Learning Styles and “Finding Nemo”

Hands up who remembers the blue fish Dory from “Finding Nemo”? The one who suffers from a short-term memory loss? (“I forget things almost instantly. It runs in my family! Well I mean... at least... I think it does. Hum... Where are they? ... Can I help you?”)

Have you ever wondered why she can’t remember anything? Or rather, she can’t remember anything she hears, and yet she has no trouble remembering how to read? In fact the only thing Dory can remember throughout the movie is the address label she’s read: “P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney”; and she only recognises Nemo’s name when she reads a prompt?

Those of you who know about Learning Styles already understand where I’m going with this one: some students learn better by listening, others by reading, others yet by doing or watching.

Of course, a person’s learning is not constrained to the senses. For optimal learning and memorising conditions, you need to take into account information processing, the learning environment, the time of day and many other factors.

Have a look at a sample Learning Style Report to see learning preferences in action.

(Some trivia about the movie “Finding Nemo”, from the IMDB website:

• Factual errors: When the fish are in bags and the bags are in the ocean, the bags should float with their inner water level at just about the same level as the surface of the ocean.
• Factual errors: Marlin and Dory are advised to swim to the back of the whale's throat and then are blown out of the whale's blowhole. This is not physically possible as whales mouths and digestive systems are not connected to their respiratory system and blowhole.
• Factual errors: Coral should be bigger than Marlin. Female clownfish are always bigger than their mates.)

Learning Styles - How Your Learning Style Can Make You Feel Sleepy

If you know a little about learning styles and working styles, you will know that learning and working in a style that clashes with your own unique preferences will - inevitably - make you feel stressed and tired.

However, recent research indicates that the problem goes a lot deeper than that. Dr Nakamori Suganuma, of Osaka University, Japan, and a lead researcher into the issue, discovered that people who spend more pre-bedtime hours using the Internet or watching television are more likely to report that they don't get enough sleep.

This is even though they sleep as long (or almost as long) as people who spend fewer pre-bedtime hours in front of a computer or television screen, because longer Internet and television use before bedtime did not correlate with getting less actual sleep.

The research, therefore, implies that electronic media have an effect on sleep demand and sleep quality, either making the users THINK they’ve had too little sleep whereas in fact they may have had enough, or causing the users to need more sleep than those who don’t use computers and TV in the pre-bedtime hours.

So, what does that have to do with learning styles? Quite simply, your learning style will often dictate how much TV you will watch and how long you will spend on the computer. If you are predisposed towards e-learning, for example, chances are, you will spend more time on the computer than somebody who is not.

Also, learning styles are responsible - to a large extent - for determining WHEN you will use the computer and watch TV, particularly for work and learning purposes.

To find out what your learning style is and whether it might be responsible for making you crave more sleep, please click here.