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Columnists: Sangeetha Sridhar| Dr.Rajan Philips| Hasan Kamoonpuri | Prof.C.F.Joseph
Synopsis. Episode 1. Hi! Friends, You know and I know that learning new things is one of the most rewarding experiences in life. In fact mastery of new materials and skills is one of the greatest sources of pleasure for most normal human beings. All of us are born with different degrees of intelligence and innate ability to learn. Aren’t we amazed at seeing a young child copying its parents actions and learning their language with relative ease. We use our senses to take in stimuli and our brain helps us to process that information by receiving, sorting, storing and retrieving when required. We use our intelligence to learn. Learning however is much more than just getting grips with a language or learning a string of history dates for an examination. It really affects the quality of our very existence and it continues thorough out our lives. There is no point at which we stop learning new skills or assimilating new information to continue to live a worthwhile life. Research shows that those who have the habit of life-long learning remain alert, attentive and healthy. The lose of memory for most life-long learners is minimal even in old age. It seems that those who are able to keep their brain active with constant learning and upgrading maintain much better physical health and continue to be useful the society even in the fag end of their lives. Our abilities to learn do not depend so much on how intelligent we are, rather more importantly on our willingness to absorb new things and our eagerness to take on challenges and set ourselves higher goals in life. Everyone learns in a style of his or her own. Whichever our learning style we will benefit by understanding our personal style and making the best of our potentials. It is never too late to start making the best of ourselves. With the new discoveries now available about the way our brains function, we can use our natural aptitudes and techniques to increase our learning power and hone our skills to maximize our potentials. When it comes to predicting our ability to learn new facts and skills, arts, crafts or sports, a traditional IQ test is of only very limited use. It will give us a numerical ranking for a certain type of intelligence--- as defined by a particular social and educational system--- but it won’t tell much about the way our brain functions, the special skills we have or the ways in which we learn best. The role of these series of episodes is to provide information to help us understand how our brains function in reality. It will help us become more aware of the way our particular brain works and teach us learning approaches and living methods that are tailor-made to suit our brains that we can effectively use it to learn anything we choose and wish to learn and live a more fruitful life. First we need to understand the overall picture of the complex character of the human brain. An intricate web of interconnections, the brain processes information in two main different ways. As a rough guide, the left side of the brain operates logically and rationally and the right side more intuitively and imaginatively. Everyone uses both sides of the brain, but most people prefer one side over the other. Those who are left-brain dominated have well developed analytical powers and they often are the mathematicians and linguists of the world. Right-brainers are very good at visualizing concepts and they are often the artists and engineers. Our ability to learn improves when you are able to use the whole brain combining the abilities of both sides of the brain. Henry Matisse, a great artist once said “ when I eat a tomato, I look at it differently, but when I paint a tomato, I see it differently.” He was clearly referring to the functions of the two sides of human brain. Traditionally, most intelligence and aptitude tests focused on these two areas of brain functioning. They viewed intelligence as a single entity inherent in everyone one in different degrees. In 1900 Alfred Binet designed the first intelligence test from which the world got the concept of I.Q. (Intelligence Quotient). This view is rather narrow and takes in only a couple of key areas and therefore is rather unfair to quantify only these and declare a man’s potential. However, modern educational psychologists hold the view that there several areas of human intelligence. Most of them supporting the view of Howard Gardner of Harward Graduate School of Education, agree on seven such areas of intelligence. Linguistic, Musical, Logical-mathematical, Visual-Spatial, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal and Physical. Continued..... |
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