Popular Myths

[joreth]

It still amazes me what myths persist in our culture.  The head-banging icon is not because of how stupid people are (although usually I use it for that), it's because I continue to be amazed at how stupid (or misinformed and uninterested in becoming informed) people are.

Here's one of my particular pet peeves:

Humans only use 10% of their brains -

This media darling has been around for at least a century. Fortunately, it's just not true. MRI imaging clearly demonstrates--with fancy colors no less--that humans put most of their cerebral cortex to good use, even while dozing.

http://www.livescience.com/bestimg/index.php?url=myths_10percent_brain_03.jpg&cat=myths 

Another is the life-expectancy myth.  I can't tell you how many times I've heard both the above myth and this one in various "motivational" speeches at conventions.  The idea behind this second one is that the average life expectancy at any given age in history (which age depends on who is telling the story) was anywhere between 30 and 45 years of age, making today's life expectancy double that of our ancestors.  This is not true.  The reason it's not true is because of how an "average" is figured.  We have not made exceptional strides in medical advancement of prolonging the lifespan.  Yes, we have made some strides and we have increased our life expectancy by about a decade or so, but that doesn't "double" the life expectancy of people.  No, where we have made advancement is in infant care and in *quality of life* of the elderly and the ill, and not nearly as much in prolonging life in general.  In previous eras, our child mortality rate was much, much higher.  So when you factor in the numbers of child-deaths to the total number of years each person lived, you bring the average way down.  But chances are, if you made it to adulthood, you were probably gonna make it to 60.

http://lifetwo.com/production/node/20070716-dramatically-longer-average-lifespans-fact-myth-or-something-else

Comments

[corpsefairy.livejournal.com]

The 10% one drives me nuts because it's so obviously false. If we only used 10%, why would we bother to even have the other 90%? What do we use it for, storing penguins? Brains are expensive to build; if we could get away with only using 10%, that's exactly how big a brain would be.

[girlpurple.livejournal.com]

but but but... PENGUINS!!

My personal pet peeve myth is "humans are 98% water". Wouldn't we be alot more Jello-like if that were actually the case?

On the other hand... mmmm, Jello! Do penguins like Jello?

[joreth]

Yeah, that in particular bugs me. I hear it mainly from two types of people: 1) The motivational speaker trying to get people to sell more shit and 2) the nutty tree-hugging-hippie (I say with some bit of sarcasm, since I'm all for environmental issues) who believes in magic and that we have all these abilities to break the laws of physics if we can just master that 90% of our brain's potential that we haven't tapped into yet - it's that part of our brain that is responsible for mind-over-matter, for teleportation, for out of body experiences, for moving objects with our thoughts, for casting spells.

These people piss me off. You're exactly right, the brain is exactly as big as it's supposed to be and we use as much of it as we're supposed to use. As people who skin and tan their own hides say, each animal has just enough brains to save their hides - a play on words meaning (as I'm sure you can guess) that there's either enough brains to use when curing the hide or there's enough brains to keep them from getting killed in the first place.

[funky-firelord.livejournal.com]

How about tree-hugging-hippies who love science? *grins*

I must admit the whole lets carry around a few pounds of extra Grey goo just for the hell of it never really sat with me, I do think as humans we don't use all the brain power that we could and a lot of it is wasted, but I think thats mostly because we are a lazy race IMO.

The 98% water is a interesting one, not sure where that one came from, however most of matter is largely empty space. If you consider how much matter can be compressed for example in a neutron star.

Now if matter is largely empty space then maybe the people who came up with these theory's must have most of theres in there brains...

I know I'm rambling Ill shut up now.

Firelord