11 fascinating myths about the brain (E)

Good morning, my beautiful beans, and welcome to this Encore episode of the summer break. And if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, then let's call it the winter break. This episode that we have chosen is

about 11 myths about the brand that you must know. So some of them are really obvious myths that you've probably heard debunked and others are not so obvious. And I had so much fun putting this episode together. It's a great episode to listen to if you want to drop some fun facts.

in the next dinner that you're at or conversation that you're at. It's a good conversation starter. So if you're interested in the brain in social psychology and pop psychology, then 100% you want to be listening to this episode to separate fact.

from fiction, it is a vibe. Hope you're having a great holiday if you are on holidays, by the way. Love you so much, enjoy. I was actually listening to an article, someone on YouTube, a neuroscientist talking about this. And what has actually gone down, and the reason why a lot of these myths occur or evolve into mainstream pop culture,

in the first place is because there's a lot of you know scientific articles that will get published in scientific journals and then you'll get someone that writes an article for a magazine or a newspaper based on a snippet or one thing that was said in that scientific journal but didn't actually

go through that journal article properly, didn't actually go through what was being said, what actually was proven or disproven. They just take like a snippet of information here and then say, this is a new fact about the brain, it is what it is. At times, there's even been articles about something that was done, you know, how to treat a certain cancerous cell within a petri dish. And then an article's come out saying, oh, this particular compound cures cancer.

You know, so you're not comparing what's occurring in a petri dish to what actually happens within the human body completely differently. So that's an example. And because of that, then you like really skew. It's kind of, it's kind of like Chinese whispers on speed and it ends up the article to the mainstream.

culture ends up being an absolute like bastardization of what the scientific journal was in the first place to the extent that sometimes it says the actual opposite of what the scientific journal article said or what the study set out to prove or disprove, right? So that's how they occur and then they just keep getting like spread and there's a lot of people that have

try to certain method of teaching something a certain way and then it becomes a gospel and then people debunk it. All these things, okay? So I'm going to be going through, I don't have a brain factor for today because they're all brain facts. So I'm going to be going through 11 points for today's episode. I'm excited. Share these, share these with people. They're just fun, like, what do you call it? Party, it's not really a party trick, but fun, like little anecdotes to tell when you have nothing else to talk about. So let's get straight into it.

Brain myth number one, and I'm going to start with a really obvious one, a really popular one, is this idea that you only use 10% of your brain. You actually use all of your brain pretty much all the time, just at different intensities. If you didn't use it, you would lose it.

What you want to look at when you come to maximizing your brain's potential is all about your ability for attentional focus. How can you steer your focus and your mind in like a laser way for longer periods of time to really maximize your memory, to maximize your productivity? Most of us have a lot of scattered focus and therefore we don't feel like we're maximizing our brain's potential, okay? So you still use all of your brain

Just not efficiently. That's the problem. So when someone says, oh, we only use 10% of our brain, obviously bullshit. What a waste of space and energy in the body. Your brain takes up 20% of your energy consumption. 20%. Your brain. It's insane. So you're using it all the time.

The issue is that we have just so many distractions and so many things that are pulling us in different directions, so many different emotions that it's really easy to end up, you know, as we all know, stuck on social media, scrolling for hours and, you know, this laser beam focus to really maximize your day and maximize your abilities is, you know, it can be honed into a whole lot better, which we don't do, most of us don't do every day.

But that's what we should be focusing on. It's all about maximizing your brain's potential with what's already going in there and increasing synapses between the cells and things like that, improving your cognitive reserve, which have spoken about a million times.

Number two, learning styles. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but I'm going to mention it here. Hate to bust a lot of people's bubbles, but learning styles is a myth. It's a myth. And I know some of you are thinking, wait a minute, but I'm a visual learner and I know that for a fact. That's anecdotal and you're gonna find out why it's not actually a scientific fact in a second. So the idea that someone's a visual learner or an auditory learner or a kinesthetic learner is a myth.

However, it's so ingrained in our society and in the education system and a lot of educators, obviously not all, but a lot of educators and people in general, that it's continuously taught. It's been taught and it continues to be taught in a lot of schools around the world as well, but it's been debunked many times. Researcher and PhD, her name's Abhinol.

She studies learning styles and she said that it started kind of around the late 80s and 90s around this self-esteem movement is what she called it, where everyone was unique and everyone was special and therefore everyone must have a unique learning style as well that should be catered to, right? So in one of many studies that was done around this topic of learning styles, students who were told what their learning style was or who identified what their learning style was still didn't study in a way that reflected that

And when they did, like when they were made to study in a way that reflected what they thought their learning style was or what they were told their learning style was, it did not improve their overall scores compared to controls. So what's happening is that they get into habits and they tell themselves on this kind of learner. And I can't learn in that other modality. So they already set themselves up to expect less for themselves.

What it actually comes down to is that people have different abilities and strengths in their abilities, but not different learning styles. And for most things, there is only one correct way of learning it, or one superior, more efficient way of learning it. Like you can't learn how to drive unless you physically do it. No matter how many audio fucking tapes you listen to about driving, you can't do it. It's not going to cut it.

You will never learn to speak a language if you don't practice speaking it. You could listen to it all day long. You could listen to every film in a language and then try and speak it, impossible. Now, one thing that I used to get all the time is people telling me, I need to say you when I would pay tea, like, group fitness and all that. I need to say you do something. I need to say you do something.

And some things like being instructed to squat. Most people would rather look at someone demonstrate a squat because they claim that they are a visual learner. But just because you prefer to watch someone squat and copy it does not mean that you're squatting properly. Most of the time you can watch someone squat and you squat and you're doing a shit job.

But you just think, oh, that's how I love better because I've watched you do it. Sometimes verbal cues allow you to do a better job. Just because one style is easier to take in, like through your eyes, it does not mean that you are then able to perform that task better. And I can fucking tell you, after teaching people to do a basic squat for over 10 years,

I can testify that verbal cues help people squat better than me demonstrating a squat any day of the week. And it's so harmful when you pigeonhole yourself into a quote unquote learning style, you limit yourself to thinking that you're not going to excel in other areas and therefore you're less likely to try something or you're less likely to commit. If you go into a class and someone's verbally queuing and you're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm a visual learner.

You're subconsciously shutting yourself off thinking, oh, I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to get it. They're telling me what to do. When in reality, you probably would do a really good job at it if everyone else is doing it. Because if the masses can do it, the chances are, so can you. Number three, memory does not necessarily go down with aging.

Some forms of memory do a little bit, episodic memory, which is like who, what, when, where, why does decline a little bit, but procedural memory, like the skill of doing something and your memory for vocabulary will continue to get better and better and better with age. If you work on it, obviously use it or lose it kind of thing. So if you're always working on it, if you're a writer or you read novels, you consume novels like crazy,

your vocab is going to keep getting better and better and better well into your 90s, right? However, dementia, obviously, and other forms of degeneration are a different thing altogether, but they don't go hand in hand with aging, while it's way more common to get dementia in older age for many reasons. It doesn't mean that old age equals degeneration necessarily.

And if your cognitive reserve is really good, that scene, I've spoken about cognitive reserve. I'll quickly recap what I mean in case you haven't listened to episodes where I speak about that. Cognitive reserve is basically like a backup reserve. So imagine that the analogy I used last time is like a tree. Imagine you've got this tree and there's like a couple of leaves on it. There, let's imagine that those leaves are kind of like your neural

connections, neurons and neural connections, right? There's like a decent amount of leaves but nothing crazy. You give that tray a really big shake and all these leaves fall and then you're left with half the leaves maybe. Imagine then that you've got a tree like filled with all these leaves and connections and filled, filled, filled, like all the leaves represent, you know, connectivity, neurons, that's filled.

You give that tree the same shake that you gave the other tree and you get the same fall of the leaves. But because you had more leaves to start with, you have way more connections remaining. Okay. So that's my analogy for cognitive reserve. As you start to decline because, and the reason why you get declined with age is often because you are doing less tasks, you slow down, you are moving less, you're probably, well,

maybe not always, but sometimes they eat worse when they're older, maybe not as much, or maybe they're eating too much of one food style, less social, less cognitive demanding tasks. You start to lose certain connectivity.

And that's where then when you do get degeneration, if you've then not worked on all those other things, then you're going to get the onset of dementia and other degenerative diseases, you're going to get the onset of the symptoms a lot earlier. But if someone's got really great cognitive reserve, whereas they're always doing something, they're keeping their routine, they're exercising, eating well, they're really social, speaking different languages, learning new skills,

Then, as they get a bit of degeneration in some areas, their cognitive reserve is good enough that's going to hold them up to quite late in life. In most cases, of course, this does not speak for every single individual case. Now, what does seem to happen with that user or loser phenomenon is that

Memory seems to become a lot poorer when people get older, but this could be due to a lack of them using their minds the way they used to before they retired. So one of my lecturers that I had at the Brain and Mind Centre, she worked very closely with centenarians or close to centenarians around Australia. And these guys were in their late 90s, early 100s.

And they were trying to study what was it that made them different, and how were they performing very independently, so sharply, at all these tasks at such an old age. And they found that these centenarians never really retired.

They all kept busy. One of them was an accountant. He was like 98 or 99 and he'd go into his office every fucking day. Okay, physically he's slower. He might be a little bit slower at certain things, but he's still keeping busy and they had this strong sense of purpose. And for those that didn't work a job with an income, they were going and volunteering to places. They were going and, you know, helping out here or meeting these groups of people. They had set routines where they would see their friends and do this and play golf and socialize and blah, blah, blah, blah.

What they didn't do was like, I'm retired now. Let's just relax and sit back and let's not set an alarm. No, they all got up early. They routine routine routine purpose, purpose, work, work, work, work, work. You have to use it or you lose it. So these people were like, why retire? What am I going to do? Sit around? Especially a lot of them found things that they enjoyed doing. Like this guy that was the accountant, fucking loved it. And that was just like he had loved his life. And so he was always,

doing that kind of stuff. There were still a lot of them were still driving. They were just doing all these things because they didn't slow down at the typical age of retirement. And that is crucial. And if you're doing that, then your memory doesn't necessarily have to go down, especially your procedural memory.

Number four, you are not, every time you lightly hit your head, you are not losing brain cells. Do you remember when, I don't know if you guys did this in primary school, but I remember in primary school, kids would run around and like, lightly hit your head and be like, you just lost 100 brain cells, you just lost another 100, you just lost another 100, it doesn't work like that.

Luckily, you are not losing brain cells every time you lightly knock your head. If there's a light knock, there's no evidence whatsoever that you are losing any brain cells as in like neurons or glial cells. The brain is very well cushioned and it's designed to have movement within the brain. The issue is when the blow is enough to have the brain impact on the sides of the walls of the skull. If there's significant impact

that there's bruising or swelling or bleeding, then this can cause obviously cellular loss due to blood supply being cut off through the bruising and bleeding process of when there's too much impact within the brain. But a light knock to the head, and I'm talking a light knock, obviously don't go around fucking knocking your head, is not going to make you lose 100 brain cells like they used to make you believe in primary school.

We're not the teachers. I'm talking like your peers in primary school. Am I the only person that I don't know I feel like that was just something that was done around school anyway Number five you don't need to be knocked unconscious to suffer a concussion right a concussion is a mild Traumatic brain injury okay, so after a hit or a blow to the head or violent shaking of the head or whiplash etc

you're going to get inflammation that occurs within the brain because what happens is your brain obviously you get impact to one side of the brain right then your brain bounces wherever you say you got impact to the back of your head your brain then rushes through

through the cerebral spinal fluid that's cushioning and holding your brain. They're floating within the skull. It smashes to the front of your head and then smashes back again to the back of your head. So it does this shaking forward and back. If you hit your head on the side really hard, it does that same shaking, but side to side. And what happens is you can get quite a bit of bruising and inflammation.

when that happens to the brain because the brain is actually very soft, okay, very soft. So it's quite easy that when it hits the, like part of the skull, the brain squishes into that part of the skull and there's a lot of stretching and tearing that can happen to that part of the brain that's been hit on the side of the skull. Obviously you need a big enough blow that's going to create that impact within the cushioning.

But that's what concussion is. And when that happens, it's going to lead to symptoms of concussion. But the inflammation and that damage, the bruising, the bleeding, that can occur without being knocked unconscious. And being knocked out does not necessarily mean that the injury that you sustained is

worse, it might or might not be. Only around 10% of concussions include the person blacking out, okay? So you could hit your head quite hard, obviously headache is a main one, but then other symptoms can be, you know, fatigue. So you might just feel fatigued for the next few days and that could be that you had...

A concussion. And a lot of scans also don't pick up on concussion or the damage that's caused by a concussion because scans often don't really look out for that kind of stuff. Scans look for activity within the brain. So it's hard to know where the activity is, you know, what's been bruised, what's not in a lot of scans. Okay. Now another myth.

is that after a concussion you should be doing something called cocooning and that is being in a dark room with no stimulus all day long and avoiding any sort of activity but now researchers reckon that cocooning straight after a concussion might make the symptoms worse so instead what you should be doing is just light activity like walking listening to like calming music or like a

Something relaxing, light work if you feel up to the task, but not if it feels strenuous, like if you feel, oh no, I'm actually quite tired, then obviously rest. But puzzles and things like that are really good. And then of course, when you do go to bed, having like a really decent night's sleep, sleep is, you know, crucial for it. But just to be awake in a dark room doing fuck all is actually not going to help the symptoms at all. Number six.

IQ tests do not actually accurately measure intelligence. They measure cognitive capacity in certain domains. But the test doesn't take into account all other parts of what intelligence is. For example, you might have the potential or capacity to learn at a ridiculously fast rate and retain a whole lot of information on certain things that that test is not testing for.

And you might have a lot of abilities that cannot just be answered on a piece of paper that do correlate with intelligence, like a lot of coordination abilities or future planning or predicting or problem solving activities that might not correlate with how the IQ test is laid out. So it will roughly measure what it is testing for at that point in time.

not really, like it is quite hard to measure intelligence overall. You can measure intelligence in certain domains for sure, but just overall intelligence is actually very hard to measure. Number seven, we're back to the concussion topic. Sleep after a concussion. So you might have heard that it's terrible to go to sleep in the hours following a concussion. And that was because there was this myth of this belief that sleep could cause you to slip into a coma or die.

Right, I believed that when I was a keto tenager, even before I studied the brain, I was like, oh my God, you cannot sleep after a concussion, or especially after you've blacked out and then came to. But sleep is actually not the issue. The reason why they say that they don't want you falling asleep.

is because when the person is asleep, it's not possible to be aware of the signs of serious brain damage that normally show up soon, like in the hours following the blow to the head. So it's more so for the people around the person than the person who's sleeping. When you're slurring or suffering a seizure, big seizures or minor seizures, weakness to one side of your body, all of that

Either you should be awake to be aware of those things or you should be around someone that's going to notice things that you might not be noticing that your behavior might be different if you've had like a big hit to the head. So kind of until you seek medical attention and you get like the all clear or like a really good check, it is recommended that you don't sleep. So you don't miss out on any vital cues about the state of your brain. Okay. And after seeking medical attention and receiving the all clear, which really anyone should be doing after a big hit to the head.

Then you'll get a really good idea if you can now rest or sleep or what you should be doing and you're obviously the physician will tell you what you need to do.

But things to look out for are, if you struggle to carry a conversation, if you have dilated pupils, difficulty walking, then you definitely need to get medical attention. And then after the Auckland sleeping and rest is, like, sleeping is one of the best ways to recover from a concussion. Most of the deep repair work in your brain and body is only done in your sleep. And kind of like what I said before, you want to avoid crazy stimulation, like operating machinery and

something that like working really hard. It's all light, light to gentle tasks, light puzzles, things that are relaxing, things that are calming. That's what you want to be doing. Okay. And then of course you want to be seeking medical advice as to if you should be taking any medication or not. Okay. So definitely go to a doctor if you think you have suffered a concussion.

Now, number eight, left-brained and right-brained people. It is a myth. This idea that logical thinking and intellectual people are left-brained. And if you're more creative and artistic and free-spirited, you are right-brained.

Both sides of your brain are used equally. You don't have a dominant side that's going to determine if you're creative or if you're more of an intellect, okay? It just doesn't work that way. The brain doesn't work that way at all. There is no extra activity in one side of the brain if you are logical and the same goes for the other side of the brain if you are creative. There are certain regions of the brain that are localized to one hemisphere, like the language center, for example, which is generally located in the left hemisphere, but

In general, you've got equal communication between both hemispheres all the time. If you didn't, and one was fully dominant, and the other hemisphere was just like cruising, then you would, I would imagine, I would guess that you would probably have a disparity in like a differences in the sizes of the hemispheres. So that just doesn't work. That's totally been debunked. There've been a whole bunch of studies on this one. Number nine, video games.

I'm not bad for your brain so i think a lot of people think that sitting there watching video games all day long going to be bad for your brain it can have secondary it could cause secondary problems that are bad for example it could be addictive to the extent that it draws you away from other tasks it draws you away from socializing and then it could

Leader feelings of being out of place or feelings of anxiety you can have these addictive patterns which are destructive in other areas But if you're someone that would play for example a couple of hours of video games overall in a week the actual The actual activity of playing a video game is not damaging to your brain Obviously if your children are addicted to video games do not let them listen to this because they're gonna take that

10 edges take one piece of information and apply it to what's going to work for them. But you've got to look at it as the activity is not detrimental and if in certain things it can actually help them strengthen different connections in their brain with reaction times and things like that. However,

Any behavior that is going to tap into your addictive pathways where it is pulling you away from a balanced lifestyle is detrimental and will be detrimental in other ways, but I'm talking about directly bad for your brain. No, it is indirectly bad for your brain if it is done too much. Okay? Number 10 contrary to the popular belief drinking alcohol

This is again a directly thing, does not directly kill your brain cells. But don't go celebrating too soon, don't be like, yeah, fuck yeah, it's not gonna damage my brain. There is still a lot of alcohol related brain damage that can occur. Long-term alcohol consumption, especially in larger amounts, even if you're not an alcoholic. What happens is that if you drink a lot of alcohol,

consistently for a long period of time, it can actually cause a lot of issues within your circulation throughout your body, but also within your brain. And poor circulation is one of the biggest factors that are responsible for neurodegeneration. If your cells don't get blood, if your cells don't get oxygen, they don't get the nutrients and it's all fucking game over from there. It's downhill from there. And just because alcohol doesn't kill the brain cells,

It still actually can cause damage to the ends of the neurons at the nerve terminals, okay? So it's not all celebrating, but I think people think alcohol is going to kill your brain cells. No, your number of brain cells, your number of neurons are not dropping down every time you have a glass of wine. That's not what's happening. So don't stress if you just have the occasional drinks here and there. You're probably fine.

the issue is when you're drinking a bit too much and when you're causing that damage to the end of the neurons and also the when you're causing problems with your circulation within the brain okay it does increase stroke risk as well which then of course if you get a stroke that causes crazy extensive damage to the brain and also given how much it can impact

Alcohol impacts the release of GABA, which is major inhibitory neurotransmitter. And it's quite... GABA plays a very important role in the brain. If you're constantly playing around with your GABA levels, then you can potentially, if you're doing it at a higher level, you can potentially then cause extensive damage to the brain when you're fucking around with excitability and inhibition within the brain.

But like I said, will drinking a glass of wine kill some brain cells? No, it will not. Last one. Number 11. Multitasking cannot be done at full capacity. And what I mean by that is we're talking about attention-heavy, focus-heavy tasks. You might think, oh, but I can

I can walk and talk. I can drive and talk. No, because anything that can kind of be, you know, taken over by a subconscious mind, a lot of the movements and things that you do when you're driving or walking is very subconscious activity. So you can talk to people as well.

I'm talking about two focus tasks at the same time, it can't be done. And when you're trying to encode information, when you're constantly dividing your attention back and forth, your ability to encode your information effectively is diminished. So like I said, this is more for high-focus activities. But for example,

This is why you're always losing your keys. This is why, because you're probably trying to do another task and then you've not paid attention to what you're doing. You've come home, you've put your shit somewhere, you've gone somewhere else. Those people that are always losing their shit all the time, they're people that probably multitask all the time. They're people that struggle. If you're always thinking, oh my God, why can't I remember that? Why can't I remember this? Why can't I? Encoding information.

is something that the more focused you are when you're doing the task, it's a lot easier to encode the information, okay? And that's pretty, it makes kind of sense, doesn't it? But that's why when you walk into your home, if you put the keys bang in a particular place that you know for a fact you're always going to put it, it's a lot easier for that routine to be ingrained, being like, boom, I know where the keys are.

You never have to think about that again, but it's a very focused thing of putting them there. When you're busy, when you're fucking around, when you're trying to do them in and things, when you're trying to help someone with their homework, but at the same time you're trying to pay a bill and then you're trying to do this, you're trying to do that. Something's going to give, something's going to crack and that causes more stress and then it ends up taking you longer to do the task than if you did it in a short amount of time.

Now, another big one is when you're trying to have a conversation, I think we think we're better at multitasking than we are, but a lot of people have conversations on their phone, on their mobile phones, on speaker, and they're trying to do other tasks on their phone at the same time that they're talking to the person on the phone. And it is so obvious when someone is doing it to you, because you'll ask them a question, like you'll say, oh, what time is dinner, by the way? And they'll be like, what time's dinner?

um what time is dinner like cunt it doesn't take you fucking 10 minutes to figure out that dinner's at seven o'clock when you're the one that booked it it's they're probably strolling through social media as they're talking to you and they just cannot multitask so they're like really scattered trying to run so when when like and you just see it a mile away i've got like a couple of friends that do it i'm like babe just fucking

Call me when you're free. You know, if you've got shit to do right now, focus on that and then give me a call when you're free. And they're like, oh, no, no, no, no, fine. And then all of a sudden, they're on the ball and they can focus. Do you know why? Because I obviously identified that they're on social media. I say I'm going to leave the phone call and then they get off social media and they give me their full attention. And all of a sudden, the conversation goes from being boring as fuck to very entertaining because they're focused, okay? So the same goes for you. If you're dividing your attention when you're on the phone, don't waste that person's time.

do not waste that time. Just say, look, I'll call you, like, either get off social media, probably what you should be doing, get off your phone and give them your full attention. Or if you don't have time to talk to them, say, do you mind if I call you back in X time? You get the tasks that you're trying to do a lot faster than trying to do it when you're on the phone. And then when you talk to that person, you'll actually enjoy their company over the phone so much more than you are right now while you're trying to do a task.

Alright? Guys, thank you for listening to today's episode. This is my fun brain facts and myths debunked. I'm gonna try and do more of these. I find them very entertaining. Anyway, please share, please tag me in all your stories, good times, and that is all for today's episode. Love you guys so much. You guys are the real MVPs. As always, remember, be kind to yourself, be kind to your brains. Don't take shit from anyone, and especially, don't take shit from yourself. Don't care.

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