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It's amazing to think how common these sorts of myths used to be before the internet. If you heard something like this and wanted to challenge it, you would have to get on the bus and spend a couple of hours at the library and return with some photocopies. Now you can pull up Wikipedia on your phone.
It's amazing to think how common these sorts of myths used to be before the internet. If you heard something like this and wanted to challenge it, you would have to get on the bus and spend a couple of hours at the library and return with some photocopies. Now you can pull up Wikipedia on your phone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functi...
Left brain vs. right brain thinking is another myth about the brain that seems to be much harder to dispel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functi...
It's a bit like saying a piano player will only use 10% of the keys at a time.
>Studies of brain damage: If 10 percent of the brain is normally used, then damage to other areas should not impair performance This is unbelievably naive to use as some sort of proof, using 10% does not imply that its 10% of the physical organ. Rather 10% compared to what one could do with better training, improved lifestyle, etc. And this does not have to be purely intellectual, it can be imagination capabilities,…
counterpoint - people do take damage to brain and recover abilities, suggesting that the brain has redundancies built into it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of post-internet myths that are humming along just fine. :D It's a crazy phenomenon to watch play out.
Absolutely true, but there somehow seems different quality to them. The myths of old seemed to be little factoids that were not easy to verify and were taken at face value, then just spread until they became "common knowledge". The new ones seem to have an almost religious quality to them. Flat-earthers for example, if someone told me 25 years ago that this would be a thing I would have just laughed.
Wikipedia says
In the modern era, the pseudoscientific belief in a flat Earth originated with the English writer Samuel Rowbotham with the 1849 pamphlet Zetetic Astronomy.
In 1956, Samuel Shenton set up the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS), better known as the "Flat Earth Society" from Dover, England, as a direct descendant of the Universal Zetetic Society.
The term flat-earth-man, used in a derogatory sense to mean anyone who holds ridiculously antiquated or impossible views, predates the more compact flat-earther. It was recorded in 1908: "Fewer votes than one would have thought possible for any human candidate, were he even a flat-earth-man."
It's a bit like saying a piano player will only use 10% of the keys at a time.
In a pedantic way, it is close to the truth as most pianists use up to 10 keys at a time (a few more if you count pedals). There are many keys available to the pianist but the pianist remains constrained by their input capacity.
Left brain vs. right brain thinking is another myth about the brain that seems to be much harder to dispel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functi...
> Some popularizations oversimplify the science about lateralization, by presenting the functional differences between hemispheres as being more absolute than is actually the case.[21]: 107 [22]
Sources that wikipedia uses:
[21] Westen D, Burton L, Kowalski K (2006). Psychology : Australian and New Zealand edition. Milton, Qld.: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9780470805527.
[22] Toga AW, Thompson PM (January 2003). "Mapping brain asymmetry". Nature Reviews. Neuroscience. 4 (1): 37–48. doi:10.1038/nrn1009. PMID 12511860. S2CID 15867592.