Readings for Monday's Lab & Tuesday's Understanding

Education, Children & The Brain
Even though I am a magazine journalism major, I have spent most semesters in psychology classes and therefore was pretty familiar with the material we were given to read and watch for this week's lab on Monday.
I really enjoyed the article about Nico & Brooke and their brain development differences due to having their brains segmented and removed. From this article, we can see the differences between the right and left hemispheres and how these specific sides of the brain are used in reasoning and "understanding" the world around us. Interestingly enough, in my nonverbal communication class, we are reading Paul Ekman and just finished up an exercise regarding matching emotions to faces, most likely the same exercise these boys went through.

The question I came out of the reading with is, do individuals have a "stronger" left or right brain that impacts their ability to understand life? Is that why some people are much better at articulating reasons behind actions while others can't give much more than, "It felt/looked/sounded right"? This goes hand in hand with the inital article passed out in class regarding the changes children go through while their brains are developing. Is it possible that the adults that have difficulties "understanding" or articulating information have missed something devlopmental in one of the brain's hemispheres? Does that initial article suggest important years in which children/teens need to develop comprehending abilities that once missed out on, may impact the rest of their lives? And does the Nico/Brooke article suggest there may be medical ways to overcome this?

Or should I not be thinking via this brainwave and instead focus on the idea that individuals differ in their abilites to "understand" solely due to brain differences which is why we can and will only ever be able to understand ourselves (insight from Understanding chapter). Though others can share their feelings and emotions with us, we can only take from that what they tell us and obviously will never know if we "understood" them. (Some of this may have come from our emotions discussion in psych, but it's hard to differenciate such similar material.) The Youtube lecture also spent time with the issue of emotions and further established the notion that although emotions play such a giant role in our lives, and the emotions of others can signal our own emotions, we can never really be privy to another's emotional state, it's just impossible.

The ideas of inabilities due to brain development is echoed in the final article for lab, in that missing a brain region could trigger a nerological malfunction, which could negatively impact understanding capabilites, as well as triggering emotions that impact social behaviors. This fits into all of the other readings in that yet again we see the power and importance of emtions and the concept of understanding emotions/the implications misunderstanding may have on an individual.

I also found this to be important:
"In this group, patients sustained comparable
prefrontal damage in early childhood, rather than as adults. As
they developed, these children were cognitively normal in the
traditional IQ sense, able to use logical reasoning and factual
knowledge to solve the kinds of academic problems expected
of students. However, while smart in the everyday sense of
the word, these children slowly revealed themselves as having
varying degrees of psychopathic and antisocial tendencies.
They were insensitive to punishment and reward and did not
seek approval or social acceptance as typical children do."
This again suggests that an abnormally developed brain impacts a child's abilities, my question here is does the part of the brain that is injured impact the child's abilites differently? I assume yes.

Finally the article sums up the issue at hand:
"As both the early- and late-acquired
prefrontal damage patients show, knowledge and reasoning
divorced from emotional implications and learning lack
meaning and motivation and are of little use in the real world.
Simply having the knowledge does not imply that a student
will be able to use it advantageously outside of school."
I like this idea in regards to anyone, not just those who have a mis-developed brain, and I think this is what we are trying to understand in this class. Meaning is not separate from emotion, knowledge is not separate from understanding. All of these things need to work together if someone hopes to achieve something worthwhile.