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April 12, 2011 23 mins

We all know the myth that we use only 10% of our brains, but how we know it's a myth in the first place? In this episode, Robert and Julie interview neurosurgeon Dr. T. Glenn Pait and learn how neuroscience is changing the way we think about our brains.

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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas. You know, Julie,
we're setting here using our brains to speak and uh,
and listeners are out there using their brains to to

(00:25):
hear or to interpret the sounds coming through their ears
and uh. And it just really gets crazy mind blowing
when you start thinking about about ourselves as a brain
and and and and think about the walls that are
off and up when the brain tries to look at
itself and tries to view itself and understand itself. WHOA,

(00:46):
hold on a second, when you're shattering my brain right now.
But yeah, there's also often this this kind of cognitive
blindness that it sets in when we when we're trying
to understand what we are, I mean, you know, will,
we're also guts, were also all these things we leave,
as we've explained in another podcast. But are you telling
about consciousness? Yeah, consciousness itself? YEA, what are we? What's

(01:10):
going on in our mind? And so recently we actually decided, hey,
let's go ask an expert on this, right, Yeah, we did.
We actually talked to neurosurgeon Dr T. Glenn Pate from
the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and we wanted
to talk to him about one of the biggest myths
out there about the brain, um, which is I'm sure

(01:30):
everybody knows, is that that we only use ten percent
of our brain. And he's actually been in brains, right,
I mean he has been like elbow deep in brains before.
That's right. He yeah, he's he's, uh, he's I was
about to use some sort of fly fishing metaphor, but
I'm sure he doesn't have to wear fly fishing kids.
But yeah, he's deep in there, and um, he's the

(01:51):
guy to ask about this. So we do know that
this was perpetuated by psychologist William James, who in the
early nineteen hundred said that the quote the average person
early achieved but a small portion of his or her potential.
So I mean that seems you know, yeah, okay, that's
that's true, right, that's yeah. Everybody has great ideas, not

(02:12):
everybody acts on them, that kind of thing, right, But
somehow that got perverted into this, well, we really only used,
you know, one part of our brain, which we know
is not true? Yeah, or the tim percent right, that's
the ten percent has been thrown out there. It's all
over the place. Like sci fi and comic books love
to run wild with it. You're always encountering that. It's

(02:33):
like the normal. We don't normally we only use ten
percent of our brain. But you know, but in this
summer movie, our hero will learn to use another five percent.
Oh yeah, yeah, as as evidenced by the recent movie Limitless, right,
Oh is there is there psychic craziness and that well,
they take it. He takes a magic pill, the hero
of that, and and then all of a sudden he's

(02:54):
on He's firing on all cylinders and writing books overnight,
like Stephen King in the eighties. Yeah, I know, right,
we just need to tap into Stephen King's brain, see
what's going on? Tell us a lot more. Um. But
so we do know three brain scans we can verify
and say, no, it's not just one part of your
brain working and everybody else is just hanging out up

(03:15):
there being lazy. Um. Brain scans tell us that our
brains are always active, with some parts more active than
others depending on the activity that we're engaging in. Right,
So we talked to Dr Patar said, please tell us
why this continues to persist, And this is what he
had to say. You know, with every myth, you know,
it gets repeated over and over again. Every generation will

(03:35):
have it. It will change perhaps a little bit of
a band or it's leaning, uh and it it's just perpetuated.
And you know some of them, as you know, they're
couch and what seems to be a little bit of
common sense, right, um, but we need something to hold
onto and if we do not understand um, our environment, Um,

(03:59):
we need some to explain and the beliefs and in
the world around us. So you get to the brain,
which is a land of mystery for a lot of us.
The concept mind is still a mystery for us. So
we think that, well, we're not using all of our brain, So, um,

(04:20):
can we light up New York City with our brain
because we're only using ten That's that's a myth. No,
that's that's not the case at all, um, Because the
brain is such an incredible mystery environment. In factually, hear
all the time. We hear it on television and radio
and all the broadcasters will say, well, this is not

(04:41):
this isn't brain surgery. Correct. You hear it every day
on television, just the end of day. And I think
because of the mystery of the brain not knowing what's
what's going on with the rain, we have incredible expectations
of it. Beth is absolutely incorrect, And I think it's
an expectation appointing us to achieve or the brass that
we already have. And it's a way in which we

(05:03):
cannot explain to all the mysteries of the brain that
we hope the mysteries will be unrattled and once we
reach our capacity, we will be able to, you know,
become super people. Okay, So basically the comic books in
the sci fi films are just completely full of it. Yeah, yeah,
and and and but it makes a really interesting point
about this whole wish fulfill fantasy that we have, you

(05:25):
know that if we could just it's sort of an
excuse and a hope, right like, oh, yeah, I'm not
getting to that book I meant to write overnight because
I'm just not using all my brain. But maybe one
day I could. Yeah. And and also the kind of
like a sense of guilt too, I don't know, it
kind of reminds me of there's sort of like an
original sin kind of a thing to it. You know.

(05:47):
It's kind of like like there's here's this creature with
all this potential, but oh, it's held back because it's
lazy or something. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, but then again,
not to bring up that movie Limitless, but I just
keep thinking about it because again, it's such an interesting
seductive idea. Who's in this somehow? Mr Bradley Cooper's in it? Um?
I think for provert de Niro's in it. I haven't

(06:08):
seen it. You thought I thought you'd loved it and
to keep talking about it. No, No, I just think
it as an example of or we're talking about right now.
I mean, I've I've read about the plot. Obviously, that's
not all I know that he takes a superpill and
becomes Superman. I'm not I'm not judging it. It's it's fine, okay.
It's not that I don't like Bradley Cooper, Robert Denier.

(06:29):
I just haven't seen it. All right, So the movie, though,
it made me think, could you actually through science, could
could you create some sort of magic pill? And a
lot of people have asked that question too since that
movie came out, and we do know that researchers have
been working on memory enhancing drugs for Alzheimer's patients and
that a memory boosting molecule in the brain has been identified.

(06:53):
But I mean, this is a far cry from enhanced
cognitive development or even know, super crazy cogitive thinking. Now
when I go to the health food store, though they
are countless um little bottles that claim to supply this
kind of power. Well, I mean, you know that if
you take riddle in right, you're gonna become more focused.

(07:14):
So there are certainly things that you can do that
can help you, but it's not gonna turn you into
a super brain overnight. I'm sorry, And you don't need
any more super brains over there. I need all the
brains I can get. I don't know, I don't know.
So you know, once again, we talked to Dr pat
about this. We wanted to say, well, okay, so we

(07:34):
know why why this myth has persisted, But how has
technology changed the way that we actually think about the brain.
And he had this to say, It's it's allowed us
to appreciate the anatomy the brain is better and as
a surgeon, we thrive for anatomical consistency. You know, it's

(07:54):
like compendix. It didn't have consistency, so it sort of
confused us for a while. But we look for m
anatomical consistency as surgeons whom in or asurgence, and that's
what I want. So the imaging allowed us to better
appreciate the anatomy of an incredible orgy of the brain.
And then from that we went once that further, we

(08:14):
got into the function of the brain, and now we
have functioning imaging, and this has given us better insight
into the normal function of the brain, because if you
don't know the normal, it's difficult to understand the abnormal.
And the imaging has allowed us to better appreciate the
brain and normal and abnormal states, therefore allowing us to

(08:37):
unravel some of those mysteries of diseases or at least
begin to attack them before they announced themselves in such figure.
So neuro imaging has managed to actually really bust some
of these, uh these myths we have right, we're actually
see what's going on, or at least get get a
visual um perspective on brain activity, what's going on, what's

(08:59):
going going on, where it's going on, and how much
activity is taking place. Well, and it's definitely busted some
of the assumptions that we have about the way that
we operate. And one of the things that I was
thinking about is this study about love and hate that
we talked about love hating robots, and this was um
research because the research scientists was thinking, you know what,

(09:20):
there's this guy at work that I know he hates me,
and so I want to see, um, what's going on,
you know, with people when they hate. Because his his
thought was, it's got to be some sort of impassioned,
irrational thing that's happening, that part of the brain has
got to be connected to this emotion. But what he
found is that it was actually um that hate is

(09:43):
actually hanging out in the part of the brain that's
very rational and calculating. So it makes us have just
a different view on what exactly is going on or
how we perceived the way that our behavior is being
expressed around us. And then there's another thing too, that
brain damage permanent. Right. We used always think, okay, well,
if if you're getting a horrible accident or something happens,

(10:05):
you know it's permanent. But we know about neuroplasticity and
that's the ability to bring to heal itself. And of course,
if you've got extreme damages um then you probably do
are are going to sustain permanent damage. But if you've
got low level to mid level damage, your brain can
actually kind of go in there and start reforming synaptic connections.

(10:27):
It can't recover neurons that have been lost or damage,
but those synaptic connections can be rebrown, which is really incredible.
I feel like that's one that that's still has has
some has some spreading to do, because I feel like
there's still that idea out there that if like I
would have walked behind a horse and get kicked in
the head, whatever damage I've suffered would be permanent. I
think that we've seen this in other areas too, and

(10:48):
we've talked about this with the music and U Can
Music Rebuild Your Brain in that podcast, and we we
looked at Alzheimer's patients and people who have had strokes,
and again we saw these examples of neuroplasticity where their
parts of the brain could pick up and help you
to relearn words, for instance, as a stroke patient. A
stroke patient might not be able to to speak, but

(11:10):
she may be able to sing and eventually be able
to speak again through music because that part of her
brain is taken over the faculties, which is pretty interesting, right,
Or or people who really learned to to speak via say,
using their tongue to to to draw the letters on
the roof of their mouths. I've heard of that as
a as an example of someone overcoming stroke. Yeah yeah, so,

(11:33):
but like Dr Pat says, I mean, this is it's
still very much a mystery to us, the brain. Um.
But you know, we've got all of this exciting technology
in front of us today that can really help us
to better understand ourselves and maybe even consciousness, right, like
what it means to be a conscious being or as
sentient being just you know, not not nothing, No, but

(11:55):
it's a that one's that one is on is one
of the uh, I don't know. It kind of feels
like a Pandora's box at times. You know, I wonder
the more we unlock about consciousness and the more we understand,
you know, what we are and who we are? Uh?
Do we do we stand the risk of demystifying ourselves
too much. This presentation is brought to you by Intel,

(12:21):
sponsors of Tomorrow UM I think I've mentioned it before.
There's a there's a quote from author Are Scott Baker
who makes the argument that that consciousness is um It's
it's like a coin trick and uh and if you
explain the coin trick, then you can no longer see

(12:43):
the magic. And in this scenario, we are the magic. UM.
So I don't know. I think about this sometimes. Well,
there's actually that We'll get to this in a little bit,
but there's actually something called the Blue Brain Project that
is exploring this this very idea. Who's in that is that? No, No,
this is an actual project that's going on. Oh this

(13:07):
is the model. Yeah. Yeah. But before we talk about that,
we wanted to talk with Dr Pete a little bit
more about the future of neuroscience and as a neurosurgeon,
what he would love to see. Let's find out technology
has has prompted UM or the disease process has prompted,
you know, the blossoming of technology. As soon as we

(13:29):
get a handle on one item, there's always another question
to be answered. And so I'm always cautious to say
I think as a as a physician, surgeon, UM, an educator,
we always think that we're at at that the greatest
point of discovery, UM, and at this time of our

(13:49):
being we are that's the greatest thing, and one would
hope for marvelous things to come about. UM. The best
thing I think we're gonna be looking at in the
future is uh is uh is um at least with
the brain is continued understanding and to define you know, pathology,

(14:09):
how the brain responds to tumors, whether their primary tumors
or their tumor on the outside of the brain is
pushing on the brain. How the how the brain responds
to pathology. Execondly, I think the great thing that I
would hope to see in my lifetime is the ability
of the spinal cord and the brain to come about
with as you put down the plasticity, the ability to

(14:29):
repair itself and every turn of functioning. To have a
stroke patient UM as a dobbin he is very in fact,
the ability to communicate or speak better the spinal cord
injured patient who's uh, who's destined today to be on
the ventilator, wheelchair, dependent for life and and rely upon
others for all care, to be able to arise independently

(14:51):
from a chair. That's what I would hope. So I
think that's that's actually I can see as a certain
how he would really want to see the spinal cord
and the brain be able to better talk to each other.
Um and for eventually patients to be able to walk.
It makes a lot of sense that that is what
he's after right now. Um And and surely you know
we'll be making some good strides with that. But I

(15:15):
was thinking, you know, we should probably talk a little
bit about some existing technology right now as it relates
to the brain. And we know that there's a portable
m r I available, and we know that there's a
MEG scanner, which is super cool. This was I believe
this came out in the two thousand one, two thousand
two something like that. There's only about a hundred of
them in existence. But a MEG scanner is a magnetic anencephalography.

(15:39):
It's imaging technology that can non invasively detect brain electromagnetic
activity lasting only milliseconds and the speed of communications in
neural circuits, whereas other functioning brain imaging l fMRI I
technology can only capture activity that last seconds or minutes,
and some involve radiation exposure. So this is this we

(15:59):
talk about this a little bit about when we were
talking about dogs and um people's connection to infants and puppies,
and they actually put them in one of these mag
scanners and within one seventh of a second they could
detect that it was I believe it was the overallllle
cortex was looking at these pictures of puppies and infants

(16:21):
and lighting up and going nuts. So it just gives
us a little a little bit more of a fine
tuning mechanism to look at the brain. And this is
some of the technology that we was we discussed in
the Eat Popcorn episode that could eventually lead to a
situation where you could have advertisements reading your mind and
seeing what your reaction is to various uh physical on

(16:43):
that physical, visual or auditory stimuli. Yeah. Actually, and it
was Paul root will Be. He's the director of ethics
at Emery University, and he was the guy that said, look,
it is possible right now to beam light into your
front cortex and that the receptors would get a reflection
of that light, essentially scanning your brain and interpreting your
thoughts as you concentrated on something. And that's why we

(17:06):
brought it up in the eat popcorn podcasts because it
was like, you know that that could be used in
marketing so very easily. Yeah, I mean it could be
happening right now, who knows. Um, But I didn't want
to talk a little bit more about the Blue Brain Project,
which is a model of the brain. Yes, yes, not
a Tom York song, not a Tom York song, and
not a model of the brain like the little plastic

(17:27):
one that comes out of the Visible Man skeleton right right,
There's there's no plastic going on here. It was started
in June two thousand and five and it's a ten
year joint venture between IBM and ep f L, which
is short for Equal Polytechnique. I apologize for that. It
was the best I could do there, and it's the

(17:50):
main focus is to reverse engineer the brain. And they're
building a detailed, realistic computer model of the human brain
and it's one hundred trillion synapses. Yeah. So the first
phase of this was actually completed in two thousand and seven. Um.
This is actually from the director of this project, and

(18:10):
this quote is current technology is now allowing us to
qualify that tabula rasa hypothesis which argues that our brains
are a blink slate at birth and we only gain
knowledge through experience. It's an idea that has permeated science
for centuries. There is no question that knowledge in the
sense that we typically understand it, reading and writing, recognizing
our friends, learning a language is the result of our experiences.

(18:33):
But the ep f l's teams work demonstrates that some
of our fundamental representations or basic knowledge is inscribed in
our genes, which is like whoa, Okay, because neuro scientists
have been saying this for a long time. Okay, if
you've if, um, if you have a d D or
a d D h D. These are things that aren't
necessarily things that came from your environment, that you acquired

(18:57):
through your environment. So we should start looking at this
and through neuroscience and ways to treat it, and start
considering the person as a whole um, knowing that they
came prepackaged with some of these things, which is pretty cool. Um.
And this is from ned City News there their articles

(19:17):
called brain stimulation is a goal of the Blue Brain
supercomputing project. Blue Brain can model components of the mammalian
brain and precise cellular detail and simulate neuronal activity in
three D. Soon blue Brain will be able to simulate
a whole rat brain in real time. Wow, I know.
I mean that's been a personal dream of mine to
live long enough to see a rat brain, you know,

(19:40):
generated in your Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean the again,
the project director, Henry Markham. I don't believe that said
his name before, but Henry Markham, he has a really
good Ted dot Com talk on this. He was basically saying, well,
we can't use mice forever, and I don't know why.
He thinks maybe we're going to run out of myce um,
But for him, obviously it's just a better way to
look at the human brain. And so he thinks that

(20:03):
this computer model is actually going to bear out a
theory that the brain creates a version of the universe
and then projects it like a bubble all around us. Yeah,
so that that's the consciousness part, right, Well, that's pretty
mind blowing right there. Yeah, it's crazy, and um, I
mean it's basically basically like mathematics is animating our neurons
for us to look at. And Seed Magazine's article Out

(20:26):
of the Blue says that if the project succeeds, it
will have taken the self and turned it into something
that we can see this sense of self and then
will we be horrified will be enlightened? Well, I mean
that's the whole thing, right, the magic trick. It's like
the jig is up. I mean, do you is it
what we thought it was? Or you know, do we
are we just these you know, freeasembled packages. I mean,

(20:49):
does it really matter the environments you know that we're
in and how much we learn from that or you know,
it's that whole nature versus nurtural question. But John, you know,
I don't think it's actually gonna answer it definitively. No,
probably not. I mean, there's there's This is one of
the things that we're gonna continue to chew on for
quite some time. I feel like that the the technology

(21:11):
is going to improve tremendously. It's gonna give us even
more tools to better analyze. But uh, it just feels
like one of those things that we're just the more questions,
more questions are going to come up with every answer. Well,
and there's always been the philosophical aspect of it too, right,
that the brain is the seat of the soul essentially
um when in fact we know that our guts are

(21:33):
telling us a lot our guts right now are telling
us how we feel, you know, in an emotional sense,
like sending all sorts of signals. Um. So it's not
just you know, the three pounds of gray matter sitting
atop our next you know, doing everything. But it's certainly
interesting that people are reverse engineering and looking at um,

(21:55):
the seat of the soul, so to speak. Well, hey,
let's move on to some listener mail then, all right,
and this one from a listening by the name of Malachi.
Malachi gave us a rather long email and I don't
I can't read it all, but um he picked up
some some particularly mind blowing stuff from a pharmacology class
that he was that he was a part of. And

(22:16):
uh so, skipping a bit and getting right to the
chase here he says, where this starts, getting into the
area of blowing my mind, is that when you examine
all the molecules that make up living things, they are
all left handed versions of molecules. All the amino acids
in your body are composed of the l isomer form
of that molecule. It appears that all of all life

(22:37):
on Earth evolved from an original common ancestor that just
happened to be using left handed amino acids, it would
seem that it is pure chance that life evolved with
the preference for left handed isomer's. After all, an organism
made entirely from right handed amino acids could function. In theory,
it would just be a mirror image down to the
molecular level of its counterpart, left handed version. Alien species

(22:59):
in another world to be composed entirely of left me
of right handed isomers. So yeah, that's pretty interesting. Yeah,
thanks Malichai, And if you have anything mind blowing to share,
or you have some thoughts on a recent episode, you
can find us on Facebook and Twitter. We're blow the
Mind on both of those, and you can also drop

(23:20):
us a note at Blow the Mind at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn
more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in
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