Visual, auditory, kinesthetic — a myth

Let’s say you consider yourself an auditory learner. I tell you I want to teach you something, so you naturally reach for a recording — because listening is how you’d most like to take it in. Now let me add one detail: the material is a particular dance figure that you’re supposed to reproduce with your own body. Does listening still seem like a good idea? Of course it doesn’t, because you sense that this calls for getting up and moving, not cocking an ear. And that’s the crux of it: the same person, the same question, yet the answer flips in a second the moment you learn what you’re meant to study¹. You’ll learn a mathematical formula differently than a melody, and a melody differently than a dance step — and it has little to do with which type of learner you take yourself to be.

This reveals something that escapes most people convinced they have a fixed style of taking in information. What decides the most fitting form of learning is the content, not the person sitting down to learn. A geometric proof is hard to grasp without a drawing in front of your eyes, even if someone calls themselves the purest auditory learner under the sun. You won’t drill the French “r” from photographs alone, even if you fancy yourself a visual learner. It’s the kind of material that determines which sense you need to take it in with — and a declared preference changes surprisingly little here. And yet the conviction that one has a personal type of information uptake is almost ubiquitous today — one person counts themselves a visual learner, another an auditory one, and yet another a kinesthetic one.

Worse still, this myth operates at the very heart of the education system. Research shows that 93% of British teachers believe in it². The conviction is also widespread in the scientific literature, since as many as 89% of publications on learning styles approach them uncritically and with approval. If almost everyone believes it, including people who teach others for a living, then surely it must be true. Well, no! Before we debunk this myth, though, we need to look more closely at the details, because not everything in style theory is false.

Part of this theory is perfectly true. People really do differ from one another, and no sensible person denies it. We differ in our aptitude for a given field, in the prior knowledge we bring to a topic, and in plain interest¹. These things genuinely affect how fast and how well you learn something. The trouble is that style theory takes this obvious truth and, under its cover, smuggles in an entirely different and far more questionable claim.

The falsehood begins where the idea of your personal sensory channel appears — the channel you supposedly have to match your learning to. This is exactly where the trap lies, the one you fall into without even knowing it. The brain routinely confuses what is pleasant with what is effective. When you learn from a colorful, nicely made graphic, you feel the knowledge going in smoothly and effortlessly — but that sense of ease in no way means you’re remembering more. It’s precisely that feeling which keeps the belief in styles alive, because you mistake the comfort of learning for its result.

Fortunately, things like this can be tested with a hard experiment. One such study was run on a group of 121 adults⁴: first a standard test sorted them into auditory and visual learners, and some of them were then randomly assigned to two groups that received the same content in a different form — one as an audiobook, the other as text on a screen. Comprehension was checked twice: right after learning and again after 2 weeks, to see what truly stays in the head for the longer term.

The matching effect never showed up — not right after learning, nor after two weeks⁴. What’s more, one group simply won across the board. People with a visual preference did better on both tests — both when listening and when reading. The auditory label didn’t help even where it should have helped most, namely when listening to a recording. On its own it neither shielded the learner from a worse result nor strengthened their learning — it turned out to be simply irrelevant.

So where does this stubborn sense come from, that I do have my style and that it means something? Your favorite way of learning is usually the one in which, for some reason, you feel confident and capable. Often this isn’t the channel through which you learn better at all, but rather the type of task that simply comes easily to you¹. The mechanism at work is like wearing a favorite shirt: you put it on because you feel good in it, not because you suddenly run faster in it. You mistake preference for ability, and ability for a supposed style.

So let’s return to the claim we started with. It’s the material that decides, not your style of information uptake. You learn a map or a chart with your eyes, because these are by nature spatial objects that have to be seen. You learn the pronunciation of a foreign word and a melody with your ears, because that’s pure sound. A procedure, an experiment, or a dance step you’ll only learn with your muscles, once you actually perform it. The question worth asking, then, isn’t “what type am I” but “what does this particular knowledge demand.” The first question leads nowhere, while the second immediately suggests how to go about learning.

The whole self-education industry sells tests, courses, and aids supposedly tailored to visual or auditory learners. Glimsy does exactly the opposite — it doesn’t ask what type you are, because there’s nothing to ask. A flashcard is simply a question you have to answer from your own head. What you do with that flashcard, though, to wrap it in your favorite form — that’s your preference.

What does all of this mean for you day to day? Next time you study, don’t start with the question of what type you are, because that’s a dead end. Look first at the material itself and ask what it demands of you. At the outset this may bring a sense of chaos and a shift in habits. Yet it’s precisely this small change of routine that will help you most. So before you learn, see what the material looks like, hear what it says to you, and go in the direction it wants to lead you.