Critical of Thinking: Stop Jabbing My Brain!
By Dean Burnett
A recent article on this website highlighted the ridiculously inaccurate yet worryingly enduring misconception that ‘we only use 10% of our brain’. As someone who has just obtained a PhD in Neuroscience, I can equivocally state that this is bollocks. I have wished it was true on occasion; it would have made my job a lot easier.
But it isn’t.
I’ve even seen my own brain as part of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) test, and it was firing on all cylinders. Probably because I was thinking ‘wow, I can see my own brain’ and pondered the scientific and philosophical implications of this, which activated my higher reasoning centres as well as my visual cortex. This activity was reflected in the scan, fascinating me further as I wondered what it implied. This required further activation of my brain regions which again was reflected in the scan. Before long, every available area of my brain was activated as a result of my watching my brain being activated.
fMRI, the most fun you can have while stuffed into a noisy tube.
But I can vouch, personally, that the whole 10% thing is a myth. There are many possible origins for it. For example, neurones are largely outnumbered by glial (companion) cells in the brain, arguably by a factor of 10. But we still use them all! Others argue that the origin is based in the fact that we only use 10% at any one time. But that’s like saying we only use 50% of our limbs, based on the fact that we spend a lot of time sat down (dropping to 25% if the reason you sit down so much is to persistently engage in a certain activity that requires only one hand). My own personal theory is it comes from the results of the original experiments in brain mapping by electrically stimulating the surface of an exposed brain of an unconscious patient. For my sins, I can’t remember off the top of my head (hah!) who it was, but may have been Marie Jean Pierre Flourens. These experiments revealed that about 10% of the exposed unconscious brain, when electrically stimulated, produces a movement reaction. This is quite a bit more specific than the popular misconception allows for.
It’s a ridiculous notion anyway. The brain is the most energy hungry and demanding organ of the body. Selective pressures of evolution mean that if we didn’t use 90%, we wouldn’t HAVE that 90%. It would be the equivalent of building the space shuttle and filling it with rocks and banana skins for every launch. Or paying millions for art made entirely out of glass and thin wire and putting it in the all-white foyer of a building which is responsible for the care of people with visual problems (anyone who’s ever been to Cardiff University Optometry School will know that the latter isn’t a joke).
Yet the myth endures. But this is understandable, when you meet so many people who appear to be so clearly under-using their brain power. And I’m not talking about the quack merchants and their followers: I mean customers, as scientists and other so-called intellectuals can be just as dim as anyone. I have met a straight-A student doctor who once posted a twig with a stamp on it ‘to see where it would end up’. She also once got mixed up between the Sun and the Moon.
Just recently, I volunteered for another experiment where I had to undergo transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). This is a relatively new and revolutionary technique where they use rapidly alternating magnetic fields to induce a temporary electrical current in specific brain regions, which momentarily activates them, without any need for anaesthetic or surgery. I really like this sort of thing; I wanted to know what it would feel like to be a cyborg. Although, a friend of my father-in-law is suspicious of the whole thing. What, he asked, is there to stop the technology being used to induce currents in fatal areas (e.g. brainstem) in people, from a distance? Doesn’t this offer the ultimate assassin’s weapon? I managed to reassure him by pointing out that a long-distance version of TMS would require coupled magnets that were about the size of a vertical football pitch, never mind the question of aiming and powering the thing, all things which really hinder the ‘stealth’ aspect of effective assassination.
But I am usually very tolerant of people who could be described as ‘ditzy’, or ‘dappy’, or ‘clumsy’, or just easily distracted. They are, almost always, lovely people, so I ignore their ‘flaws’, if you can call them that. The only time I make an exception is if someone is being ‘dappy’ and as a result keeps accidentally DIRECTLY SIMULATING MY MOTOR CORTEX! When someone is running current through my brain, I don’t want to hear the word ‘oops’ at all, let alone with frightening regularity.
Ironically, by not sufficiently activating her brain, this woman, lovely as she seemed, was persistently activating mine in unwanted and worrying ways.
But perhaps the notion of underused brain areas is underlying the problems faced by most sceptics today? As I said, the brain is a massively hungry organ, but it is also very plastic. Rats which have had their whiskers removed in studies have shown to have the brain regions associated with sensation from whisker-contact diminish and replaced by expansion of the adjacent, non-whisker based areas. In contrast, London Taxi drivers have been shown to have an incredibly enlarged hippocampus, the area of the temporal lobe with an important role in spatial memory and navigation. There are many comparable studies which show the same thing; that brain areas are like muscle. If you use them often, they get bigger, but if you don’t, they atrophy.
So maybe similar things are occurring in proponents of homeopathy, psychics, chiropractic and the like? It’s possible that they’ve gone so long without applying logic or rational thought to anything that the brain regions responsible for these actions have withered away. It would explain the complete and total faith in their chosen obsession– maybe the brain regions controlling gullibility and the willingness to pay for stuff which is of no value have expanded to compensate?
I’d love to study them and their brain activation patterns, but I’m no longer allowed in the fMRI machine.
Apparently, you can have ‘too much’ fun while stuffed in a noisy tube.
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