Which Do You Prefer?

My fam­i­ly knows quite well that if they want me to com­pre­hend, much less remem­ber, any­thing late­ly, it has to be writ­ten down. I lis­ten to and enjoy sam­bear’s pod­casts, but I have to get rid of all oth­er input because I can’t han­dle any oth­er input at the same time. I learn best via text.
Eide Neu­rolearn­ing Blog, one of my favorites, has a great recent entry on such differences:
Brain of a Pod­cast­er or Blogger?

Because the brain net­works for read­ing and lis­ten­ing are dif­fer­ent, some of us will be much bet­ter at read­ing blogs, while oth­ers of us will be much bet­ter with pod­casts. This may be one of the most impor­tant learn­ing style dif­fer­ences we have in the class­room or even in our workplaces.

In the fig­ure below, the hot col­ors show what the brain looks like when it reads a sen­tence, and the cool col­ors, when it hears a sen­tence. There are areas of over­lap (check out the paper below to see that Fig­ure), but large areas of dif­fer­ence as well. Pod­casts like­ly acti­vate more on the “right” side of the brain, than blogs (in the fig­ure, right and left are “reversed” accord­ing to radi­ol­o­gy conventions).

How well suit­ed are schools to brains of blog­gers vs. pod­cast­ers? It might vary quite a bit, depend­ing on the teacher. At times, a great dis­crep­an­cy can exist between the two routes (much bet­ter with read­ing / much bet­ter with lis­ten­ing) so that it real­ly needs to be looked for. When­ev­er we have a stu­dent who real­ly bot­toms out lan­guage-heavy ques­tions, we check whether they can per­form much bet­ter if the ques­tions are avail­able to be read (min­i­miz­ing audi­to­ry work­ing ver­bal work­ing mem­o­ry), the ques­tions can be read to them.

Visu­al vs. Audi­to­ry Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing and fMRI

iPods in School

Cur­rent Mood: 🙂relaxed
Cyn is Rick's wife, Katie's Mom, and Esther & Oliver's Mémé. She's also a professional geek, avid reader, fledgling coder, enthusiastic gamer (TTRPGs), occasional singer, and devoted stitcher.
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