Pierre Fermat and Jane Marple

March 16, 2005

Drawn back there by a link from a brand-new baby-steps super-senior blogger, we remember that the source of our recent blogging-for-the-brain post is Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide, two physicians in the State of Washington with a particular interest in what they call neurolearning, that is, brain-based learning and education involving learning differences and learning disabilities. Their rich website offers a dense set of references to studies in the neurology of learning.

The first post that caught our attention explains that problem-solving that is Aha! based (which they call "easy"), and that which surfaces after wrestling with a many-faceted problem (which they call "hard"), invoke two very different patterns of brain operation.

The first is, let us say,  Agatha Christie's Miss Marple remembering someone from her youth or small village, and applying it by analogy to illuminate character in a mystery that comes to her attention.

The area that lights up is that dreamy area of the right temporal lobe that might access more personal knowledge and experience - or 'autobiographical' memory. It might be that right analogy or metaphor is struck, the pattern is recognized and... Aha! The problem is solved.

The second pattern typically arises in solving elaborate engineering or mathematical problems, those who tackle Fermat's theorems, for instance.

A picture from a mathematical calculating prodigy... requires huge areas of cortex, both sides of the brain, and conscious manipulation of lots of facts, relationship and data. It looks like you might expect for a heavy bit of number crunching.

There is a whiff here of "feminine" and "masculine," landmarks and vectors, the intuitive and the rational, instant grasp and the stamina for digging through irrelevance and ambiguity to a robust outcome. Problem-solving and brainstorming sessions should be assiduously balanced, or weighted for the nature of the problem being addressed, rather simply fitting the proclivities of a leader or consultant. It's probably also valuable to be trained and challenged in whichever type comes less naturally.

And for a blogger who enjoys the kinesthetics of the keyboard and the moving letters on the screen, there's confirmation in another of their observations, that the activity (and perhaps sociability) of computer games can stimulate children reluctant to fulfil writing assignments.

Our professional colleagues agree. Multi-media features would improve most law-office tasks of not-so-briefs or memoranda, lend a spring to the step along the corridor toward the long night of "therefore"s and citations.