ABSTRACT
In my work with teachers one of the things I do is try and bring them up to date with some of the most relevant brain discoveries of recent times and, like any good teacher, I always start with ‘assessing prior knowledge’. Occasionally I meet teachers who know a great deal about the nature of the brain. Occasionally. For the most part, though, I would suggest that teachers as a profession know very little about it. This is especially true of the NQTs or ‘Not Quite Teachers’. I always ask the question of them, whether they are primary or secondary, PGCE or BEd or whatever route it is by which they came into teaching, ‘What did you do about the brain in your training?’ The answer, nine times out of ten, is ‘Nothing’. Or ‘A little bit’. Or, ‘We did brain gym!’, which, as I point out to them, is not about the brain, it’s just a phrase with ‘brain’ in it. You wouldn’t train to be a car mechanic without lifting up the bonnet so why should you be allowed to train to be a moulder of the physical and lasting structure of young brains without having to have some understanding of the neurological effects of your actions? When there is some claim to prior neurological knowledge it often boils
down to a hazy understanding of left brain, right brain theory, combined usually with an inability to remember which side is ‘responsible for’ which attributes. So, let’s put that one to bed straightaway. The whole left brain does this, right brain does that story is not true. Not in the way you think it is anyway. This particular myth came about due to the Nobel-winning work of a
neurobiologist called Roger Sperry,2 who identified what he called ‘two spheres of consciousness’ when working with people with epilepsy in the 1960s. The severing of the corpus callosum, the ‘bridge’ that links the two hemispheres and allows messages to pass between them, seemed to have a beneficial effect on people suffering from epilepsy and, in studying why this was, Sperry and his team identified that, among other things, the left side of the brain was the ‘language center’ whilst the right side had no
language but was where we processed music and space perception. And from some hard science, a whole industry of pop-psychology was born. But it’s not so much not true or false as, like everything with the brain,
far more complicated than that and even now the cause of a great deal of heated debate in neuroscientific circles. In a New Scientist article in 1999, the freelance neuroscience writer John McCrone described how advances in brain imaging techniques were revealing how we are not a person made of two split brains but a person made up of one very complicated, very linked, single brain:
language turned out to be represented on both sides of the brain, in matching areas of the cortex. Areas on the left dealt with the core aspects of speech such as grammar and word production, while aspects such as intonation and emphasis lit up the right side. In the same way, the right brain proved to be good at working with a general sense of space, while equivalent areas in the left brain fired when someone thought about objects at particular locations.
