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more than five senses, science, skepticism, smithsonian, ten percent of your brain, top ten brain myths
Here’s a great article from the Smithsonian about the commonly held myths that we have about our brains. You’ll find all the classics in here like the 10% brain use myth and others that you didn’t even know were myths. I have provided an outline below if you don’t want to go and read the article yourself.
Top Ten Brain Myths
1. We only use 10% of our brains.
This is contradicted by MRI scans, our knowledge of brain degenerative disease, and evolution. You can get smarter, but you won’t suddenly unlock mind control or telepathy.
2. “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed and persistent.
“Vivid they may be, but the memories decay over time just as other memories do.” Each time you access a memory you subtly reconstruct it, lose information, and add incorrect information. Your memory is not a videotape.
3. It’s all downhill after 40 (or 50 or 60 or 70).
Plenty of mental faculties get better with age, such as social arbitration and vocabulary.
4. We have five senses.
You have many more than that. You may not be able to echolocate or sense heartbeats of prey, but you do have a sense of balance, acceleration, body temperature, and passage of time, among others.
5. Brains are like computers.
“The metaphor fails at pretty much every level: the brain doesn’t have a set memory capacity that is waiting to be filled up; it doesn’t perform computations in the way a computer does; and even basic visual perception isn’t a passive receiving of inputs because we actively interpret, anticipate and pay attention to different elements of the visual world.”
6. The brain is hard-wired.
Neuroscience has found that the brain is remarkably plastic. Damaged parts of the brain can be rewired and new skills like playing an instrument can reorganize certain sections of the brain. The brain is adaptable.
7. A conk on the head can cause amnesia.
Brain injuries and disease do not specifically target areas of the brain that deal with memory and personal information, nor do injuries bring back such functions.
8. We know what will make us happy.
We are terrible at estimating what will make us happy. Riches can leave us miserable and solitude can be very pleasing. When it comes to planning for happiness, we haven’t a clue.
9. We see the world as it is.
“We have a limited ability to pay attention (which is why talking on a cellphone while driving can be as dangerous as drunk driving), and plenty of biases about what we expect or want to see. Our perception of the world isn’t just “bottom-up”—built of objective observations layered together in a logical way. It’s “top-down,” driven by expectations and interpretations.”
10. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
“Certain sex differences are enormously important to us when we’re looking for a mate, but when it comes to most of what our brains do most of the time—perceive the world, direct attention, learn new skills, encode memories, communicate (no, women don’t speak more than men do), judge other people’s emotions (no, men aren’t inept at this)—men and women have almost entirely overlapping and fully Earth-bound abilities.”
Next time you hear anyone using these colloquial myths in conversation I trust that you will correct them.
Nice post :)
Just to be of help, on the last sentence, you wrote “next time you HERE”, which I suppose was meant to be “hear” :P
Thanks for the correction. Post updated.
I’m sure anyone who’s been married will likely disagree with #10. Sure, our brains send signals through dendrites the same way, but value systems are often quite different.
#10 seems to be more about social norms and behaviour, and less about bio-mechanics.
Also, quote “(no, women don’t speak more than men do)” On average, I disagree. For example:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-419040/Women-talk-times-men-says-study.html
Here’s a study that shows men and women’s brains “under the microscope” in different scenarios:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/563705_3
They do sometimes respond significantly differently, and within a variable-controlled lab setting.
There is a lot of psychological research on the communication aspect to back you up Steve, they are wrong on that part of it. But in the most general sense, we are more similar than different.
“But in the most general sense, we are more similar than different.” This is open for wide interpretation. But generally, I still think you’re wrong, and not just about psychological aspects.
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003482.html
img: http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/Brains_resize2.jpg
The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill….
In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of – or connections between – these processing centers.
This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility….
“The study also identified regional differences with intelligence. For example, 84 percent of gray-matter regions and 86 percent of white-matter regions involved with intellectual performance in women were found in the brain’s frontal lobes, compared to 45 percent and zero percent for males, respectively. The gray matter driving male intellectual performance is distributed throughout more of the brain.
I think that you are missing the point here. The brains of women and men are more similar than they are different; that is a factual statement. I do not doubt that there are differences, like the ones that you have mentioned, but these are completely overwhelmed by the similarities (brain function, structure, cognitive processes, neurotransmitter releases, neuronal density, ability to learn, facial recognition processes, biases, information seeking and processing, electrical signal processing, etc.).
In short, to say that we are more different than similar, women and men would have to be of different species. Even our brains when compared to our ape cousins are more similar than different.
Love your blog. Thanks.
To the best of my knowledge, I know of no actual studies on the dangers of cell phone usage while driving. I’d love to know of them. I know that I tend to miss turns when talking on my cell while driving.
And referencing #10 after John Gray, PhD? His degree is from Columbia Pacific University in Mill Valley, CA, a non-accredited institution shut down by the government.
Keep up the good work.
Here is an abstract of a research review showing that cell phone use can increase driving risk.
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