Recently The Daily Mail has published very fascinating facts and common myths about our grey matter, I mean our brains of course. These facts and myths have been taken from a new book by two leading neuroscientists Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang. The information is interesting and sometimes really surprised.
FACT: You can’t tickle yourself
When a doctor examines a ticklish patient, they place one of the patient’s hands over their own to prevent the tickling sensation.
Why does this work? Because no matter how ticklish you may be, you can’t tickle yourself.
This is because your brain focuses on what’s going on in the outside world — to prevent important signals from being drowned out in the endless buzz of sensations caused by your own actions.
For instance, this means you’re unlikely to notice the texture of your socks, but you would feel a tap on the shoulder.
The patient doesn’t feel the tickling because his brain thinks it’s his own hand doing the action.
FACT: Looking at a photograph is harder than playing chess
When computer scientists first began trying to write programmes to mimic human abilities, they found it relatively-easy to get computers to follow logic and do complex maths — such as those required in chess moves — but very hard to get them to figure out what they were seeing in a visual image.
Today’s best computer programmes can beat a grand master, but any toddler can beat the top programmes when it comes to making sense of the visual world.
One reason for this is the difficulty in identifying individual objects.
You only see this ambiguity when you see something briefly enough to misidentify it — like when that rock in the middle of the dark road suddenly turns out to be a neighbour’s cat.
MYTH: You only ever use about 10 per cent of your brain
Although half the world’s population thinks this, in reality you use your whole brain every day.
But for the myth to stick around for so long, it must have been saying something that we really want to hear.
In fact, its impressive persistence may depend on its optimistic message: “If we use only 10 per cent of our brains normally, think what we could do if we could use even a tiny bit of that other 90 per cent.”
The truth is, studies of brain activity show that even simple tasks actually produce activity throughout the entire brain.
More about this book you can read in my Library. So welcome to your brain.
