Smart kids use more of their brains to solve puizzles.
James Wood, 14, uses more of his brain to solve puzzles than other children. To the surprise of Melbourne experts conducting research, James - and seven other mathematically gifted children - used both hemispheres, and parts he wasn't expected to.
...
"It may be there's big education consequences of this work," says Fred Mendelsohn, head of the Howard Florey Institute. "If it's something that can be learned, you can obviously make a big difference to the way you teach people, the way they learn, they way they develop skills."
It could be that the brains of smarter kids have connections coded for genetically to allow them to recruit more parts of the brain to work on a given problem. If so, it may not be possible to train a brain using teaching techniques to connect various parts of the brain in ways that would allow more of it to be used when solving problems.
| Share | | Randall Parker, 2003 August 21 01:40 AM Biological Mind |
This finding resonates with many other observations by students of creativity. Perhaps one of the best known of these thinkers,Edward DeBono, uses the terms "Lateral Thinking" and "Red Hat/Green Hat" thinking. His work helps us take our thought processes out of deeply-grooved channels by co-opting alternative methods of topic structure or alternative methods of filtering-by-purpose. What the researchers above may have discovered , (very meaningfully in children), is that there are actual neural zones and pathways that may be involved in DeBono's prcesses. Another theoretical term, "functional fixedness", applies to the narrow use of tools ("a scissors is not a doorstop") which prevents a potential solution from being reached. If we apply that term to brain "tools" or concept "tools" ("let's use a chess algorhythm to find terrorists") we may be seeing a bit more of what the brain research cited above can imply.