The Scene staff
Wouldn’t it be cool to use more than 10 percent of your brain? Imagine what you could accomplish if you tapped into that other 90 percent.
Actually, it’s pointless to think about it. The popular notion that we use only 10 percent of our brains is completely bogus.
Different parts of the human brain are constantly working, whether we are doing mindless things like breathing and walking — or writing a column past deadline.
The sum of these efforts results in 100 percent of our brains being used in a day, according to John Henley, a neurologist at The Mayo Clinic.
The pervasiveness of the misconception in pop culture is interesting to me. Recently, I have been reading about the brain and have found other common myths.
1. Multi-tasking is efficient
I have never felt like I was a good multi-tasker, but I have repeatedly heard others say they can perform multiple tasks simultaneously more productively than single tasks. I was skeptical, but I didn’t want to be dismissive.
My suspicions were confirmed when I learned that the scientific consensus is that multi-tasking does not technically exist. People who believe they are doing more than one thing simultaneously are actually switching between tasks very quickly.
On top of that, in a scientific-journal piece called “Cognitive Control in Media Multi-taskers,” Stanford professors reported that those who task-switch frequently are prone to more distractions than those who don’t.
All in all, I was glad to learn that multi-tasking is inefficient. After years of hearing my brother brag that he gets more done when he is doing two things at once, I can feel better knowing he is really distracting himself into unproductivity.
2. Memories are trustworthy
When some people recall important events in their lives, they throw out small details to illustrate the sharpness of their memories. For example, “I can still remember the bright-pink tie he wore that day.”
Crazily enough, our brains are capable of fabricating memories that feel just as vivid as the real ones.
Psychologist and University of California, Irvine professor Elizabeth Loftus performed experiments that showed people often create memories of events that never occurred.
She performed one experiment that consisted of asking people if they remembered a time when they were 5 or 6 years old and got lost in a shopping mall. The story concluded with an elderly couple helping them find their parents.
Of course, no such thing happened to these people. Yet an astounding 25 percent claimed to remember the event. Some even added specific details.
Other stories in the study involved people being hospitalized overnight or having an accident at a family wedding with similar results.
We also are prone to believing something if we hear it often enough, a phenomenon known as the “illusion of truth.”
This explains, in part, why some people still are convinced that President Barack Obama is a Muslim from a foreign country. They’ve simply heard it so many times that they’re blind to the contradicting evidence.
The illusion of truth really wigs me out. Sometimes I can’t remember what news I have heard from legitimate or untrustworthy sources, making me skeptical of many things I recall.
3. Mozart makes you smarter
This myth started when the late Dr. Albert Tomatis, an internationally known ear, nose and throat specialist, found a slight improvement in IQ after people listened to Mozart. This resulted in generations of fetuses being bombarded with classical music in the womb.
However, the legitimacy of the study has been frequently questioned over the years. No scientists have been able to replicate his results, making the original conclusion suspect.
The notion that playing an instrument makes you smarter also was questioned in a 2013 Harvard study.
While it is a bummer to hear that my years of guitar playing didn’t make me any smarter, I am at least happy I figured this out before I tortured my future child with classical music.