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5 Brain myths debunked
- We use only 10% of our brains. PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks. But there's also the fact that highly motivated people score higher on IQ tests, which suggests that we don’t always exercise our minds at 💯% capacity.
- “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed and persistent. Memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a 📸, remember exactly where we were, what we were doing, who we were with, what we saw or heard. But the memories decay over time and without being aware of it, we forget important details and add incorrect ones.
- It’s all downhill after 40 (or 50 or 60 or 70). Plenty of mental skills improve with age. Like vocabulary, tests of social wisdom, regulating emotions and finding meaning in life.
- We have five senses. Sight, smell, 👂🏼, taste and touch are the big ones. But we also have proprioception, nociception, sense of balance, sense of body temperature, acceleration and the passage of time.
- Brains are like computers. The brain doesn’t have a set memory capacity, doesn’t compute the way a 💻 does, & even basic visual perception isn’t passive inputs because we actively interpret, anticipate & pay attention to different elements of the visual world.
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5 More myths about the brain disproved
6. The brain is hard-wired. We can rewire the brain and recruit other parts of the brain to compensate for the lost tissue. Blind people use the 'seeing' part of the brain to 👂🏼.
7. A conk on the head can cause amnesia. Traumatic 🧠 injury can cause the inability to recall past events. But, a brain injury doesn’t selectively impair autobiographical memory.
8. We know what will make us happy. We routinely overestimate how happy something will make us and the things we dread don’t make us as unhappy as expected.
9. We see the world as it is. We have a limited ability to pay attention and plenty of biases about what we expect or want to 👀. Our perception of the world is driven by expectations and interpretations.
10. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. When it comes to perceiving the world, directing attention, learning new skills, encoding memories, communicating (women don’t speak more than men do), judge other people’s emotions (men aren’t inept at this)— men & 👩 have almost entirely overlapping abilities.
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