The impact of left and right brain on learning

The impact of left and right brain on learning

Learning

Learning is the process through which experience causes permanent change in behavior or knowledge (Woolfolk, 1993). There are two primary schools of thought regarding how people learn, the behavioral and cognitive schools, each of which encompasses many individual theories and principles (West, 1997). Cognitive theory focuses on the internal mental activities that bring about a change in knowledge. They focus on mental activities such as thinking, remembering, creating and problem-solving. Behavioral theory focuses on the effects of external events on the person. Scientists, like Pavlov and Skinner, looked at how external stimuli could produce observable responses.

Memory

According to Woolfolk (1993), memory has three components: the sensory register, short-term memory and long-term memory. The sensory register is the original source of input to the memory. It constantly receives input from all senses and retains all of this information briefly. It encodes what it perceives to be important and passes it along to short-term memory. Much of what we perceive is related to how we give meaning to sensory input (Lucy, 1997). Many theories, such as Gestalt, bottom-up processing and top-down processing, indicate that people tend to organize sensory information into patterns and relationships for enhanced learning and storage (Thomas, 1997).

The short-term memory can retain five to nine separate items at a time that will last approximately 20-30 seconds. Long-term memory holds information that has been learned well. It has unlimited capacity and duration, although information can take some time to be learned well enough to be stored here. The brain is capable of absorbing more than 36,000 images per hour (Hyerle, 2000).

According to the theory of left-brain or right-brain dominance, each side of the brain controls different types of thinking. Additionally, people are said to prefer one ...