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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 processes. However, exciting discoveries in neuroscience have disproved this theory. Researchers have identified multisensory interactions both in the case of perceptual tasks and settings and throughout processing. Multi-sensory interactions have been localized in the early sensory, association, and other cortical areas, including 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 characteristics are processed in different visual areas. Techniques that allow simultaneous 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 metaphor 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 multi-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 presentation 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
