these different learning styles, but one is typically our dominate learning style. What I'm discovering though is that there seems to be another learning style that has not been adapted to yet. I've been trying to define this new learning style and I'm finding some interesting things. From here on out I will term this learning style as "Core of the Brain" or "COB" learners.

I see you leaning closer to the monitor now and you're eager to figure out just what the heck I'm talking about. Let me just start by sharing a little of my own story:

Many, many years ago, my son and I began working with a Neuro-Linguist Programmer Practitioner or NLP Practitioner. In our individual sessions she asked us, "Point to where your mental picture is." Ironically, both my son and I shared the same location for our mental picture and it was in a place she'd not encountered yet... we probably fell into the 6% category. What she shared with me was the beginning of an interesting journey. She said that most of the population has their mental picture in front of them, somewhere between their forehead and about an arms length away. Through my own informal research I found that this was true, in addition, I began to connect together learning styles and the location of our mental picture.

Auditory Learners: Have their mental pictures in front of their forehead and their mental pictures are stationary or look like a photo/poster. The picture is 2D.

Visual-Spatial Learners: Have their mental pictures in front of their forehead and the mental picture is 3D. They have the ability to rotate their picture and see the depth of objects within the picture. They don't need to move their bodies to "see" what's on the other side of the object.

Kinesthetic Learners: Those that are kinesthetic would always respond by saying, "The picture is all the way around me." These individuals seem to be "in" their picture to experience it and feel it. These individuals also seem to have a hard time jumping from picture to picture as they need to let go of the FEELING they have with the picture.

You'd think that would be all you needed to know about learning styles, yes? There are some, perhaps the 6 percenters, that see and think differently. Their mental picture is in the Core of the Brain. They respond by saying, "My mental picture doesn't project out of my brain, it's way in there, in the middle of my brain." COB learners they are.

What kind of learning style does COB have? It's interesting. COB learners seem to be strong visionaries. Interestingly, language seems to hinder their learning. They have a combination of visual-spatial and kinesthetic styles, but they also have other strengths. We will explore the COB learning style in depth in another post.