My mother owned a great big book called "Society of the Mind", it was not her usual fare being sparse and almost mechanical in its tone, no doubt an artifact of some teaching conference she attended. I poured over the book because it offered a David Macaulay style explanation for what my brain cells were saying to each other. It posits that the mind works rather like a city where many agents or groups are working at seeming separate tasks but collectively they form a greater whole that represents itself as a single identity like say - Cincinnati or Chris Scott. Apparently the book, now in its third decade, is still in print  and not roundly discredited so perhaps it's worth considering in the light of learning theory.

Perhaps it is the case that so it goes with the body so it goes with mind, an individual might have some areas that are vigorous and others that are stunted and malformed. Some agents in the mind might be highly effective while other unrelated agents never really come online at all. The result of such a mismatch might be seen as learning disability or felt as frustration. Science has only begun to explore the webwork of the mind, perhaps we are as far from understanding it as medieval physicians were from understanding the black plague, our descendants may wonder how we maintained such a perfectly wrong approach for so long. Gardner proposed nine types of intelligence (and then added more), perhaps these correspond to parts of the brain itself?