Children's Brains are Much Smarter Than Adults'.
According to experts, each side of the brain is related to certain cognitive aspects . For example, in a very general division, the left hemisphere dominates everything that has to do with language and the right hemisphere is directly related to emotions . From this distribution of tasks comes the popular belief that the right hemisphere is related to creativity while the left is related to rigorous analysis . In each person one or the other predominates and, however, in babies and children it does not work like that .
How does the brain of babies and children work?
Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have conducted a new study published in the journal PNAS entitled ' The Neural Basis of Language Development: Changes in Lateralization with Age '. Research has revealed that infants and young children use both hemispheres of the brain each time they carry out a task , as opposed to what adults do: concentrating the task in a single hemisphere.
Through external stimuli, the brain of adults receives large amounts of information of all kinds and to process it, they divert it to one of the two hemispheres , although they later work on it in an interconnected way. Every time they perform a task , one of the two hemispheres takes it on and focuses on it. In contrast, when babies and children receive information from outside, there is no distribution and both areas of the brain are activated .
The research focused on analyzing the differences between the brain activity of healthy children between 4 and 13 years old and that of healthy adults between 18 and 29 years old. To do this, the experts subjected the volunteers to several comprehension tests. Among them, a syntactic analysis of sentences.
The results showed that the brain of the first group, the little ones, activated the language on the left side but also the right side to understand the meaning of the sentences . However, in adults, only the right hemisphere was activated when they read emotionally charged sentences aloud .
Experts deduce that this finding explains why children recover from neural damage much earlier and better than adults . Elissa Newport , director of the Center for Plasticity and Recovery of the Brain and which collaborates with Georgetown University, assures that it is great news "for children who experience neuronal injuries" and explains that in the event of some type of failure, one hemisphere compensates to the other : "For example, if the left hemisphere is damaged by a perinatal stroke , one that occurs just after birth, a child will learn language using the right hemisphere, and a child born with cerebral palsy that damages only one hemispherecan develop the necessary cognitive abilities in the other hemisphere ."
Best CBSE Schools in Coimbatore
The end of the neuromyth
This discovery also serves to banish a false myth in teaching that has to do with the involvement of the left and right hemisphere in children's tasks. The division of tasks in the hemispheres has always been used to explain that there are children who are more suitable in some classroom tasks or specific areas of learning than in others . However, as we have seen with this study, it does not work like that. Educational Neuroscience in London knows this and has focused education on global brain learning . This means that in the daily exercises of boys and girls, they seek a balance in the processing to develop both hemispheres by mixing analytical and creative aspects in the same task.
These teaching methods aim to end the frustration of students who see themselves as less valid in some tasks and seek to provide them with new opportunities to face learning through new ways.
Comments
Post a Comment