Neural interconnectivity and intellectual creativity: giftedness, savants, and learning styles

There is considerable evidence that intelligence as a brain function occurs through the synchronised integration of information processing involving a myriad of interconnected functional modules. Consistently, the brains of gifted children show relatively higher levels of cerebral interconnectivity when engaged in cognitive tasks. An important part of the evidence for integrated brain function as the seat of intelligence comes from studies into cross-modal processing, where sensory information in one modality e.g. vision, is processed in multiple sensory areas e.g. auditory, sensory. Thus, so-called learning styles such as VAK (Visual-Auditory-Kinaesthetic) based all processing information in a single modality, fail to acknowledge how the brain actually works. This could explain why no independent evidence has been found for the learning efficacy of VAK and similar learning style inventories. Moreover, as an anti-integration pedagogy, VAK is implicitly anti-intellectual and anti-giftedness. Savants are an intriguing example of high-functioning individuals. Despite their extremes of performance, this chapter argues that in terms of their neural interconnectivity, the brains of savants are qualitatively different from those of children we usually classify as gifted.