Neurologists Debunk 11 Brain Myths | Debunked | Science Insider

we only use 10 of our brains so this is not true the bigger the brain the smarter the creature size doesn't matter you can't prevent a stroke no that's not true that's very not true actually hi i'm dr santoshi bilakota i'm a clinical assistant professor in neurology at the nyu grossman school of medicine i'm dr brad kamitaki i'm a neurologist and assistant professor at rutgers robert wood johnson medical school and today we'll be debunking myths about the human brain the bigger the brain the smarter the creature size actually does not matter when it comes to

the brain because there are creatures out there with bigger brains than us but probably not as complex your brain is really determined by your body proportion right so when you think of like a big brown bear that's way bigger than us their brain is going to be bigger but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are smarter than us we don't know that for sure because it hasn't been fully studied but we've seen that in instances such as chimpanzees they do have smaller brains but we do know for a fact that chimpanzees are probably as smart

as we are certainly it's not the size of the brain that matters but probably how complex it is and how well developed certain areas are certain areas in humans are for example our language centers are just much more developed than a cow or even a chimpanzee yeah that's important in determining intelligence rather than the size itself and also how do we measure intelligence that also becomes tricky because not everyone is intelligent in the same way non-cognitive factors also play a role like what's your social intelligence what's your emotional intelligence all of that i think is

very complex and really difficult to measure iq tests are always an accurate measure of intelligence so this is false there's so much that goes into intelligence normal intelligence tests might measure things like executive function or planning verbal skills reading skills things like that but it's only an approximation of what you can do and highly influenced by the conditions of the test how you're feeling at the time of the test your educational level it'll be nice to say that there's one test or one way that we can determine how intelligent someone is but there's so much

that goes into intelligence that one test or even multiple different tests can't measure that very well so the popular iq test was developed in the early 1900s and it was a way to determine which french students were cognitively delayed so we could offer them better resources that got adopted in america at stanford where for all the reasons brad laid out it doesn't take all of those things into account so i think although it is nice to say hey i am smart i did well on an iq test really don't think that means too much neither

of us were born being doctors right we had to learn and develop those skills under many years of training i think that education is the best way to kind of make that happen education very broadly that might not necessarily be school for everyone definitely some people are savants some people are prodigies it's really hard to say what determines that they might be better at certain things but not necessarily good at others we're all individuals we all have different talents and different aptitudes for different things so iq tests just kind of measure your intelligence in that

one specific area not how overall intelligent you are we only use 10 of our brains so this is not true we actually use all of our brain not all of the time but most of the time we're using some percentage of her brain this myth came into fruition i think in the early 1800s where people were trying to figure out why injuring different parts of the brain caused disabilities in people so a bunch of psychologists came up with the theory that we only use about ten percent of our brains versus people who are smarter who

use more now we simply know that that is not the case we know that because we have something called a pet mri and a functional mri study we have the frontal lobe which we use for a lot of different purposes motor function language function executive functioning or planning activities behind that our parietal lobe here which is our sensory cortex in the back of the brain we have the occipital lobe which is our visual processing center and then here on the side we have the temporal lobe which is involved in memory language comprehension on the left

side so to give you an example if you are reading something you're going to be using your temporal lobes for comprehension you're going to be using your frontal lobes for comprehension you'll also be using the back of your head where your visual cortex sits because that's where information from your eyeballs travel and your body kind of makes sense of it that way and then also if we take the brain apart a little bit we have our brain stem over here which is kind of our lizard brain it's our primitive brain that controls things like level

of arousal breathing respirations heart rate blood pressure we have some deep motor functions here in the brain as well another part of the brain that we have is our cerebellum kind of on the bottom which is also involved in motor control and motor planning in doing one task you could be using multiple parts of your brain but you're not using everything at the same time video games rot your brain so this is a myth video games in and of themselves don't actually rot your brain it's something that i definitely heard a lot when i was

younger from my grandma my mom a lot of our literature has shown that video games especially the ones that focus on team building on solving riddles solving puzzles building strategy are actually pretty good for you they actually do build up those centers of your brain especially when you're a child you know games can be used for other purposes for example our colleagues in surgery when they do scopes they practice those skills with things like video game simulators looking at the trials no one has actually defined what too much video games is every literature study that

i've looked at quotes between 12 hours to 90 hours a week is okay i feel like 90 hours might be a little excessive but i think in reality the bigger signs of someone withdrawing from social activities and wanting to just stay at home and play video games and they'd prefer to do that then do other things that's more of a red flag i always say everything in moderation like if it's affecting your social life if you're just stuck in front of the tv all day that's not good psychologically memory gets worse as you age so

this is false in fact there are some types of memory that improve as you get older for example things like semantic memory your vocabulary reading procedural memory for example people that are very good at musical instruments like can play the piano often will retain those skills some people will notice some changing memory that's often things like episodic memory which is kind of our memory of recent events episodic memories basically like the who what where and when so where did i put my keys where did i park my car those kind of things do tend to

decline and i think a lot of it is because we just aren't as focused on things it's not necessarily something that's pathological or suggests dementia not everyone will get dementia but that risk does increase as you get older right now we don't have any medications or treatments that can prevent someone from getting alzheimer's disease there are some environmental risk factors that if you address can prevent you from getting dementia or at least prevent your memory from getting worse so some of those things include just general health eating healthy foods taking care of your heart moderate

exercise making sure that you stay healthy cardiovascularly which is also going to help your brain left brain people are logical and right-brained people are creative i think this myth came from the 1800s when as neurologists are trying to figure out different functions of the brain they discovered that the left side of our brain and most people is dominant for language verbal memory whereas the right brain was much more of our visual spatial functions but there's no structural brain difference in people who are more logical or versus more creative rather it's more their environment the way

that they were raised in neurology when we talk about brain hemispheric dominance we typically are talking about language and verbal memory dominance where does that live and for most people that's on the left side of the brain so if you're right-handed about 90 of the time you're going to be left hemisphere dominant which means a lot of your memory and speech production and understanding comprehension that kind of stuff is going to sit on the left side of your brain whereas if you're a left-handed it can kind of go both ways so i think the reality

is we say that someone is left brain dominant or right brain dominant and it doesn't really mean that one person is more creative and the other one is more logical these are just talents and sort of skills that people develop whether inherently or through their personalities but it really has nothing to do with the side of their brain that they use more you can't prevent a stroke no that's not true that's very not true actually you can definitely prevent a stroke how to do that is by really addressing all the factors that could result in

a stroke we know very clearly that things like high blood pressure smoking high cholesterol diabetes unfortunately increase your risk for a stroke which is basically when there's sign of blood flow going to your brain because of a blood clot or bleeding in the brain there's no quick and easy fix again it's about maintaining your cardiovascular and brain health over time so that you never get into a situation where a stroke will occur if you do ever have symptoms of a stroke and we often tell people this fast mnemonic so facial droop arm weakness slurred speech

or language problems and then t is time call 9-1-1 and get to the hospital right away emergency medicine physicians can give you plot-busting medications to break up the clot that's causing the stroke so there's things that we can do to address it and prevent it from getting worse and i think there's a misconception that stroke is an old person's disease we know this isn't true anyone of any age can have a stroke the reason why you're going to have it is going to be different if you're older versus when you're younger but a big cause

of stroke in young people is brain bleeds if you have a family history of aneurysm you should definitely get screened i think that's actually recommended eating fish makes you smarter so i actually don't know where this one came from but maybe it's like an immigrant household thing but i heard this a lot yeah yeah i mean in asian households for sure this is tricky because fish doesn't necessarily make you smarter but it is good for you and some fish more than others have omega-3s which we know are good for heart health good for brain health

and just good for your overall body health so i think maybe that's why this one came into place but i don't think it makes you smarter what do you think yeah no i think it was my parents way of getting more efficient you do have to be careful about eating too much fish we know that certain types of fish have more mercury than others like tuna you don't want to overdo it i should add that fish is part of a mediterranean diet which we advocate for all of our patients mediterranean diets are diets that are

rich in good fats like fish for example olive oils vegetables healthy grains and that is going to be helpful for stroke prevention it's going to be good for cholesterol for hypertension for diabetes all kinds of stuff so fish as part of a healthy diet is good for you but it will not make you smarter you can always trust your senses i'd say that's a myth our senses can play tricks on us and cause things like illusions or even sometimes hallucinations for example people with schizophrenia might hear voices of people talking that aren't actually there our

senses are not 100 objective they're dependent on how well our brains and you know eyes ears are functioning at that time everyone is different my pain tolerance might be lower than rats or vice versa i don't think we have a really good neurological way of explaining why that might be that's still something that we don't fully understand also your senses can be a little influenced by emotions and memories i think if you see something that reminds you of someone the way you're going to react to it might be a little different i don't know if

what i'm seeing is the same thing that everyone else is seeing like how can we ever it's like when they had that blue dress and the black dress and people were saying different things different sexes have different brains so no that's not true and i'm going to rip it again because that was funny i should start with saying that we're all born with the same brain regardless of what your gender identity is regardless of what your sexual orientation is there's really no structural differences so if a neurosurgeon was looking at two different brains they wouldn't

know who was assigned male at birth and who was assigned female at birth there have been studies out there that have shown that those have been assigned female at birth might have more robust emotional pathways versus those who've been assigned male at birth are more executive thinkers we now know that that's not true as you get older if you've been exposed to different things how you relate to the outside world that's what develops the structures of your brain and the connectivity it has really nothing to do with what gender you were assigned at birth it's

more nurture it's not necessarily nature and how you're made if you have a seizure you have epilepsy no i'm going to rip this a few times because i want to make my point what a seizure is is hypersynchronation of brain cells so what is that your brain talks to itself using electricity if something goes wrong with electricity in your brain you have a seizure basically when all of your neurons freak out and fire at once your body hyper synchronizes and we have a seizure seizures can be due to a lot of things not necessarily epilepsy

which is a lifelong neurological condition you have to have multiple unprovoked seizures and that's the difference between a seizure and epilepsy also if you have epilepsy you have to take daily medication to keep your brain from having seizures so if you have had your first seizure of lifetime or if you're someone with seizures there are a few things that you should do one definitely get checked out by a neurologist there are tests that we can order that can be helpful for you one of them is an eeg we put stickers on your head look at

your brain waves and see where the abnormalities are and the second one is the imaging that we have mris and pet mris are both used and if a diagnosis of epilepsy is made the most important thing for you to do is take your medications and lastly keep communicating with your doctor because you're not going to get to that period of seizure freedom unless you communicate with your doctor you only get one brain you're born with all the brain cells that you are going to have and it's up to you to take care of them there's

a grain of truth in a lot of these myths but they're just not fully accurate just make sure that you do your research and take care of yourself