Are you a right-brain-functioned person or left-brain-functioned? As researches show, women are more apt to use their right brain while men have stronger cortex callosum, an organization which locates exactly between two hemispheres and dominates the communication work through electrical signals and impulses transmission.
Callosum is a bridge coordinating two brain parts for sorted received jobs. Synthesizing, imagining, visualizing as well as all the creative processing go to the right part. Logic thinking, data analyzing, language, etc, dwell on the left side. Brain is always under certain waves ranged from different lengths, but not all of them will put brain in a prepared state to learn. Some helps, some stimulates, some protects. Alpha wave, the medium-length type, is the most stimulating and predominant one to put our brain in the best learning mode. But how we can produce or let it happen inside of our brain? The answer is related to our physiological condition, if we relax physically and spiritually, our brain will let go this wave. To rest and recuperate and keep us in the state of relaxed ease, brain will act more proactive to receive and process data, automatically funnel to a solution and undo knobs. If we force ourselves focus on concrete things, try to memorize or activate higher-order thinking skills, Beta wave, the shortest one, shows up and gives commands to brain to learn but only within short memory.
Relaxed and calm state is best for learning happen when Alpha waves accompanied by electrical energy moving in and beyond neurons and across synapse. However, another type of wave, the slowest one appears when our body is asleep. At this period, only non-conscious processing, related to sorting and storing data, are still continue to push those short memory information into a longer storage space.
Since we understood how our brain work in various length ranges of waves, it is unavoidable to accept a truth--- our genetic makeups as long as our environmental influences are not the same. Every kid is gifted differently, some visually, some audibly, some musically, some physically. As teachers, we need to help with our students to identify their own best ways to learning; at meantime, and try to add other possible techniques to their capacity for learning.
So, before you deliver your lesson, make sure you've known every student's learner's type, their previous night sleep quality, their time-being state, and then give a proper warm-up part before you really start new stuff. Providing with a sense of secure and trust atmosphere in the learning environment is also necessary, for it happening at any second:)
