Brain myths busted
It seems like general knowledge that people don’t use most of their brains, or that you have a creative and a logical brain side. But is it actually true? Before you share one of these brain ‘facts’ with your friends during the next party, you should know that many of them are in fact wrong. Here are some of the top brain myths busted!
You only use 10% of your brain
I’ve heard this one many times: you only use 1,5, or 10% of your brain. There is even movies (Limitless, 2011; Lucy, 2014) about drugs that let you use 100% of your brain and makes you a super-human. This myth, however, is so wrong, there is even a whole wikipedia page dedicated to how wrong it is.
You may have guessed it by now: the truth is that we actually use most of our brain most of the time. It would also be a huge waste if 20% of our bodies energy goes to an organ which we don’t really use. This idea probably emerged in the late-19th/early-20th century and snowballed ever since. I mean, it really is an attractive idea that we could somehow ‘dip’ into this unused potential by using drugs, meditation, sports, or others.
Fact is, that over a normal day we will use 100% of our brains. Even areas that are not being used need activity of inhibitory neurons that stop other neurons from sending signals. Although activity is lower, we also use most of our brains while we sleep.
Myth busted.
The right hemisphere is the creative one
Chances are that you came across this very commons myth: the left brain is responsible for logic (math, analytics), whereas the right hemisphere makes us creative. Differences in left and right brain hemisphere, called lateralisation, are very much fact. For example, our right hemisphere controls the movements of our left body and vice versa.
The two hemispheres, however, are very well connected and constantly communicate via the corpus callosum (nerve fibre tract that connects right and left brain).
The idea that one side is logical and the other is creative comes from observations in patients which had these nerve fibres surgically cut. This procedure was performed to treat epilepsy. These “split-brain” patients were able to name objects that were recognised with the left brain, but not the right brain. The idea of a dichotomous (two-part) brain was born.
We still don’t understand everything related to the brain, and some lateralisation regarding functions definitely exists. Nevertheless, we have a good understanding that the whole brain works together to compute most tasks and functions. Therefore, there is no creative or logic brain hemisphere, they both do everything together.
The bigger the brain, the smarter you are
This one might sound strange, but we might associate intelligence to a large head and big brains. Comparing humans to other animals, this is certainly not the case. A blue whale’s brain weighs around 7kg, a human brain a mere 1.2–1.4kg. There are no intelligence tests for blue whales and they are certainly better at many things than us humans (like being sustainable). Yet, I believe it’s safe to say that we are somehow smarter even though we have smaller brains.
But what about comparisons among humans? Einsteins brain only weighed around 1.2kg, which is 200g less than the average male brain, but he was very smart. Myth busted? Not entirely. To make a convincing argument, studies need to assess intelligence and brain size of many more individuals, and it has been done.
A study with 13,600 individuals found a minor correlation between brain size and cognitive function. This correlation explained 2% of the difference in cognitive tasks. These results of course need to be taken with a grain of salt. Questionnaires assessing cognitive tasks can be noisy and are not a direct measure of intelligence. Furthermore, the correlation wasn’t extremely strong and 98% of differences in cognitive tasks come from unidentified factors.
There are more studies that also found a positive correlation between brain size and intelligence. Most likely, however, it’s not the shear size of the brain, but rather the number of neurons and connections. Nevertheless, there is some truth in this myth and researchers are eager to get to the bottom of this.
Alcohol kills brain cells
We wake up after a nights out; pulsating pain in our heads. Immediately, we reach to the aspirin at our nightstand and swear to ourselves: never ever will I drink again. At some point probably everyone wonders how much we damage our brains by drinking. And jokingly we tell our friends that after yesterday night’s binge, we probably lost a million brain cells.
The truth will surprise you and perhaps be soothing before your next alcoholic adventures: brain cells don’t die from alcohol (usually). During development, drinking can have severe consequences on cognitive development. But in adulthood, drinking too much from time to time won’t affect your brain all that much. Neurons may be dysfunctional for the period of intoxication (alcohol is a neurotoxin), but they won’t die.
Severe alcohol abuse and alcohol poisoning, however, are a different pair of shoes. Long-term alcoholism can affect the hippocampus and lead to Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrom — a vitamin B1-deficiency that leads to loss of neurons.
So if you consume alcohol moderately, you don’t have to worry about your brain cells.
