February 14, 2013 • 24 mins
As is usual for SYSK, Josh and Chuck go over some, but not all, of the entries in this list of ten common myths about the brain. While it lives there in your noggin you don't really have much of a grasp on your brain and how it works. You think you do, but you don't.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff you should know the podcast.
(00:21):
Greetings pricklings. Hello, everyone, brains, brains, brains. That's right, that's
my intro. Uh that you didn't do it ten times though?
About no one wants to hear that. And we're not
going to even talk about ten brain myths we even
though the this episode is called ten Myths about the Brain. Yeah,
if you're new to the show and you've never heard
(00:42):
us do one of our famous top tens, then you
probably don't know. We rarely cover all ten. We will
tease you a bit with six to eight and then
say go read the article if you want the other one.
And in this case, we've actually covered a couple of
the things before, so there's no point in rehashing exactly
so that. I guess I just probably need to explain
(01:02):
that you laid the ground rules pretty well man to
a top ten that is really not tin um. So
we we have brains in our heads. Uh, And I
think most people walk around feeling like they have some
ideas about the brain, some understanding, um, but it turns
out that some of them are wrong. There's myths out
there and so have kind of interesting weird origins too. Yeah.
(01:26):
I thought this is pretty cool article because we've covered
the brain a lot and it's one of our favorite,
favorite favorite subjects. So it's kind of cool to root
out some of these things that a couple of these
I thought were true. Well. Well, for example, like, um,
your brain is gray, I thought that to be true. Well,
and it's understandable why too, because people call the brain
(01:47):
gray matter. Um apparently Hercule Paul row I just said
that like a dog that was That was right, h
That's an odd name to have to say though. Yeah,
Hercules plaically especially from my tongue marble mouth. He used
to call his brains his gray cells. Oh yeah. Um,
so yeah, everybody thinks the brain is great and it
(02:10):
is gray. There are very much, um lots of gray
areas called gray matter, but there's other colors to the
brain too. Yeah. This kind of knocked me out because
I had no idea that the brain was also white, black,
and red like our Georgia bulldogs in Atlanta, falcon starts
lapping in there, everybody's brains walking around the bulldog fan So,
(02:30):
like you said, there is a lot of gray matter,
uh cells, neurons connecting to each other. There's also white matter.
Well that's the stuff that connects them. Well, the white
matter is is the nerve fibers right right, So it
connects like your gray matter regions to one another. So
that makes sense. Yeah, but what about the substantia nigra
(02:51):
Latin for black substance that is part of your brain
is black? I would think that would be scary. Yeah,
he was dead, dude, think so. But the that that
region of the brain um, it has to do with
motor control, like fine control, and that's that They think
that possibly that's where Parkinson's damage comes from, or Parkinson's
disease is located there. And the reason it's black is
(03:13):
because of neuromelanin, which is a pigment. And I was
very curious why your brain would eat any kind of pigment? Whatsoever?
Did you get to that? Yeah, it turns out they
don't know, but they think that it basically takes um
it removes heavy metals from your bloodstream. From that area
and that they they also think that it has to
(03:33):
do with there's a adrene of chrome, do you remember that?
From Fear and low thing in Las Vegas. So that
stuff is real, and your brain produces as a byproduct
of some of his normal processes, and we would all
be totally psychotic apparently from the stuff if it wasn't
for neuromelanin. They think basically getting rid of it. So
we depend on that color. Yeah, that pigment, at least
(03:57):
not for coloring in this case, but some other stuff. Yeah,
I couldn't. The reason we think gray besides people calling
it gray matters because usually when we see a brain
it's floating in a jar, then it has been turned
gray from the formaldehyde and stuff. But I couldn't find
any kind of picture of like an active brain with
all these colors. I guess it's impossible unless they just,
(04:19):
you know, peel your skull off and take a picture
real quick. Yeah, I'm sure that was exist. What couldn't
I find a picture? I don't know. I mean, yeah,
they do brain surgery, you know, with the healthy living brain.
Didn't work super hard though, that's the secret. So there
there you go. Red black, white and gray your brain,
all right. Number two, listening to Mozart makes you smarter. Yeah,
(04:44):
this one I thought was did too, because Baby Einstein
if you've never heard of that, that is, parents are
living this stuff, big, big, multimillion dollar industry of packaging
classical music and poetry and stuff like that to a
not just to your baby and toddler and growing child,
(05:04):
but for your fetus as well. Even. Yeah, the Mozart
effect is what it's called, UM, and it's gonna be smarter.
Apparently the Mozart effect is trademarked by a guy named
Dan Campbell. Basically, UM puts together Mozart and CDs and
books and stuff like that. Um. The thing is is
this Mozart effect was It was first noted in the fifties,
(05:27):
I think by an ear nose and throat doctor named
Albert Tomattus, and he said that he made it. He
said that UM, the his patients who were struggling with
speech and audit auditory disorders UM showed improvement when they
listened to Mozart specifically. And then in the nineties somebody
(05:49):
else apparently conducted a test at the University of California,
Irvine that showed that people's IQ scores improved after listening
to Mozart, and then the Mozart effects was born. Well,
so based on these studies, I would think that it
does make you smarter. So is that true? Apparently not
(06:09):
necessarily no, because these are all myths. Yeah, that that
that you see Irvine study in particular was kind of
taken out of context. I get the impression, and um,
they were saying, well, we never said it makes you smarter.
We just said that it improved people's ability on the
specific temporal spatial test. Yeah, this one specific thing. We
(06:31):
didn't say it makes you smarter. That's the popular media
that did that. So things got a little twisted around
over time, and since then they have not been able
to duplicate these results from that original test. So it
turns out it probably won't hurt you any right, but
listening to classical music is not going to actually make
you smarter. But they have found that, um, learning to
(06:52):
play music, you can do a lot of stuff. Um,
it improves concentration, self constant competence, coordination. Really yeah uh
and you mentioned people playing Mozart to get the Mozart
effect for their fetuses. Yeah, Um, have you ever heard
the one that you get a new wrinkle in your
brain every time you learn something. I knew that wasn't true.
(07:14):
It sounds a little bit like an angel gets his
wings every time. All totally, Uh, that is not true.
But there are some cool little factoids in here. Uh,
one of which is that by the time you reach
forty weeks old, you have the same brain. It will
get larger, of course, but you have all the same
little folds and crevices called jerry and sulci um, all
(07:39):
folded up together. And the reason it's folded up together
is because our brain is large and the skull isn't,
so it needed to scrunch itself in there as we evolved.
And I think if you unfolded all that, the brain
would be the size of a tennis court. No, no,
that's the intestines a pillowcase. Okay, that's still pretty Yeah,
(08:00):
it's huge. Um, and that's why we're so smart. Um,
which kind of leads us to another. Um. Another myth
all right, that humans have the biggest brain, which is
not the case, which makes sense to me. I thought
this one was pretty cool. Actually, Um, A lot of
people walking around I think that because we're so smart,
(08:22):
we must have the biggest brain. But if you if
you think about it, no, a whale is going to
have a bigger brain than a human brain. That's true
because whales are enormous. Our brains about three pounds a whale.
Sperm whales about what's seventeen pounds, Yeah, which is a
huge brain. So why aren't sperm whales running the planet?
The reason why, It doesn't really matter the size of
(08:43):
the brain. It's the size of the brain to the
rest of the body. That ratio is what matters. Yeah,
I thought that was super interesting. They used dolphins as
an example because the dolphin's brain is about the same
size of a humans brain. Dolphins are super smart, But
an average dolphin weighs about three fifty pounds. Uh, I
don't know. Does it say how much the average adultways,
(09:03):
it's not three. I would say, depending on whether it's
male or female, anywhere between a hundred to two hundred pounds,
whether or not average somewhere in there. Sorry. Uh. And
then they also go on to name some other animals,
which was just sort of cute to think about. A
beagle's brain is two point five ounces. Cute, little beagle
(09:25):
and a sparrow has a brain that weighs less than
half an ounce. That's adorable. So again though it's the
it's the brain size to body size ratio, and humans
it's one to fifty UM. Most other mammals it's one
to one eight UM, and then in birds it's one
to two twenty typically. Yeah, but we do have humans
compared to mammals, we have the largest cerebral cortex, which
(09:48):
is really where like that's the money section. It's also
the newest part of our brain. It's on the outermost surface, um,
and that's where all the higher functions are carried out.
And that's what really separates us. That's why we run
the planet. Otherwise just be orangutans. Um. What about subliminal
messages and we learn from those? Uh, that is a falsehood, sir.
(10:10):
I guess that's the spoiler. All these are false but
their myths. Yeah, they're myths. Um. But back in the
nineteen fifties, there was a marketing executive, a researcher named
James Vickery who, uh did you know everyone always heard
you know, you go to the movies and they splash
up Coca cola and popcorn. I thought that was a myth.
I did too, but that was true. They did that
(10:30):
in nineteen fifty seven. Yeah, there's a there's a still
in this article from the movie and over Kim's face
it says hungry eat popcorns and it's from a frame
of the movie. So that's one three thousandth of a second.
And um, Vickery said, you know what, Uh, sales increased
in the theater by eighteen percent for popcorn I'm sorry
(10:53):
for drinks, and by fifty seven percent for popcorn thanks
to these messages. Yeah, and everybody said, okay, well, we're
very interested in basically psychologically manipulating everybody into buying our products.
So they started putting that stuff in jingles and in
UM movies and television, and UM, they found pretty quickly
(11:15):
that it actually doesn't have an effect yet. Well, they
banned it first of all, the FEC band in nine,
because they did think it worked at the time. UM.
But then later on it turns out that James Vickery
just lied about the results, not true at all. He's like, hey,
I was a sales guy, not a scientist, but you
expect uh so yeah, like you said, the FEC band
(11:40):
subliminal advertising in general, which was a good move because
if it did work, that's not okay. No, but a
lot of people still think that it's still around and
then it actually does work, Yes, but it is not true.
And they even tested this in Canada evidently on TV.
They flashed the message call now during a broadcast, and
I guess nobody called. Maybe they didn't give a number.
(12:03):
There's this right, I feel like I need to call somebody,
but I don't get it. I wondered though, like if
if they were studying the wrong thing, like call now
makes sense, but what if it has to be much
more explicit, like hungry eat popcorn? You can't eat popcorn?
Like maybe that would make you grab a bite of
(12:23):
popcorn fit we're in your lap. Maybe it has to
be more direct, like hungry, go buy popcorn at the
front concession stand now, you know, because then your brain
would obey that command rather than a roundabout command that's
the result of something you have to do, telling you
to go do that thing. Maybe that would work. So
you're leaving the door open for this for further testing.
(12:43):
I could see it subliminal below the lineman or lemon,
which is the threshold of our conscious awareness. Yeah, it
looks like Lineman when by itself, that's what's in sprit.
But if he said subliminal, then somebody would just on
two upside the head, you know. Yeah, where are we now?
(13:04):
We are on the idea that brain damage is always permanent.
I didn't know that this was a thing. I didn't
know that people said that. Sure, I never heard that. Well,
I think the point of it is is you know
that the brain can't repair itself once it's damaged, And
that's absolutely not true. It's not true. The brain is
extremely resilient. It's it's so much so that there's this
(13:27):
thing called plasticity, um, which is it kind of ties
into that idea that you get a new wrinkle when
you learn something that's not true. But your brain can
rewire itself. That's how you learn and unlearned behaviors through
brain plasticity. Yes, so I guess there are some truth
in that. Neurons, once they are damaged, they cannot grow back, right,
(13:48):
but thanks to plasticity, that will make new neural connections
in sometimes surprising ways, which is why if you've had
a stroke and damage part of your brain, you can
relearn to speak alps if you've lost that ability by
forging these new connections. There's a girl out there, um
who has only one hemisphere of her brain. That's it
(14:08):
that way. I don't remember she was born that way
or if it was the result of surgery or damage
or something, but she's got half of a brain. Her
brain has just one hemisphere, and she has binocular vision.
She can see out of both eyes, which they had
no idea how that was going on. And they finally
went in and looked, I guess using an m R
I and they found that her optic nerve that should
(14:30):
be connected to the missing hemisphere had basically grown, had
grown to go patch in another part of her brain
on the other side, and it basically hijacked this other
part of her brain and was using it for sight.
That is unbelievable. That's the brain. I wonder what you
lose though, I wonder if it forges a connection and
at the expense of another, you know what I'm saying, Yeah, like,
(14:53):
could she be like, man, I can see through both eyes,
but I can't tie my shoot any longer. Yeah, maybe, yeah,
it's possible, But I mean the brain would would say, well,
it's better you can see somebody else can tie your shoes.
Well that makes me wonder, though, I wonder if there
is an order to it all, like if the brain
knows what's more important. Yes, there is. As a matter
of fact, this ties into that idea that you only
(15:15):
use ten percent of your brain. Wow, all right, let's
hear it. Well that's not true, by the way, right,
And actually that one has a pretty interesting origin, doesn't it. Yeah,
they're not quite sure where it came from. Um, it
seems like it's always been around though, the notion that
you only use ten percent of your brain. But um,
they think it may have come from American psychologist William
(15:37):
James in the early nineteen hundreds when he said the
average person rarely achieves but a small portion of his
or her potential. And that was just sort of twisted
into ten percent of your brain is used. And people,
you know, you see people taking advantage of this notion
all the time with self help books like Tap into
the Other and it's just bunk, right, And this is
(15:57):
where it ties in. It is in that all regions,
all physical regions of your brain are being used. But
there's a theory that's around for savantism. Explain savantism, which
I want to do someday, we need to write the
article on it. But so fascinating. There's a theory right
(16:19):
now that savanta is um is from the result of
like brain damage. What what savantism is the result of
the brain's tyranny of the frontal lobe is what it's called.
And basically the idea is that your frontal lobe decides
what's important, and it bosses around all the other regions
(16:39):
of your brain to carry out this very smooth, efficient
streamline process that basically it decides is the most important,
and in doing so, it cast to the side a
lot of other stuff, like the ability to make great art,
or the ability to count a bunch of matches that
just fell on the floor, whatever, And that savantasm is
the result of this executive function, this tyranny of the
(17:01):
frontal cortex being disrupted, so that maybe you aren't just
the most efficient shark in the tank any longer, and
you're not out there and like going, going, going, and
like trying to compete and beat everybody else. But there's
all these other things that are now free to just
kind of blossom, like artistic deep, amazing, artistic, interesting abilities. Yeah,
(17:24):
that's that's this theory point and we're just now learning
this stuff. But it suggests that maybe we do only
use a portion of our abilities, not physical, like we're
using a dred percent of the physical parts of our brain,
but what we're using it for is that issue. Yeah,
you see what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, so there's definitely
something to that. Yeah. I trip out on the brain
(17:46):
a lot, Like when I'm studying it for the podcast,
I'll get sidetracked. Like this morning, I was reading this
article and I just had one of those little flights
of fancy where it amazed me that I was looking
at these printed shapes on a pay paper that formed
words into sentences that I understood and had meaning. And
I just was amazed by the brain. Just laying in
(18:08):
bed this morning, I was like, oh my god, Like
I'm reading these words that makes sense, and I'm speaking
words that have a symbol form on a paper, And
I promise you I wasn't on LSD this morning, but
I just had one of those moments where it just
like totally amazed me that I was even able to read.
So the brain basically made you impressed with itself. Yes
(18:28):
it did. And while you mentioned ls do we I
guess we can say in passing apparently drugs do not
create holes in your brain. That is not true, um.
And there's a lot of uh back and forth over
how much damage drugs due to your brain at all,
how reparable that damage is. And there are studies going
(18:50):
on on all all the all the time about long
term drug use and the results. One of them, interestingly
found that they think that some long term use of
some drugs can cause structures in the brain to grow,
and that is why addicts may have a hard time
kicking the habit, because they've grown a certain part of
(19:10):
their brain. I guess to Yeah, your limbic system is
strengthened through that. Very interesting and alcohol um does not
kill brain cells. It damages the dentrides that we've talked about,
and those are the ends of the neurons where the
connections are taking place. I guess right. So it makes
your neurons talk sideways to one another like the brain
(19:32):
cells are still there, but they just can't talk about yeah,
pretty much. And there's something a neurological disorder called Wernikey
Corsicov syndrome, and that is uh can result in a
loss of neurons in the brain. But that's basically what
I think of when I think someone has like pickled
themselves with alcohol. But that's kind of what's going on.
(19:53):
It's actually not the alcohol that's killing brain cells. It's
from it's from a uh A deficiency and thymine. That amazing. Yeah,
So if if you have a thymine deficiency, you can
get this war Nikki Corsicov syndrome and um, that's a
B vitamin. And if you are an alcoholic, you typically
aren't absorbing your your thymin like you would if you
(20:16):
weren't an alcoholic, which is why it's associated with alcoholism.
But it's not alcohol killing brain cells, right, And it's
much easier for me just to say they've pickled themselves,
which is really sad. We're laughing, but it is. It
is super sad. Yes, it is. If you've ever met
anyone that was pickled, well, yeah, and here's a alcohol
Any addicts suffering as a result of their addiction is
(20:36):
extremely sad, it is. So that's all I got. How
many was that? Seven? Is eight or six and a
half something like that. Um, if you want to learn
the fate of the other remaining brain myths from this
top ten list. Type in brain myths in the search
bart how stuff works dot com and it will bring
(20:56):
this article up. And actually we sort of have issue
with one of them we left off was the decapitation.
They said it was a myth. I guess I didn't
even read it, kind of but didn't we say it was?
They say, and they're like, yeah, it's gonna last for
a couple of seconds or whatever, like, which is what
we said in the podcast. But for some reason they
(21:17):
made that seem like, but that's nothing right. But then
they said that it's an extremely painful way to die
because you are conscious. Afterwards, it was it was kind
of a cluster mixed messages. Yeah, all right, uh so
I said, such partians this time for a listener. Now, yes,
I'm gonna call this poop poopy time. We did our
(21:39):
our podcast on fecal transplants, and we've had all manner
of poopy emails coming in and I'm gonna share one
from Jacob Carnes, U, Hi, Josh, Chuck and Jerry and
he spelled Jerry right. I just finished the Fecal Transplant
podcast and felt compelled to write in after you mentioned
the Nora virus, which I was afflicted with about two
weeks ago. Didn't last long, just about twenty four hours,
(22:00):
but it hit instantly, like someone flipped the switch. I
will spare you the details, but it was nearly the
worst I've ever felt. The day after was nearly the
best I've ever felt, due to the euphoria of still
being alive. But for the following week, my gut felt
like it just wasn't right. My hunch is that it
was really messed with the internal flora. He needs some
Kombucha's that. Oh it's this um. It's just like fermented
(22:25):
basically like probiotic drink. Um. I guess it's Eastern. It's
really delicious. There's some very delicious kombucca drinks out there,
and it's supposedly promotes um colonization in your gut. You're
drinking this stuff. I love it. Yeah, where you get it?
Whole Foods has his kind. It's called GTS and they
(22:46):
have a specific flavor called ginger a. That's just it's
so good. You have to check that out. Yeah all right. Uh.
He follows up to say, this is my favorite part.
Like I said, I felt compelled to write after you
mentioned the Nora virus, but I felt obligated after you've
brought up the terror of your young selves experience when
you had the misfortune of using the bathroom after your
father's remember that old man poop. When I was a child,
(23:10):
my father liked to enjoy a cigarette while doing his
business is very seventies, So when I heard the call
uh shortly after him, I was subjected to the putrid
number two smell mixed with the stale cigarette smoke, and
to this day I have trouble separating the ladder from
the former. As I grew up, the need to look
(23:30):
cool convinced me to try and take up the habit
of smoking to look cool on the toilet numerous times. Uh.
But my childhood association has at least helped me come
to my senses. So you never learned to smoke because
he associated with his dad's poop. That's good. Whatever works.
Thanks for another great podcast, guys, Jacob Carnes. Yeah, I
(23:51):
guess for all of you smoking out there, like take
it to the toilet. See what happens. I take a
big whiff of poop. Well, while you're smoking a cigarette
and they'll probably bring Q of your habit mixing, disgusted
with anything. Well, we'll break you have habits right, Um,
if you have a habit breaking tip, bad habit breaking tip,
(24:12):
we want to hear it because that's the demonstration of
brain plats. The city is you know Uh. You can
tweet to us at s y SK podcast. You can
join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
Discovery dot com, and you can join us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com
(24:36):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, does
it How stuff works dot Com brought to you by Toyota.
Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff you should know the podcast.
(00:21):
Greetings pricklings. Hello, everyone, brains, brains, brains. That's right, that's
my intro. Uh that you didn't do it ten times though?
About no one wants to hear that. And we're not
going to even talk about ten brain myths we even
though the this episode is called ten Myths about the Brain. Yeah,
if you're new to the show and you've never heard
(00:42):
us do one of our famous top tens, then you
probably don't know. We rarely cover all ten. We will
tease you a bit with six to eight and then
say go read the article if you want the other one.
And in this case, we've actually covered a couple of
the things before, so there's no point in rehashing exactly
so that. I guess I just probably need to explain
(01:02):
that you laid the ground rules pretty well man to
a top ten that is really not tin um. So
we we have brains in our heads. Uh, And I
think most people walk around feeling like they have some
ideas about the brain, some understanding, um, but it turns
out that some of them are wrong. There's myths out
there and so have kind of interesting weird origins too. Yeah.
(01:26):
I thought this is pretty cool article because we've covered
the brain a lot and it's one of our favorite,
favorite favorite subjects. So it's kind of cool to root
out some of these things that a couple of these
I thought were true. Well. Well, for example, like, um,
your brain is gray, I thought that to be true. Well,
and it's understandable why too, because people call the brain
(01:47):
gray matter. Um apparently Hercule Paul row I just said
that like a dog that was That was right, h
That's an odd name to have to say though. Yeah,
Hercules plaically especially from my tongue marble mouth. He used
to call his brains his gray cells. Oh yeah. Um,
so yeah, everybody thinks the brain is great and it
(02:10):
is gray. There are very much, um lots of gray
areas called gray matter, but there's other colors to the
brain too. Yeah. This kind of knocked me out because
I had no idea that the brain was also white, black,
and red like our Georgia bulldogs in Atlanta, falcon starts
lapping in there, everybody's brains walking around the bulldog fan So,
(02:30):
like you said, there is a lot of gray matter,
uh cells, neurons connecting to each other. There's also white matter.
Well that's the stuff that connects them. Well, the white
matter is is the nerve fibers right right, So it
connects like your gray matter regions to one another. So
that makes sense. Yeah, but what about the substantia nigra
(02:51):
Latin for black substance that is part of your brain
is black? I would think that would be scary. Yeah,
he was dead, dude, think so. But the that that
region of the brain um, it has to do with
motor control, like fine control, and that's that They think
that possibly that's where Parkinson's damage comes from, or Parkinson's
disease is located there. And the reason it's black is
(03:13):
because of neuromelanin, which is a pigment. And I was
very curious why your brain would eat any kind of pigment? Whatsoever?
Did you get to that? Yeah, it turns out they
don't know, but they think that it basically takes um
it removes heavy metals from your bloodstream. From that area
and that they they also think that it has to
(03:33):
do with there's a adrene of chrome, do you remember that?
From Fear and low thing in Las Vegas. So that
stuff is real, and your brain produces as a byproduct
of some of his normal processes, and we would all
be totally psychotic apparently from the stuff if it wasn't
for neuromelanin. They think basically getting rid of it. So
we depend on that color. Yeah, that pigment, at least
(03:57):
not for coloring in this case, but some other stuff. Yeah,
I couldn't. The reason we think gray besides people calling
it gray matters because usually when we see a brain
it's floating in a jar, then it has been turned
gray from the formaldehyde and stuff. But I couldn't find
any kind of picture of like an active brain with
all these colors. I guess it's impossible unless they just,
(04:19):
you know, peel your skull off and take a picture
real quick. Yeah, I'm sure that was exist. What couldn't
I find a picture? I don't know. I mean, yeah,
they do brain surgery, you know, with the healthy living brain.
Didn't work super hard though, that's the secret. So there
there you go. Red black, white and gray your brain,
all right. Number two, listening to Mozart makes you smarter. Yeah,
(04:44):
this one I thought was did too, because Baby Einstein
if you've never heard of that, that is, parents are
living this stuff, big, big, multimillion dollar industry of packaging
classical music and poetry and stuff like that to a
not just to your baby and toddler and growing child,
(05:04):
but for your fetus as well. Even. Yeah, the Mozart
effect is what it's called, UM, and it's gonna be smarter.
Apparently the Mozart effect is trademarked by a guy named
Dan Campbell. Basically, UM puts together Mozart and CDs and
books and stuff like that. Um. The thing is is
this Mozart effect was It was first noted in the fifties,
(05:27):
I think by an ear nose and throat doctor named
Albert Tomattus, and he said that he made it. He
said that UM, the his patients who were struggling with
speech and audit auditory disorders UM showed improvement when they
listened to Mozart specifically. And then in the nineties somebody
(05:49):
else apparently conducted a test at the University of California,
Irvine that showed that people's IQ scores improved after listening
to Mozart, and then the Mozart effects was born. Well,
so based on these studies, I would think that it
does make you smarter. So is that true? Apparently not
(06:09):
necessarily no, because these are all myths. Yeah, that that
that you see Irvine study in particular was kind of
taken out of context. I get the impression, and um,
they were saying, well, we never said it makes you smarter.
We just said that it improved people's ability on the
specific temporal spatial test. Yeah, this one specific thing. We
(06:31):
didn't say it makes you smarter. That's the popular media
that did that. So things got a little twisted around
over time, and since then they have not been able
to duplicate these results from that original test. So it
turns out it probably won't hurt you any right, but
listening to classical music is not going to actually make
you smarter. But they have found that, um, learning to
(06:52):
play music, you can do a lot of stuff. Um,
it improves concentration, self constant competence, coordination. Really yeah uh
and you mentioned people playing Mozart to get the Mozart
effect for their fetuses. Yeah, Um, have you ever heard
the one that you get a new wrinkle in your
brain every time you learn something. I knew that wasn't true.
(07:14):
It sounds a little bit like an angel gets his
wings every time. All totally, Uh, that is not true.
But there are some cool little factoids in here. Uh,
one of which is that by the time you reach
forty weeks old, you have the same brain. It will
get larger, of course, but you have all the same
little folds and crevices called jerry and sulci um, all
(07:39):
folded up together. And the reason it's folded up together
is because our brain is large and the skull isn't,
so it needed to scrunch itself in there as we evolved.
And I think if you unfolded all that, the brain
would be the size of a tennis court. No, no,
that's the intestines a pillowcase. Okay, that's still pretty Yeah,
(08:00):
it's huge. Um, and that's why we're so smart. Um,
which kind of leads us to another. Um. Another myth
all right, that humans have the biggest brain, which is
not the case, which makes sense to me. I thought
this one was pretty cool. Actually, Um, A lot of
people walking around I think that because we're so smart,
(08:22):
we must have the biggest brain. But if you if
you think about it, no, a whale is going to
have a bigger brain than a human brain. That's true
because whales are enormous. Our brains about three pounds a whale.
Sperm whales about what's seventeen pounds, Yeah, which is a
huge brain. So why aren't sperm whales running the planet?
The reason why, It doesn't really matter the size of
(08:43):
the brain. It's the size of the brain to the
rest of the body. That ratio is what matters. Yeah,
I thought that was super interesting. They used dolphins as
an example because the dolphin's brain is about the same
size of a humans brain. Dolphins are super smart, But
an average dolphin weighs about three fifty pounds. Uh, I
don't know. Does it say how much the average adultways,
(09:03):
it's not three. I would say, depending on whether it's
male or female, anywhere between a hundred to two hundred pounds,
whether or not average somewhere in there. Sorry. Uh. And
then they also go on to name some other animals,
which was just sort of cute to think about. A
beagle's brain is two point five ounces. Cute, little beagle
(09:25):
and a sparrow has a brain that weighs less than
half an ounce. That's adorable. So again though it's the
it's the brain size to body size ratio, and humans
it's one to fifty UM. Most other mammals it's one
to one eight UM, and then in birds it's one
to two twenty typically. Yeah, but we do have humans
compared to mammals, we have the largest cerebral cortex, which
(09:48):
is really where like that's the money section. It's also
the newest part of our brain. It's on the outermost surface, um,
and that's where all the higher functions are carried out.
And that's what really separates us. That's why we run
the planet. Otherwise just be orangutans. Um. What about subliminal
messages and we learn from those? Uh, that is a falsehood, sir.
(10:10):
I guess that's the spoiler. All these are false but
their myths. Yeah, they're myths. Um. But back in the
nineteen fifties, there was a marketing executive, a researcher named
James Vickery who, uh did you know everyone always heard
you know, you go to the movies and they splash
up Coca cola and popcorn. I thought that was a myth.
I did too, but that was true. They did that
(10:30):
in nineteen fifty seven. Yeah, there's a there's a still
in this article from the movie and over Kim's face
it says hungry eat popcorns and it's from a frame
of the movie. So that's one three thousandth of a second.
And um, Vickery said, you know what, Uh, sales increased
in the theater by eighteen percent for popcorn I'm sorry
(10:53):
for drinks, and by fifty seven percent for popcorn thanks
to these messages. Yeah, and everybody said, okay, well, we're
very interested in basically psychologically manipulating everybody into buying our products.
So they started putting that stuff in jingles and in
UM movies and television, and UM, they found pretty quickly
(11:15):
that it actually doesn't have an effect yet. Well, they
banned it first of all, the FEC band in nine,
because they did think it worked at the time. UM.
But then later on it turns out that James Vickery
just lied about the results, not true at all. He's like, hey,
I was a sales guy, not a scientist, but you
expect uh so yeah, like you said, the FEC band
(11:40):
subliminal advertising in general, which was a good move because
if it did work, that's not okay. No, but a
lot of people still think that it's still around and
then it actually does work, Yes, but it is not true.
And they even tested this in Canada evidently on TV.
They flashed the message call now during a broadcast, and
I guess nobody called. Maybe they didn't give a number.
(12:03):
There's this right, I feel like I need to call somebody,
but I don't get it. I wondered though, like if
if they were studying the wrong thing, like call now
makes sense, but what if it has to be much
more explicit, like hungry eat popcorn? You can't eat popcorn?
Like maybe that would make you grab a bite of
(12:23):
popcorn fit we're in your lap. Maybe it has to
be more direct, like hungry, go buy popcorn at the
front concession stand now, you know, because then your brain
would obey that command rather than a roundabout command that's
the result of something you have to do, telling you
to go do that thing. Maybe that would work. So
you're leaving the door open for this for further testing.
(12:43):
I could see it subliminal below the lineman or lemon,
which is the threshold of our conscious awareness. Yeah, it
looks like Lineman when by itself, that's what's in sprit.
But if he said subliminal, then somebody would just on
two upside the head, you know. Yeah, where are we now?
(13:04):
We are on the idea that brain damage is always permanent.
I didn't know that this was a thing. I didn't
know that people said that. Sure, I never heard that. Well,
I think the point of it is is you know
that the brain can't repair itself once it's damaged, And
that's absolutely not true. It's not true. The brain is
extremely resilient. It's it's so much so that there's this
(13:27):
thing called plasticity, um, which is it kind of ties
into that idea that you get a new wrinkle when
you learn something that's not true. But your brain can
rewire itself. That's how you learn and unlearned behaviors through
brain plasticity. Yes, so I guess there are some truth
in that. Neurons, once they are damaged, they cannot grow back, right,
(13:48):
but thanks to plasticity, that will make new neural connections
in sometimes surprising ways, which is why if you've had
a stroke and damage part of your brain, you can
relearn to speak alps if you've lost that ability by
forging these new connections. There's a girl out there, um
who has only one hemisphere of her brain. That's it
(14:08):
that way. I don't remember she was born that way
or if it was the result of surgery or damage
or something, but she's got half of a brain. Her
brain has just one hemisphere, and she has binocular vision.
She can see out of both eyes, which they had
no idea how that was going on. And they finally
went in and looked, I guess using an m R
I and they found that her optic nerve that should
(14:30):
be connected to the missing hemisphere had basically grown, had
grown to go patch in another part of her brain
on the other side, and it basically hijacked this other
part of her brain and was using it for sight.
That is unbelievable. That's the brain. I wonder what you
lose though, I wonder if it forges a connection and
at the expense of another, you know what I'm saying, Yeah, like,
(14:53):
could she be like, man, I can see through both eyes,
but I can't tie my shoot any longer. Yeah, maybe, yeah,
it's possible, But I mean the brain would would say, well,
it's better you can see somebody else can tie your shoes.
Well that makes me wonder, though, I wonder if there
is an order to it all, like if the brain
knows what's more important. Yes, there is. As a matter
of fact, this ties into that idea that you only
(15:15):
use ten percent of your brain. Wow, all right, let's
hear it. Well that's not true, by the way, right,
And actually that one has a pretty interesting origin, doesn't it. Yeah,
they're not quite sure where it came from. Um, it
seems like it's always been around though, the notion that
you only use ten percent of your brain. But um,
they think it may have come from American psychologist William
(15:37):
James in the early nineteen hundreds when he said the
average person rarely achieves but a small portion of his
or her potential. And that was just sort of twisted
into ten percent of your brain is used. And people,
you know, you see people taking advantage of this notion
all the time with self help books like Tap into
the Other and it's just bunk, right, And this is
(15:57):
where it ties in. It is in that all regions,
all physical regions of your brain are being used. But
there's a theory that's around for savantism. Explain savantism, which
I want to do someday, we need to write the
article on it. But so fascinating. There's a theory right
(16:19):
now that savanta is um is from the result of
like brain damage. What what savantism is the result of
the brain's tyranny of the frontal lobe is what it's called.
And basically the idea is that your frontal lobe decides
what's important, and it bosses around all the other regions
(16:39):
of your brain to carry out this very smooth, efficient
streamline process that basically it decides is the most important,
and in doing so, it cast to the side a
lot of other stuff, like the ability to make great art,
or the ability to count a bunch of matches that
just fell on the floor, whatever, And that savantasm is
the result of this executive function, this tyranny of the
(17:01):
frontal cortex being disrupted, so that maybe you aren't just
the most efficient shark in the tank any longer, and
you're not out there and like going, going, going, and
like trying to compete and beat everybody else. But there's
all these other things that are now free to just
kind of blossom, like artistic deep, amazing, artistic, interesting abilities. Yeah,
(17:24):
that's that's this theory point and we're just now learning
this stuff. But it suggests that maybe we do only
use a portion of our abilities, not physical, like we're
using a dred percent of the physical parts of our brain,
but what we're using it for is that issue. Yeah,
you see what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, so there's definitely
something to that. Yeah. I trip out on the brain
(17:46):
a lot, Like when I'm studying it for the podcast,
I'll get sidetracked. Like this morning, I was reading this
article and I just had one of those little flights
of fancy where it amazed me that I was looking
at these printed shapes on a pay paper that formed
words into sentences that I understood and had meaning. And
I just was amazed by the brain. Just laying in
(18:08):
bed this morning, I was like, oh my god, Like
I'm reading these words that makes sense, and I'm speaking
words that have a symbol form on a paper, And
I promise you I wasn't on LSD this morning, but
I just had one of those moments where it just
like totally amazed me that I was even able to read.
So the brain basically made you impressed with itself. Yes
(18:28):
it did. And while you mentioned ls do we I
guess we can say in passing apparently drugs do not
create holes in your brain. That is not true, um.
And there's a lot of uh back and forth over
how much damage drugs due to your brain at all,
how reparable that damage is. And there are studies going
(18:50):
on on all all the all the time about long
term drug use and the results. One of them, interestingly
found that they think that some long term use of
some drugs can cause structures in the brain to grow,
and that is why addicts may have a hard time
kicking the habit, because they've grown a certain part of
(19:10):
their brain. I guess to Yeah, your limbic system is
strengthened through that. Very interesting and alcohol um does not
kill brain cells. It damages the dentrides that we've talked about,
and those are the ends of the neurons where the
connections are taking place. I guess right. So it makes
your neurons talk sideways to one another like the brain
(19:32):
cells are still there, but they just can't talk about yeah,
pretty much. And there's something a neurological disorder called Wernikey
Corsicov syndrome, and that is uh can result in a
loss of neurons in the brain. But that's basically what
I think of when I think someone has like pickled
themselves with alcohol. But that's kind of what's going on.
(19:53):
It's actually not the alcohol that's killing brain cells. It's
from it's from a uh A deficiency and thymine. That amazing. Yeah,
So if if you have a thymine deficiency, you can
get this war Nikki Corsicov syndrome and um, that's a
B vitamin. And if you are an alcoholic, you typically
aren't absorbing your your thymin like you would if you
(20:16):
weren't an alcoholic, which is why it's associated with alcoholism.
But it's not alcohol killing brain cells, right, And it's
much easier for me just to say they've pickled themselves,
which is really sad. We're laughing, but it is. It
is super sad. Yes, it is. If you've ever met
anyone that was pickled, well, yeah, and here's a alcohol
Any addicts suffering as a result of their addiction is
(20:36):
extremely sad, it is. So that's all I got. How
many was that? Seven? Is eight or six and a
half something like that. Um, if you want to learn
the fate of the other remaining brain myths from this
top ten list. Type in brain myths in the search
bart how stuff works dot com and it will bring
(20:56):
this article up. And actually we sort of have issue
with one of them we left off was the decapitation.
They said it was a myth. I guess I didn't
even read it, kind of but didn't we say it was?
They say, and they're like, yeah, it's gonna last for
a couple of seconds or whatever, like, which is what
we said in the podcast. But for some reason they
(21:17):
made that seem like, but that's nothing right. But then
they said that it's an extremely painful way to die
because you are conscious. Afterwards, it was it was kind
of a cluster mixed messages. Yeah, all right, uh so
I said, such partians this time for a listener. Now, yes,
I'm gonna call this poop poopy time. We did our
(21:39):
our podcast on fecal transplants, and we've had all manner
of poopy emails coming in and I'm gonna share one
from Jacob Carnes, U, Hi, Josh, Chuck and Jerry and
he spelled Jerry right. I just finished the Fecal Transplant
podcast and felt compelled to write in after you mentioned
the Nora virus, which I was afflicted with about two
weeks ago. Didn't last long, just about twenty four hours,
(22:00):
but it hit instantly, like someone flipped the switch. I
will spare you the details, but it was nearly the
worst I've ever felt. The day after was nearly the
best I've ever felt, due to the euphoria of still
being alive. But for the following week, my gut felt
like it just wasn't right. My hunch is that it
was really messed with the internal flora. He needs some
Kombucha's that. Oh it's this um. It's just like fermented
(22:25):
basically like probiotic drink. Um. I guess it's Eastern. It's
really delicious. There's some very delicious kombucca drinks out there,
and it's supposedly promotes um colonization in your gut. You're
drinking this stuff. I love it. Yeah, where you get it?
Whole Foods has his kind. It's called GTS and they
(22:46):
have a specific flavor called ginger a. That's just it's
so good. You have to check that out. Yeah all right. Uh.
He follows up to say, this is my favorite part.
Like I said, I felt compelled to write after you
mentioned the Nora virus, but I felt obligated after you've
brought up the terror of your young selves experience when
you had the misfortune of using the bathroom after your
father's remember that old man poop. When I was a child,
(23:10):
my father liked to enjoy a cigarette while doing his
business is very seventies, So when I heard the call
uh shortly after him, I was subjected to the putrid
number two smell mixed with the stale cigarette smoke, and
to this day I have trouble separating the ladder from
the former. As I grew up, the need to look
(23:30):
cool convinced me to try and take up the habit
of smoking to look cool on the toilet numerous times. Uh.
But my childhood association has at least helped me come
to my senses. So you never learned to smoke because
he associated with his dad's poop. That's good. Whatever works.
Thanks for another great podcast, guys, Jacob Carnes. Yeah, I
(23:51):
guess for all of you smoking out there, like take
it to the toilet. See what happens. I take a
big whiff of poop. Well, while you're smoking a cigarette
and they'll probably bring Q of your habit mixing, disgusted
with anything. Well, we'll break you have habits right, Um,
if you have a habit breaking tip, bad habit breaking tip,
(24:12):
we want to hear it because that's the demonstration of
brain plats. The city is you know Uh. You can
tweet to us at s y SK podcast. You can
join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
Discovery dot com, and you can join us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com
(24:36):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, does
it How stuff works dot Com brought to you by Toyota.
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