Brain and learning ! *

Today I am going to talk about the paper “Understanding the brain: The birth of a learning science”, particularly about the chapter six: “Dispelling ‘Neuromyths’”. The chapter talks about myths in Neuroscience, and I found very interesting the topics the chapter talks about but specially one caught my attention. Is a myth that I always believe it was true and that I heard a lot of people talking about it. The author gives the myth in the text the following name “But I read somewhere that we only use 10% of our brains”.

The text talk how the myth came, and the hypothesis they give is that it came from Einstein, I am sure you are wondering how could that be and the answer is that he was the first person to say he use only the ten percent of his brain and that research supported this.

The experiment they did to prove the myth was this: They used electric shocks to see which areas react and how they could not see the react they said that those areas were not functional.

Another origin of the myth could have emerged for the composition of the brain. The glial cells are the ones “feed” neurons but they can not transmit the nerve impulse. And besides there in 10 glial cells for 1 neuron so some people thought that this would explain how the “ten percent myth” has come from.

Now in our days there are new techniques to watch this, scientists know more about the composition of the brain so they did a new experiment in patients with local anaesthetic and they saw how all the areas of the brain were active. And they also said that for physiological reasons evolution would not let us waste 90% of our brain.

And that was the end of the myth. When I was reading I really thought the second origin of the myths I told you could be true, but when I read the last experiment I ended up believing that it was false! but it was interesting to know that not everything the people say is true.