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| Brain myths you should dump |
Alright then, the brain is indeed powerful but this is not a sufficient fact that should justify the false assumptions people often hold about the brain. I will share some myths about the brain that many people have misunderstood over time, even before the intervention of neuroscience and modern scientific inquiries.
1. We use only 10% of our brain
Imagine you disuse a whole lot of 90% of your brain, wouldn’t you become dumb? Imagine further that the tiny percentage of your brain is dissociated from the rest 90% so that only the 10% is overwhelmed by myriads of functions allocated to it. You can imagine how many functions of the brain are associated with each part of the body systems, such as, the respiratory and the circulatory systems. Why then would people still hold on to this neuromyth?
2. The larger brain makes an ultra-smart individual
The philosophy of the advocates of this myth is that ‘the larger your brain, the more tendency you are a smart person. Haven’t you ever seen an imbecile whose head is relatively bigger than the normal person?
Here, I chose to correlate bigger heads with bigger brains since the brain is situated in the skull. Imbeciles are known for intellectual sub-normality and below average IQ of between 50 to 70, where normal persons are on the average of 100 IQ in the normal distribution curve for IQ.
I do not mean to affirm here that anyone whose head is so tiny is the ultra-smart, it’s just that brain size and intelligence are not necessarily correlated.
3. Alcohol will make a hole in your brain
This is certainly not true. Drugs do work on the brain by gradually affecting minute structures, chemicals e.t.c and thereafter this effect is felt from these structures called neurons, and neurotransmitters.
Alcohol will not bore a hole in your brain but it definitely will influence the way neurons fire and wire together by inhibiting some functions since it is an inhibitor whose chemical structure binds with GamaAminoButyricAcid (GABA). However, alcohol does affect the brain. Here’s an interesting article about how alcohol affects the brain.
I would suppose this brain hole-alcohol myth was invented to create fear in the minds of alcohol addicts so as to caution them to abstain from alcohol use.
