How the brain function in the islamic perspective

1. CHAPTER NINE
The author started this chapter based on the story of a boy named Tim. He sees different colors
whenever he encounters the letter of the alphabet. The author went on to describe the fact that the
boy did not know what he had is a condition since he thought everyone was experiencing the
same thing. The brain condition was known as synesthesia. John noted in the book that this
condition happens to 1 in 2000 people and he added that some thinks it is 1 in 200 people. He
further noted that scientists do not know the behavior of this condition but if they can find out
what happens when sensory processing goes wrong, they can in turn find out and gain more
understanding about what happens when it goes right and the effect that this has on learning is
what this chapter entails.
The Quran says in Surah Al-Alaq 96:15-16:
“No! If he does not desist, We will surely drag him by the forelock –
A lying, sinning forelock”
The brain is a miracle and a blessing from Allah(swt). The frontal lobe(forelock) is known to
control the essence of our humanity i.e. helps us to feel sad in times of sorrow, laugh and catch
on to people’s humor, controls every aspect and movement of our bodies, help sense different
things and ability to determine right from wrong.
He inquired how the brain can interchange between being active and being redundant and he
made us aware of the fact that the Greeks didn’t think the brain did anything. H e also shared
Aristotle’s thoughts that “the heart held all the action and that it harbored the vital flame of life”.
The noble Quran says in Surat Al-Bakarah chapter 2:7

2. “Allah has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing, and over their vision is a veil. And
for them is a great punishment.”
According to Dr. Zakir Naik, he explained that the above verse is talking about the fact that even
though scientifically the brain is the one that does the thinking, the heart here is used in the form
of intelligence.
The example given by John Medina was modified by me to soothe the purpose of this study and
it goes like this “Suppose you are at home on a Saturday night, your kid sister is playing the
stereo with loud dance beat, your mother is shouting on your brother for something he did that
was very wrong, both annoying and hypnotic, felt more than heard. The horns of cars moving on
the street blaring as they move past your house. Dogs barking around the neighborhood. The
smell of the burning food that your mother is cooking in the kitchen and the cries of your little
baby sister. There is so much information in the room; you are beginning to get an head ache, so
you step out for fresh air. Your little baby sister follows you”.
He stated that snapshots of the above modified example illustrate the incredible amount of
sensory information your brain must process simultaneously. External physical inputs and
internal emotional inputs are all presented to your brain in a never-ending fire hose of sensations.
The McGurk Effect:
The author illustrated it as this in other to explain sensory integration “Suppose researchers
showed you a video of a person saying the ugly word “ga”. Unbeknownst to you, the scientists
had turned off the sound of the original video and dubbed the sound “ba” onto it. When the
scientist asks you to listen to the video with your eyes closed, you hear “ba” just fine. But if you
open your eyes, your brain suddenly encounters the shape of the lips saying “ga” while your ears
are hearing “ba”. The brain doesn’t know what to do with this contradiction, so it makes up
something and normally it comes up with the word “da”.
HOW THE SENSES INTEGRATE:
The processes can be divided into three steps namely: sensation, routing and perception.
Sensation: It is where we capture energies from the environment. It involves converting the
external information into a brain-friendly electrical language.
Routing: Once the information acquired has been successfully translated, it is sent off to different
regions of the brain for further processing. The signals of the sensory organs all have special
places where the processing occurs and most of this occurs in the Thalamus.

3. Perception: The various senses start merging their information and these integrated signals are
sent to increasing complex areas or higher regions of our brains and we begin to perceive what
our senses have given us. This last stage is where the integration culminates. It also has both
bottom-up and top-down features. We are mostly focused on what happens after sensation and
routing ---- after we achieve perception.
Bottoms up, Tops down:
The author noted and explained this concept with an example that goes thus “Oliver sacks, a
neurologist had a patient called Dr. Richard with this problems; he had lost various perceptual
processing abilities, he could not see commonalities as belonging to separate people and better
yet, he could not always perceive multisensory stimuli as belonging to the same experience and
with the following symptoms
o when a person walks into the room and sat down on a chair, he did not always perceive
the person’s various part as belonging to the person.
o only when the person got up and out of the chair would he suddenly recognize the body
parts as possessed by that person.
o If he looked at a photograph of people at a football stadium, he would identify the same
color of different people’s wardrobes as belonging together in some way.
o He sometimes could not make a connection between the motion of a speaker’s lips and
the speech. He reported it as having watched a “badly dubbed foreign movie”.
So scientists often ask: once the thalamus has done its job distributing duties, what happens next?
The answer as given by the author is that the information that has been dissected into sensory-
size pieces and flung widely across the brain’s landscape needs to be reassembled which is what
Dr. Richard was unable to do. So the next question is where and how does information from
different senses begin to merge in the brain.
We are made to know that the where is easier than the how and that most of the sophisticated
stuffs occur in the association cortices which are specialized areas that exist throughout the brain,
including the parietal, temporal and the frontal lobes.
They are bridges between the sensory regions and the motor region which is how it got the
name. And scientists also think that these regions use bottom up and top down processes to
achieve perception.
An author, W. Somerset Maugham once said “there are only three rules for writing a novel,
unfortunately nobody knows them”. The eyes read the sentence above, the thalamus spatters the
information to all the corners of your skull and the bottom-up takes it from there. The visual

4. system which is classic bottom-line processor allows feature detectors to come in contact with
the sentence’s visual stimuli.
It is inspected thoroughly and they write a report which takes a great deal of effort and time to
organize which is one of the reasons why reading is a relatively slow way to put information into
the skull.
Top-down processing takes the job from there. The brain has the audacity to alter data stream if
it chooses and it chooses a lot.
The brain is not guaranteed to perceive the world accurately even if part of your body does and
in its bid to simplify the world, it’s simply adding more confusion to it and by the above, the
author means it uses large group of receptors, each in charge of a particular sensory attribute in
other to act simultaneously.
In order for us to savor the richness and diversity of perception, the central nervous system must
integrate the activity of entire sensory populations. This is achieved by pushing electrical signals
through an almost bewildered thicket of ever more complex, higher neural assemblies. Then, you
can perceive something.
Survival by teamwork:
According to a paper, Synesthesia has about 50 different types or more. One of the strangest
types is that even when the brain’s wiring gets confused, the senses will still work.
The author emphasize that sensory integration is the extra cognitive processing of information
that helps the learner to integrate the new material with prior information.
A man named Richard Mayer, a cognitive psychologist thinks that multisensory experiences are
more elaborate.
The Holy Quran says in Surat An-Nahl chapter 16:78
“And Allah has extracted you from the wombs of your mothers not knowing a thing, and He
made for you hearing and vision and intellect that perhaps you would be grateful.”
The author gave some ideas based on this topic among which is:

5. Multisensory school lessons: The opening moments of a lecture in a classroom is the only time
that more students are paying attention in class and if presentations during that time were
multisensory, overall retention might increase.
Sensory branding: “Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces, and then eat
just one of the pieces” said by author Judith Viorst and this is of course referring to the power of
the confection on self-will.
Smell works, but only when deployed in a particular way. Eric Spangenberg said that “ You
can’t just use a pleasant scent and expect it to work, it has to be congruent”.
First, match the scent with the hopes and needs of the target market.
Second, integrate the odor with the “personality” of the object for sale putting the Proust Effect
at the corner of one’s mind that, smell can evoke memory.
Conclusion:
In his conclusion regarding this chapter, he stated that “All this might sound preposterous but
one must be careful to tease out context-dependant learning from true multisensory
environments, but it is a start towards thinking about learning environments that go beyond the
normal near-addiction to visual and auditory information. It is an area where much potential
research fruit lies, truly a place for brain scientists, educators and business professionals to work
together in a practical way.”

6. CHAPTER TEN
The author started this chapter with this phrase “We do not see with our eyes, we see with our
brains”.
The Holy Quran says in Surat Al-Araf chapter 7:179
“And We have certainly created for Hell many of the jinn and mankind. They have hearts with
which they do not understand, they have eyes with which they do not see, and they have ears
with which they do not hear. Those are like livestock; rather, they are more astray. It is they who
are the heedless.”
To understand this verse, all of us know that the eye is a sight method but we don’t see with our
eyes, it is only a transformation method for information from the outer world to inside our brain
where this information are processed and stored.
Those atheists can see with their eyes but their brain doesn't use all of this surrounded
information to reach the truth to believe that God is the only creator not the nature or
coincidence!!! According to their way of thinking they believe that all of these stars, galaxies,
creatures and organized and complicated Biological processes are made by coincidence!!! Indeed
they don't see the truth.
A HOLLYWOOD HORDE:
We experience our visual environment as a fully analyzed opinion about what the brain thinks is
out there. He explained further in details about how the eye processes the movement of objects.
STREAMS OF CONCSIOUSNESS:
The visual cortex is a big piece of neural acreage and the various streams (about thousands of
them) flow into specific parcels, each with their own specific functions. The thousands of
streams feeding into these regions allow for the separate processing of individual features. If it
were to stop there, we would perceive the world in an unorganized manner but when the brain re-
assemble the scattered information, then something can be seen.

7. THE BRAIN LIKES TO MAKE THINGS UP:
The phenomenon known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome simply implies that people see things that
aren’t there and it is explained in details in this section.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Since ancient times, people have wondered why two eyes give rise to a
single visual perception. If there’s a camel in your left eye and a camel in your right eye, why
don’t you perceive two camels?
Here’s an experiment to try that illustrates the problem nicely:
1) Close your left eye, then stretch your left arm in front of you
2) Raise up the index finger of your left hand, as if you were pointing to the sky
3) Keep the arm in this position while you hold your right arm about six inches in front of
your face. Raise your right index finger like it too was pointing to the sky.
4) With your eyes closed, position your right index finger so that it appears just to the left of
your index finger.
5) Now speedily open your left eye and close the right one. Do this several times.
This little experiment shows that the two images appearing on each retina always differ
and that both eyes working together somehow give the brain enough information to see non-
jumping reality.
PHANTOM OF THE OCULAR:
Researchers historically have used two types of memory in their investigations. The first,
recognition memory which is used to explain familiarity i.e. when looking at old family
photographs joggling your memory to remembrance and the other is working memory which is
the collection of temporary storage buffers with fixed capacity and frustratingly short life spans.
It’s remarkable and depressing to note that vision is probably the best single tool we have for
learning anything.
Conclusion:
He concluded by giving his ideas about how to use vision to carry out life’s many objectives:
 Teachers should learn why pictures grab attention: Educators should know how pictures
transfer information.
 Teachers should use computer animations: Animation captures the importance not only
of color and placement but also of motion.

8.  Test the power of images: Though the pictorial superiority effect is a well-established
fact for certain types of classroom material, it is not well-established for all material.
 Communicate with pictures more than words: Pictures are a more efficient delivery
mechanism of information than text and it has been scientifically proven that even if the
pictures was small and crowded with lots of other non-pictorial elements close to it, the
eye still went to the visual. The researchers unfortunately did not check for retention.
 Toss your PowerPoint presentations: Professionals everywhere need to know about the
incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images.
They need to do 2 things;
1) Burn their current PowerPoint presentations.
2) Make new ones.
Actually, the old ones should be stored, maybe temporarily in other to make
useful comparisons with the new ones.