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2.2 BRAIN-BASED (MULTI-SENSORY) LEARNING 23
Traditionally, elements of perception, such as vision, hearing, smell, taste,
and touch, have been viewed as additive, separate, and independent process¬
es. However, exciting discoveries in neuroscience have disproved this theory.
Researchers have identified multisensory interactions both in the case of per¬
ceptual tasks and settings and throughout processing. Multi-sensory interactions
have been localized in the early sensory, association, and other cortical areas, in¬
cluding feed-forward and feed-back pathways (Stein & Meredith, 1993; Shimojo
& Shams, 2001; Falchier, Clavagnier, Barone, & Kennedy, 2002; Schroeder &
Foxe, 2002; Calvert, Spence, & Stein, 2004; Foxe & Schroeder, 2005; Ghazanfar
& Schroeder, 2006; Driver & Noesselt, 2008).
Findings in brain research have demonstrated that different object charac¬
teristics are processed in different visual areas. Techniques that allow simulta¬
neous recordings of multi-neuronal activity revealed that any particular object
within our visual field is represented by the firing of a set of neurons. Bongard,
Ferrandez, and Fernandez (2009) describe the neuron activity during visual
information processing as a neural concert of the visual orchestra. This meta¬
phor can be extended to other senses as well. For example, like vision, haptic
processing pathways are also organized into a hierarchy of processing stages,
with different stages represented by different brain areas (James, Kim, & Fisher,
2007). Additionally, James et al. refer points of neural convergence to vision and
haptics. On the other hand, Overy and Turne (2009), after they had reviewed the
related literature, concluded: What is most clear from this collection of papers
is that the neural bases of rhythm and movement are fundamentally connected
and distributed across a wide range of brain regions.
Other researchers have also identified convergent neural pathways onto mul¬
ti-sensory neurons (Stein & Meredith, 1993) that may provide the substrate for
multi-sensory binding (Meredith, 2002). A typical characteristic of multi-sensory
neurons are that they fire only when more than one sensory modality is activated
(Kavenaugh, 1991; Shaywitz, 2003; van Wassenhove, Grant, & Poeppel, 2005);
they are characterized by enhanced response (supra-additivity) to the presenta¬
tion of co-occurring events. Accordingly, we think that it would be reasonable
to extend the visual orchestra metaphor to multi-sensory orchestra. In such an
orchestra, multi-sensory neurons use multi-instruments.
The left brain and right brain expressions are used to describe the specialized
functions of the two hemispheres of the human brain. For example, experiments
applying neuroimaging technologies showed that activities involving numbers,
logic, sequential tasks, and in general analysis are more closely associated with
the left side of the brain (“academic brain”). Then again, activities involving
music, imagination, colours, or creative expression are more active in the right
hemisphere (“artistic brain”). While understanding the brain’s hemispheres is
undoubtedly relevant to education, children cannot be categorized as exclusively
left-brained or right-brained learners. Some research in this field revealed that