Hundreds, maybe thousands of books about the brain have been published during the past 12 to 15 years, probably more than in the many decades before. Without question, educators want to learn as much as possible about how the brain functions in the limited time available to them for personal study. After all, teachers are responsible for what happens to somewhere around 20 to 150 young brains every school day. Even so, one might ask, “Do educators really need to understand how the brain functions to be effective teachers?” Probably not, because some teachers naturally stimulate and sustain the enjoyment of learning in youngsters. A teacher can have a storehouse of information about brain functioning and remain ineffective. Nonetheless, even the most successful teacher can use an introductory knowledge of how the brain functions to answer perplexing questions about why specific teaching techniques either work or do not.

In Multimind: A New Way of Looking at Human Behavior, Robert Ornstein (1986) describes different ways of learning as the brain's natural operating systems. He is not talking about different intelligences, which are advanced by Howard Gardner (1983) in Frames of Mind. Rather, Ornstein, a psychologist and neurobiologist, approaches the brain as a biological organ of multisystems related to brain structures: