Kinesthetic Mind-scapes: how the brain embodies reality for deep comprehension

This blog is all about promoting the skills of the right hemisphere for use in school, work and life in general. For too long our developed western culture has been enamored with the detail specific, data-driven left hemisphere skillset that produces “easy-to-see" evidence of knowledge. It's time for the right hemisphere to have it's day and for all of us to embrace these “harder-to-see” but more powerful skills for 21 century problem solving, learning, personal empowerment and societal change.

One skill in particular that is the function of the right hemisphere is the ability to create imagery and incorporate it with smell, sound, taste and touch into an embodied, experiential, mental model for deep comprehension of anything we want to learn. Cognitive psychologists have written about the “embodied cognition” (Glenberg, 2011) of creating a situation in our mental space that incorporates not only images, but sounds, movement, emotions, touch, and taste into one complex and complete mental model. This ability to form rich, dynamic mind-scapes with all the senses at once, is the key to deep comprehension with text, but also in mathematics.

It turns out that simply directing students to "make pictures" in their heads is not enough for many individuals to understand what they read. Nor is it explicit enough for teachers to do think-alouds where they model the online "blooming" of a mental image as they read. What students need to do is engage all their senses for mental imagery. Drawing, storyboarding and other external techniques can be helpful in jump starting their comprehension, but until students are creating their own mental images, they are not deeply and permanently understanding. 

Priming comprehension of both narrative and expository text with personal background knowledge is an important part of creating this "situation model" (Kintsch, 1988). Then using that prior knowledge to activate all the senses through the use of verbal prompts and physical aids like pictures or photographs, or their own drawing to encourage a mental creation of concepts that are 3 dimensional, as well as gesturing and "acting" out what they understand from the text, will lead to deeper understanding.

I use these practices in my office with the students I serve and witness students who were previously struggling to comprehend, have their own "aha" moments of connecting with the text. Many even correct prior misunderstandings by "seeing" how their personal mental movie now matches what they read. They demonstrate their own deeper enjoyment of reading by experiencing a deep personal response to text.

Let me know if these techniques work for you, or if you have others to share.

References:

Glenberg, A. M. (2011). How reading comprehension is embodied and why that matters. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 4(1), 5-18.

Kintsch, W. (1988). The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: a construction integration model. Psychological Review, 95, 163-182.