Cognitive Enhancement
Cognitive Enhancement– Can cognitive skills improve?
When you understand where cognitive skills fit into everyone’s learning process, you can see how truly important they are -- which leads to another critically important truth: Cognitive skills can change! That’s right, cognitive skills, learning skills, underlying skills, learning tools (no matter what they are called) can be improved, strengthened, and enhanced, regardless of a person’s age.
No one needs to be stuck forever with the underlying skill levels they have now. There’s no reason why you, your child, or someone you care about can’t become a better learner.
Key point: It’s not how much you know (the information that has been crammed into your head), but how effectively you process the information you have received. Cognitive skills are the processors of this incoming information.
In other words, cognitive skills are the learning skills used to 1) attend to and retain information; 2) process, analyze, and store facts and feelings; and 3) create mental pictures, read words, and understand concepts.
Cognitive Enhancement– Exploring how we learn
Learning is primarily a cognitive function. All information we receive must be processed with a variety of cognitive skills. Try this exercise. Refer to the Learning Model to better understand the learning process.
To begin, as fast as you can, spell your first name out loud. . .
Let’s examine the cognitive skills it took to complete this simple task. To do this, Input came as you read or heard the instructions, “Spell your first name out loud.” As a part of Active Processing, you gave Attention to the request, held it in your Working Memory, and began to Process it. You then chose to respond to it. You made the internal, executive Decision that this was an easy request; one that you didn’t really need to think about, because you already had the answer stored in your Knowledge Bank. You drew the appropriate information (the spelling of your name) directly from your Knowledge Bank and spoke it as Output without hesitation. This enabled you to handle this exercise quickly and easily because it was previously Known or familiar information.
Brain Development - Return to Topic List
Excerpts of the book Unlock the Enstein Inside by Dr. Ken Gibson
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