Debunking Myths About the Mind
Spoiler alert: It’s a lie that we only use 10% of our brain.
I was wandering around on the rabbit-hole-that-is-the-internet a few weeks ago and found an infographic about learning styles that I thought was interesting. I wanted to find the source of the information, but the infographic referenced another infographic, and back and back it went until I realized there was no legitimate source to trace it back to.
This got me wondering, what other commonly held beliefs about the mind are wrong? I started to do some digging, and here are three of the top neuromyths that I uncovered.
We (do not) use only 10% of our brain.
This misinformation started in the 1890s with Harvard psychologist William James. He argued that in comparison to a prodigy, the average person uses only a fraction of their brain. This idea was then popularized in the 1930s by a man named Lowell Thomas. He wrote the introduction to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and in it, he talks about William James’ theory and adds in the fictional 10%.
“This myth is so wrong that it’s almost laughable” states neurologist Barry Gordon in this 2008 Scientific American article. In this same article neurologist John Henley states that “Evidence would show over a day you use 100 percent of the brain.” Brain scans have shown that regardless of what someone is doing, all areas of the brain are always active in varying degrees.
The fact that this article and others like it are over a decade old and we’re still talking about this 10% myth tells me that there’s something sticky about this idea that we don’t want to let go of. Dr. Gordon believes that we’re holding on to this myth because of what it might mean about our own brain. Basically, we hope that there’s more potential because we know there are areas in our own lives where we fall short.
You are (not) a visual/auditory/kinesthetic learner.
There are dozens of courses, trainings, and companies built on the idea that you can improve learning by matching activities to a given learning style. In reality, there is no science to back it up.
Nancy Chick, assistant director for the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, states that “there is no evidence to support the idea that matching activities to one’s learning style improves learning.” While we like to put statistics in all of these neat boxes, it has never been proven that 40% of us are visual learners, and 30% are auditory, etc. Scientists have tried proving that there are different types of learners and have not ever found it to be true.
Harold Pashler and his co-authors, in the paper titled Learning Styles, Concepts and Evidence state:
“The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing.”
While it may be true that certain topics better lend themselves to certain styles of teaching, the reality is that it’s not as easy to quantify people into these categories as we would like.
Humans (do not) have shorter attention spans than goldfish.
I’ve seen this in many slide decks with the ever-popular goldfish stock photography. You know, the one with the lone goldfish jumping out of the bowl, caught in mid-air? Classic.
There are statistics thrown around that say our attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds in the last few decades, being beaten out by the 9-second attention span of a goldfish.
In 2017 Simon Maybin of BBC News did some digging into this and, to make a long story short, (for those of you with the fabled 8-second attention span) he was not able to trace this statistic to any concrete research backing it up. Tracing through the lineage of the story, Maybin went from the original Microsoft cited study to the figures sourced from Statistic Brain to the originally listed sources, and nowhere along the way was anyone that he spoke to able to find the research backing up the statistics.
Well, it turns out that not only does this theory not hold water (get it?) but there’s also no evidence to support the argument that goldfish only have 9-second attention spans to begin with. The research doesn’t even exist.
The pop-culture counter-argument here is the well-known Netflix Binge. If we have such short attention spans, how can we sit for hours on end consuming media?
