Free Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina Page A

anything?” She says dreamily, “Somebody just touched my hand.” He puts a tiny piece of paper on the area. He touches another spot. She exclaims, “Somebody just touched my cheek!” Another tiny piece of paper. This call and response goes on for hours. Like a neural cartographer, Ojemann is mapping the various functions of his little patient’s brain, with special attention paid to the areas close to her epileptic tissue.
    These are tests of the little girl’s motor skills. For reasons not well understood, however, epileptic tissues are often disturbingly adjacent to critical language areas. So Ojemann also pays close attention to the regions involved in language processing, where words and sentences and grammatical concepts are stored. This child happens to be bilingual, so language areas essential for both Spanish and English will need to be mapped. A paper dot marked “S” is applied to the regions where Spanish exists, and a small “E” where English is stored. Ojemann does this painstaking work with every single patient who undergoes this type of surgery. Why? The answer is a stunner. He has to map each individual’s critical function areas because he doesn’t know where they are.
    Ojemann can’t predict the function of very precise areas in advance of the surgery because no two brains are wired identically. Not in terms of structure. Not in terms of function. For example, from nouns to verbs to aspects of grammar, we each store language in different areas, recruiting different regions for different components. Bilingual people don’t even store their Spanish and their English in similar places.
    This individuality has fascinated Ojemann for years. He once combined the brain maps for 117 patients he had operated on over the years. Only in one region did he find a spot where most people had a critical language area, or CLA, and “most” means 79 percent of the patients. Data from electrical stimulation mapping give probably the most dramatic illustration of the brain’s individuality. But Ojemann also wanted to know how stable these differences were during life, and if any of those differences predicted intellectual competence. He found interesting answers to both questions.
    First, the maps are established very early in life, and they remain stable throughout. Even if a decade or two had passed between surgeries, the regions recruited for a specific CLA remained recruited for that same CLA. Ojemann also found that certain CLA patterns could predict language competency, at least as measured by a pre-operative verbal IQ test. If you want to be good at a language (or at least perform well on the test), don’t let the superior temporal gyrus host your CLA. Your verbal performance will statistically be quite poor. Also, make sure your overall CLA pattern has a small and rather tightly focused footprint. If the pattern is instead widely distributed, you will have a remarkably low score. These findings are robust and age-independent. They have been demonstrated in people as young as kindergartners and as old as Alan Greenspan.
    Not only are people’s brains individually wired, but those neurological differences can, at least in the case of language, predict performance.
    ideas
    Given these data, does it make any sense to have school systems that expect every brain to learn like every other? Does it make sense to treat everybody the same in business, especially in a global economy replete with various cultural experiences? The data offer powerful implications for how we should teach kids—and, when they grow up and get a job, how we should treat them as employees. I have a couple of concerns about our school system:
    1) The current system is founded on a series of expectations that certain learning goals should be achieved by a certain age. Yet there is no reason to suspect that the brain pays attention to those expectations. Students of the same age show a great deal of intellectual variability.
    2) These