CORRECTING 5 BIG BRAIN MYTHS
1 You use way more than 10 percent of your brain.
When it comes to commonly repeated misconceptions, the idea that you use only 10 percent of your brain is right up there. In fact, says
Dr. Tarawneh, “while brain regions are not necessarily all active at the same time, all brain regions are used to some extent over the day, depending on what we are doing.”
2 You’ve got more than five senses.
Beyond the big five (vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste), there are several other ways we perceive the world, neurologists say. One is equilibrioception, or balance, which is regulated by the vestibular system in the inner ear. Another is proprioception, the sense of where our bodies are in space, which keeps us from bumping into things. Others include our sense of pain, our sense of temperature, and our sense of time. There are also internal senses, which tell us when we’re hungry or thirsty or when we have to go to the bathroom.
3 Amnesia doesn’t cause you to forget who you are.
Instead of losing their self-identity, amnesiacs actually lose the ability to recall the past (which is known as retrograde amnesia) or the ability to learn new information (anterograde amnesia). A study from the United Kingdom found that amnesiacs may also have problems imagining scenarios for the future (such as whether they would enjoy a party) because these are often based on past experiences.
4 There’s no such thing as a “left-” or “rightbrained” person.
The myth of having a dominant brain hemisphere may have come from experiments performed in the 1960s on people who’d had the connections between the two halves of their brains severed (which at the time was a treatment for severe epilepsy). But most of our brains aren’t split in two, so the halves function as a unit. Each half may perform separate functions within a task—for instance, our ability to express and understand language happens in the left hemisphere, but other aspects of language processing, such as intonation, rhythm, and stress of words, occur in the right. For you to carry out most tasks successfully, the two hemispheres of your brain need to interact.
5 Helmets don’t prevent concussions.
According to the Weill Cornell Concussion and Brain Injury Clinic, a helmet doesn’t stop the brain from banging around inside your skull, which is the cause of a concussion. So what is the point of wearing one? Helmets prevent skull fractures, which can also injure your brain.