Question: do you still find new things about the human brain?

Paul Matusz answered on 11 Nov 2018:

Hi,

That’s a great question! The straightforward answer is – YES! We are constantly finding out new things about the brain and some of them are truly striking! One of such “novel” things is that our brains love to represent the information that comes to us about the same objects (identity of your friends and family and other people, what makes a dog, or a car, what is a chair, etc. etc.) through different senses is very often represented in an integrated way, so the brain has strongly connected information about the face of your mom/dad with their voice, the way they walk, etc.. This is very important, as it has also consequences for what we know about learning – as it shows us that the brain processes and learns new information in a fundamentally integrated “multisensory” way. I wrote a short article about how these findings change what we know about how kids pay attention to multisensory information, as well as a blogpost about how this knowledge changes what we know about how people learn – both written in an accessible way – have a look! 🙂

https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00008

Learning occurs in multisensory environments