WHY BRAIN "EXPERTS" LIE ABOUT HOW MUCH BRAIN YOU USE
How often have I heard a brain "experts" say that "It is a MYTH that you only use 10% of your brain" and "You use ALL of your brain all of the time." ?
How often? It now seems about as often as I see a new dandelion pop up in my back yard.
Years ago I finally learned not to take ANYONE'S word for anything without first THINKING about it. Except my dogs. Then of course, they don't ever actually "say" anything except woof. But then, my dogs never lie. Humans, are something else altogether. Especially the word of "experts", those without letters after their name, or with.
1) To start, any person, scientist or otherwise, who claims that "you use all of your brain all of the time", is inferring that THEY can determine HOW MUCH BRAIN YOU ARE USING. How can ANYONE determine how much brain you are using? Based on WHAT? What is the brain capable of? If a person can tell you what your brain is capable of doing, then they are qualified to tell you how much of that capacity you are using. But there is NO MACHINE nor any person reading such a machine or not anywhere on the planet that can indicate what percentage of your brain potential that you are using. Such a notion that "You are using all of your brain all of the time" is meaningless. What you will have is scientists who will look at a brain scanning machine, and see that you are using one portion or another of your brain to SOME DEGREE, and perhaps one part of your brain showing more relative activity over another portion. This is NOT indicating that you are using ALL OF YOUR BRAIN, because WHAT EXACTLY IS "ALL" of YOUR BRAIN? ???
The brain is capable of doing many things- sometimes we sit an hum a tune, sometimes we calculate math, sometimes we have a memory, sometimes we watch clouds and think very little. The degree and INTENSITY to which neurons communicate with each other to create "thoughts"- silent or otherwise- varies from moment to moment. Sometimes we are alert and our brains are filled with ideas. Sometimes we are in deep sleep. Different parts of the brain are more active than others from moment to moment- this alone indicates that you do NOT use ALL of your brain all of the time. It is true that all your living neurons are in "SOME" state of activity- they are alive and receiving oxygen and nourishment at "SOME LEVEL of activity". Is this what is meant by "We are using all of our brain all of the time" ? That hardly says anything at all, and is about as insightful as saying "We use all of our muscles all of the time". Clearly, we do not "USE" all of our muscles all of the time. We certainly do not tap into the full potential of our leg muscles just because are muscles cells are alive all the time. Nor do we tap into the full potential of our muscles when we walk to 7-11 to fetch a bag of potato chips. Similarly, to state that "You use all of your brain all of the time" says virtually nothing useful about brain use, and it certainly says absolutely nothing about BRAIN POTENTIAL. In fact, it is an outright pompous and self-aggrandizing insult for anyone to belittle the potential and capacity of the human brain by insinuating that they know that "You use all of your brain all of the time." Well, maybe such a person who makes such a statement IS using their whole brain. Sad, if it were true.
2) Allow me to quote: From Sam Wang, Ph.D., associate professor of neuroscience and molecular biology, Princeton University: "Welcome to Your Brain", Bloomsbury Press, 2008, page 6-7, "...If we only use 10% of our brain normally, think what we could do if we could use even a tiny bit of that other 90 percent... This brand of optimism has been exploited by self-help gurus to sell an unending series of programs to improve brainpower...This idea is particularly popular among people who are interested in extrasensory perception and other psychic phenomena...In reality, you use your whole brain every day...One possible explanation for how the ten percent myth got started is that the functions of certain brain regions are complicated enough that the effects of damage are subtle. For instance, people with damage to the cerebral cortex's frontal lobes can often still perform most of the normal actions of everyday life, but they don't select correct behaviors in context. For instance, such a patient might stand up in the middle of an important business meeting and walk out in search of lunch... If big chunks of brain were never used, damaging them would not cause noticeable problems..." Well, I guess its ONLY a brain damaged neuroscientist that would walk out of a pointless and stupid meeting in search of more gratifying activity, like eating a cheese sandwich. I don't know what world Dr. Wang lives in, but I usually can't go more than ten minutes before I see someone acting inappropriately and displaying incorrect behaviors. Usually it's the people running things. People who have a perfectly intact human brain. Further, according to Wang, in contrast to lying self-help brain gurus authors like myself, only in the unending series of brain books written by great molecular biologists can we find the truth.
More details to come, but first let me quote another brain "expert": Richard Davidson, Ph.D, Director of the W.M. Keck Laboratory of Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior at he University of Wisconsin: From "Meditation and Neuroplasticity: Training Your Brain", Explore Magazine, September 2005, page 385: Davidson: "We use all of our brains all of the time. If I measured your brain activity when you were awake, all of the cells in your brain would be active. The idea that people who are trained are using more of their brain is a misguided way to think about it. I would say that the adepts are using their brains more efficiently than you and I might be using ours, but they are not using more of their brains. In certain ways, they may be using less because they are so much more efficient. There is less noise, so they are activating only those portions of the brain that are required to perform certain kinds of tasks." Explore Magazine: "Another myth down the drain." Apparently, Davidson is claiming that "People who are stupid (inefficient) use MORE of their brain than the adepts (smart people)." He seems to imply that the less brain you use, the smarter you are. But he should know better. He operates fMRI machines. First of all, Davidson conveniently ignores previous studies that actually show increased frontal lobes blood flow and activity in meditators. One of many examples: Functional Brain mapping With Meditation, Sara W. Lazar, Herbert Benson, with others. Secondly, Davidson is measuring gamma activity, and his findings show that there is MORE gamma activity in the frontal lobes of experienced meditators with 10,000 or more lotus position hours under their laughing Buddha belts than dolts like me who merely write books or take out the garbage. It does not refute earlier work, such as Lazar's fMRI research (and likely Davidson's own fMRI noodlings)- http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/web/pubs/2004/meditators_synchrony.pdf
Davidson: (above reference) "We found high-amplitude gamma oscillations in the EEGs of long-time practitioners that were not present in the initial baseline.."
I.e, he found something happening in the brains of Monks that doesn't happen at all in people who may be watching Monday Night Football. That sure sounds like there is more of something in one brain than the other.
On my block, MORE is MORE, whether you call it gamma waves, blood flow, or cream cheese.
As for Wang, he must have forgotten what he wrote in his book on page 172, where he informs us that the activity of the amygdala can vary from one moment to the next, as "increased" activity. How can one possibly increase whole brain usage? Such a statement is an oxymoron (self-contradictory).
I would also suggest Wang review Scientific American and its article on radical hemispherictomy, a surgery that removes fully one-half of the cerebrum that does not result in a 50% loss of brain function. Or perhaps he would find some interest in Dandy Walker complex, where massive parts of the cerebrum are dissolved by cerebral spinal fluid- and yet intellect and intelligence may remain normal: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors.html
If the whole brain is being used all the time, how does a person with just 50% or even 10% of his brain continue to function normally? * * *
Okay, so to prove that these experts are telling unambiguous synaptic fibs, allow me first to make an analogy. (The immediately following is educational fiction, just in case your frontal lobes miss my satire and cannot initially fathom my metaphoric purpose...) Julia Child once said that, "If you have a lot of jars, you are probably only using 10% of them. Most of the jars in your cupboard are dormant." Years later, when Julia Child was no more, and the repeat showings of her PBS show ratings began to plummet, she was replaced by Wolfgang Puck. He needed to come up with something new to help establish himself as rising star and expert in TV cooking shows, and so early on to draw a distinction between himself and the former queen of Do-It-Yourself Cooking TV, Puck said, "It's a MYTH!! You use all of your jars all of the time!" This helped to boost his ratings. Before long, housewives all around the country were whispering-- "Did you hear what Puck said?! We're all using all of our jars!! What was the name of that new book he just came out with anyway? I must learn his secret for Pineapple Cheese Wontons!" Okay, so let's examine this so-called myth of the jars... You have a glass or a jar. There is nothing in the glass, perhaps, it is 90% or more empty. Would you say, that the glass is being used? Of course not, it's just sitting there DORMANT. I.e., the glass is not fulfilling its potential to perform its function, which is to hold liquid. I.e. the empty glass is not being used. When you actually pour liquid into the glass, it is then allowed to perform its function of holding liquid. A glass filled with liquid is being used
Similarly, a jar filled with banana yogurt sitting on your refrigerator shelf is being used. An empty jar, or one with just a couple of drops of old banana yogurt sitting on your refrigerator shelf is just taking up space. It is NOT being used. It is a dormant jar. You are better off putting a slice of watermelon in its place. No sense wasting space with unused jars in your refrigerator. In fact, you may have an entire shelf in your fridge full of dormant jars getting very little, if any, use. Maybe you take them out and stare at them from time to time, or perhaps dip your pinkie inside to see if the remnants have become rancid yet. These jars are not broken, but they're just occupying space getting little use except to grow mold. Unoccupied jars in your fridge are not being used.
Alright, we've settled the used and unused jar myth. Indeed, It is not a myth that all of the jars in your refrigerator are being used all of the time. Similarly, an empty glass sitting in your cupboard is not being used. Alrighty then. Whew. Glad we cleared up that misconception. I know, there were millions of people around the country who had been swayed by Wolfgang Pucks good looks and fancy haircut, not to mention his popular corporate sponsored regular PBS series, "All Jars, All The Time".
Let's switch to brains now. Neuroscientists and brain imaging experts love to show off their spanking new shiny $10 million dollar brain scanning machines. Allow me to explain in my un-efficient non-adept way as best I can: A functional MRI machine (fMRI) uses magnetic field detection to measure the change of magnetic fields in soft tissue. It does this by detecting, analyzing, and displaying the magnetic properties found in blood, usually associated with the hydrogen atoms found in the blood flow. It measures the change/increased blood flow to soft tissue organs to show their functional state. From: "The Three Pound Enigma, Shannon Moffett, Stanford University, Algonquin books, 2006- describing an fMRI session: "...In other words, when Gabrieli's students put a subject in the scanner [fMRI] and show her pictures to learn what happens in her brain when she recognizes an image, the scanner records a increase in magnetic signal from the brain areas doing the recognizing. It is this difference in signal dependent on blood oxygen level (the technique is called BOLD, for blood-oxygen-level dependent) that allows scientists to explore how and where we think." In other words, when you use a part of your brain to think in some way, more blood goes to that segment of your brain. When you do not use it so much, the blood flow is reduced. I.e, the level of activity in your brain is not always the same. It changes depending on what you are thinking about. If your brain was always thinking at the same level all of the time, fMRI machines would be totally useless, because it could not detect any change in function in your brain tissues. For example, if somebody put a bucket over your head and started banging on it, your frontal lobes would not light up and reflect nearly as much activity as your brain stem and those parts of your brain responsible for removing the bucket and punching somebody in the nose. and, if I'm not mistaken, that is pretty much the situation we are all walking around in. It's just that the people who are putting buckets over our heads are telling us that it is the latest style in head wear.
Okay then. Cooks all around the world now can not only understand how their ovens work thanks to Julia Child and Wolfgang Puck (admittedly), but after you are done cooking your brownies to perfection, you can also step over to the fMRI machine that you keep in the garage and you can explain to the guy who cuts your grass how it actually works. Alright then, let us now utilize our own very frontal lobes to synthesize a new, and accurate understanding of how much brain you use: Your car has an engine. The engine contains cylinders. In your car motor, the cylinders are glass shaped portions of the engine that combust fuel. When the car cylinder is empty, it can receive fuel, and then combust it, resulting in power that runs the engine. Similarly, your brain is a Think Motor. Unlike your Ford Mustang, your brain doesn't have just eight cylinders, it has something like 200 billion of them. Your brain cylinders are called neurons. They run on glucose. They burn sugar to operate and transmit brain signals to each other. When they are combusting sugar-fuel, these little cells are working. They are being used. When they are not being used, they burn a lot less glucose fuel. The amount of fuel delivered to each neuron is VARIABLE. When the neurons get a lot of fuel, the fMRI machine indicates this by showing increased blow flow to that part of the brain doing more work (combustion of glucose). Thus, the fMRI machine can tell brilliant neuroscientists and brain scanning experts which part of your brain is ACTIVE and being USED, and which part is not being used. fMRI imaging experiments that have proved that people engaged in meditation use their pre-frontal cortex (frontal lobes) more than dumb asses like you and me use while we are picking our nose. In other words, the Tibetan Monk who has practiced meditation for 60,000 hours, uses his frontal lobes more. (Incidentally, you don't need all that practice, you can crank up your frontal lobes immediately a variety of ways, meditation or not.)
What has this got to do with glasses? Well, when a cell is working, it metabolizes glucose, which is delivered to the cell by blood vessels and blood cells. At rest, the cell has less glucose delivered to it. It is like an empty cylinder in your car engine devoid of fuel. Then, when the cell is working, it receives a delivery of fresh blood. In order for your frontal lobes to work, the neurons literally require and get more blood. If the cell already had all the blood it needed to work, it couldn't get more, and the fMRI machine would not be able to detect an increase of blood flow to those cells in that brain area. I.e. The brain cell is like a mostly empty glass before it is used. And then, when the brain cell is being used, it receives blood and a fresh supply of glucose, just like an empty unused glass that has liquid poured into it. You think and drink. Ahhhhh.
Your brain is like your refrigerator. If one was using all of one's brain all of the time, that would be just like having a refrigerator stuffed completely full of jars, all of them completely filled to the brim with banana yogurt, all of time. Utterly ridiculous. Your refrigerator isn't like that, and Functional MRI brain scanners prove that your brain isn't like that either.
Besides the above, one also has to consider that even the most EXPENSIVE and NEWEST brain scanning machine is just taking a GROSS and FUZZY picture of the brain, and is not taking a neuron by neuron survey, asking each neuron what it is doing, nor determining what each and every neurons ABSOLUTE POTENTIAL is from zero to its greatest potential work, nor determining in any manner what the absolute potential of the collective whole of all the brain is. A brain scan image is at best giving you an overall RELATIVE picture of brain activity- how one part of the brain is acting relative to another part of the brain. No more.
So now you can see for yourself that all of the human brain is not being used all of the time, and that such a lopsided meaningless notion is a completely absurd idea to begin with. If anything, saying that "You use all of your brain all of the time" is great publicity gimmick and at least temporarily makes you appear smarter than the average bear. But for me, the only question that remains is: Why would such a brain experts tell such a bold unambiguous lie, even when their own career and research with brain scanning machines proves their own contradiction of terms? Easy. They're only using 10% of their brains.
* * *
Back to The Wonderfully Interesting Brain Music Adventure
Note: Per this article, I am not by any means suggesting that meditation alone results in activation of the frontal lobes, as one might infer from Davidson or others.
Meditation is but one consciously controlled activity by which individuals can use their frontal lobes. Simply put,
Cooperation
(positive constructive social interrelation)
are all thinking processes that represent greater use of the neural jars inside that part (FL) of the brain.
Ultimately, once you think about it enough, you come to realize that Happiness = Frontal Lobes Production.
and you can turn on your frontal lobes any time you choose.
Or you can sit there and blow your nose instead.
-Neil Slade, November 2011, www.NeilSlade.com Nobody's Guru, and Author of Tickle Your Amygdala, The Frontal Lobes Supercharge, Secret of The Dormant Brain Laboratory, The Book of Wands, Brain Magic, Cosmic Conversations
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Your Amazing Brain Adventure is a web site all about Tickling Your Amygdala- i.e. turning on the best part of your brain as easy as clicking on a light switch. This is done as easily as imagining a feather inside of your head stimulating a compass, the amygdala. The amygdala is a set of twin organs, a part of your brain that sits right in between the most advance part of your brain- the frontal lobes and pre-frontal cortex- and the most primitive part of your brain- your "reptile brain" and brain stem. By tickling your amygdala you instantly and directly increase creativity, intelligence, pleasure, and also make possible a spontaneous natural processes known as "paranormal abilities", although such things as telepathy and ESP are really as natural as breathing, or as easy doing simple math in your head. The ability to self stimulate the amygdala by something as simple as thought has been proven in laboratory experiments, such as those conducted at Harvard University research labs, 1999-2009, and can be tracked with modern brain scanning machines such as fMRI and PET... Indeed, thought is faster than light.
Other sites of interest: EasyPaintYourCar.com is a painting site dedicated to learning how to paint a car yourself, even if you've never painted a car before. You can refinish your car to professional standards at home, better than if you take it to someone else, and enjoy doing it at a fraction of the cost of having it done in an expensive shop. You can repair dents, rust, and use the most durable real automotive paint, and even learn to apply it without any special or expensive gear, in a safe and enjoyable manner. Paint your car in your garage, car port, or even driveway. You can spray, use an HVLP gun, or even use a roller.
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