Top Ten Myths About the Brain
When it comes to this complex, mysterious, fascinating organ, what do—and don’t—we know?
By Laura Helmuth
1. We use only 10 percent of our brains.
This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during fetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception, movement or emotion.2. “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed and persistent.
We all have memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a snapshot, usually of some shocking, dramatic event—the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks of September 11, 2001. People remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they saw or heard. But several clever experiments have tested people’s memory immediately after a tragedy and again several months or years later.3. It’s all downhill after 40 (or 50 or 60 or 70).
It’s true, some cognitive skills do decline as you get older. Children are better at learning new languages than adults—and never play a game of concentration against a 10-year-old unless you’re prepared to be humiliated. Young adults are faster than older adults to judge whether two objects are the same or different; they can more easily memorize a list of random words, and they are faster to count backward by sevens.But plenty of mental skills improve with age. Vocabulary, for instance—older people know more words and understand subtle linguistic distinctions. Given a biographical sketch of a stranger, they’re better judges of character. They score higher on tests of social wisdom, such as how to settle a conflict. And people get better and better over time at regulating their own emotions and finding meaning in their lives.
4. We have five senses.
Sure, sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch are the big ones. But we have many other ways of sensing the world and our place in it. Proprioception is a sense of how our bodies are positioned. Nociception is a sense of pain. We also have a sense of balance—the inner ear is to this sense as the eye is to vision—as well as a sense of body temperature, acceleration and the passage of time.5. Brains are like computers.
We speak of the brain’s processing speed, its storage capacity, its parallel circuits, inputs and outputs. 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.
This is one of the most enduring legacies of the old “brains are electrical circuits” metaphor.But one of the biggest discoveries in neuroscience in the past few decades is that the brain is remarkably plastic. In blind people, parts of the brain that normally process sight are instead devoted to hearing. Someone practicing a new skill, like learning to play the violin, “rewires” parts of the brain that are responsible for fine motor control. People with brain injuries can recruit other parts of the brain to compensate for the lost tissue.
7. A conk on the head can cause amnesia.
Next to babies switched at birth, this is a favorite trope of soap operas: Someone is in a tragic accident and wakes up in the hospital unable to recognize loved ones or remember his or her own name or history. (The only cure for this form of amnesia, of course, is another conk on the head.)8. We know what will make us happy.
In some cases we haven’t a clue. We routinely overestimate how happy something will make us, whether it’s a birthday, free pizza, a new car, a victory for our favorite sports team or political candidate, winning the lottery or raising children. Money does make people happier, but only to a point—poor people are less happy than the middle class, but the middle class are just as happy as the rich. We overestimate the pleasures of solitude and leisure and underestimate how much happiness we get from social relationships.9. We see the world as it is.
We are not passive recipients of external information that enters our brain through our sensory organs. Instead, we actively search for patterns (like a Dalmatian dog that suddenly appears in a field of black and white dots), turn ambiguous scenes into ones that fit our expectations (it’s a vase; it’s a face) and completely miss details we aren’t expecting. In one famous psychology experiment, about half of all viewers told to count the number of times a group of people pass a basketball do not notice that a guy in a gorilla suit is hulking around among the ball-throwers.10. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most biased, least reproducible, worst designed and most overinterpreted research in the history of science purports to provide biological explanations for differences between men and women. Eminent neuroscientists once claimed that head size, spinal ganglia or brain stem structures were responsible for women’s inability to think creatively, vote logically or practice medicine. Today the theories are a bit more sophisticated: men supposedly have more specialized brain hemispheres, women more elaborate emotion circuits. Though there are some differences (minor and uncorrelated with any particular ability) between male and female brains, the main problem with looking for correlations with behavior is that sex differences in cognition are massively exaggerated.
The blended senses of synesthesia: Synesthetes can taste numbers, feel colors or have other sensations triggered by sensations. Studies of their brains could provide clues for neurological disorders.
Like synesthesia, many neurological disorders — such as schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, depression and epilepsy — have been linked to abnormal communication between brain regions. The hope is that as neuroscientists learn about how the connections in the synesthetic brain differ from those in normal brains, they will also gain insight into how these differences develop — and how they sometimes manifest as harmful disorders.
Photo: Some people with synesthesia might associate sounds with colors. Credit: Pascal Broze / Getty Images
(Source: Los Angeles Times)
Pictured above is the cross-section of the hippocampus of a mouse. This photograph brilliantly displays the inner workings of the neurons in our brain’s memory center, as the somas of each individual neuron can be seen as small circles scattered throughout. The hippocampus is visible directly below the outer layer of the cerebral hemispheres, otherwise known as the neocortex.
nanobot replacing a neuron.
“Perception and imagination are linked because the brain uses the same neural circuits for both functions. Imagination is like running perception in reverse. The reason it’s so difficult to imagine truly novel ideas has to do with how the brain interprets signals from your eyes. The images that strike your retina do not, by themselves, tell you with certainty what you are seeing. Visual perception is largely a result of statistical expectations, the brain’s way of explaining ambiguous visual signals in the most likely way. And the likelihood of these explanations is a direct result of past experience.
Entire books have been written about learning, but the important elements for creative thinkers can be boiled down to this: Experience modifies the connections between neurons so that they become more efficient at processing information. Neuroscientists have observed that while an entire network of neurons might process a stimulus initially, by about the sixth presentation, the heavy lifting is performed by only a subset of neurons. Because fewer neurons are being used, the network becomes more efficient in carrying out its function.
The brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat. It doesn’t want to waste energy. That’s why there is a striking lack of imagination in most people’s visualization of a beach sunset. It’s an iconic image, so your brain simply takes the path of least resistance and reactivates neurons that have been optimized to process this sort of scene. If you imagine something that you have never actually seen, like a Pluto sunset, the possibilities for creative thinking become much greater because the brain can no longer rely on connections shaped by past experience.”
dvdp:
Diffusion Spectrum Imaging, A new imaging technique, developed at Massachusetts General Hospital, makes it possible to see in detail how neural fibers criss-cross the brain and connect its regions. Read more
//via wanderlustmind
Cells of the Cerebral Cortex
This beautiful work came from the brain of artist Katherine Dowson in more ways than one:
I had an MRI scan as part of the research into Dyslexia and all the resulting work ‘My Soul’ and ‘Brain Bricks’ are of my life size brain. ‘Memory of a Brain Malformation’ is a Venus Ulterior Malformation that was successfully lasered out of my cousins brain.
A view of the neuropil (region of synaptic connectivity in the vertebrate brain) in a zebrafish.
Image by Karina Palma, Universidad de Chile.
God is in The Neurons (by AtheneWins)
Why love evolved
The instinct of mating when looking at modern day emotions branches out to a member of one’s group, after the trust is set towards the member of one group, grooming, and courting can take place, after the grooming, and courting within the human brain love can begin . This whole process seems like it contradicts the Darwinian goal of passing down your genes. It is easy to think that evolution would be in favor of the organism that could pass on his genes many times other than being with just one person. Normally yes, but in human evolution love plays a strong important function. When two people are in love, and have a child, both parents will more likely be there to assist in raising the child thus a succession in passing down the genes to a future generation. If a parent is not their (particularly the male) the female, and the child would have a greater chance at not living. For an example of this, if a woman is 6 months pregnant 200,000 years ago, and a predator approaches her. For the woman carrying the child this would be extremely difficult for the woman to either successfully fend off the predator, or to successfully run away from the predator.
brainhacking101.blogspot.com
Red = Neurons
Green = Astrocytes/glia
Blue = Cell nucleiSorry for neurosphere spam, but I thought these were particularly beautiful.
(Source: the-lost-art-of)
A confocal projection of a transgenic mouse cerebral cortex expressing YFP in neuronal subsets. (via BSU)
(Source: tall-giraffe)
cwnl:
What is Deja-Vu?
(Source: ikenbot)
