by Cracked. com
THE MYTH: You only use 10 percent of your brain.
Man, just imagine all of the cool things you’d do if you could just tap into the 90 percent of your brain that humans are too lazy to use. The possibilities are limitless. You could probably set stuff on fire just by getting angry at it. But alas, you’re confined to using that meager 10 percent and being forever held down by your brain’s built-in laziness. And for this, you’re supposed to protect it with a helmet? Whatever.
THE TRUTH: Using all of your brain on one task would be a disaster.
It’s true that you only use a small percentage of your brain at a time. The various parts of the brain have specialized functions. It might be using the 10 percent dedicated to reading and processing muscular prose at this moment, but if you stood up and started in on an interpretive dance, the reading part would go dim and another, creepier part would light up. There’s even a special part of the brain that apparently keeps you from turning into a dick.
Trying to think with 100 percent of your brain at once would be like trying to type with 100 percent of your fingers at once: A s;fjd. There. That’s how much sense the inside of your head would make if you used it all at the same time.
So how did we come to believe this nonsense in the first place? At some point, neurologists figured out that a human can survive when parts of the brain are removed. Rather than using this to herald the miraculously adaptable living computer we’ve all got hiding behind our eyes, your teachers and parents chose to use this as an excuse to make you feel worse about yourself.
The Problem: You Believe Your Life Is a Training Montage
THE MYTH: Training montages are inspiring, harmless fun.
At some point in any sports movie, the grossly unqualified underdog will start training to the sound of some inspirational rock song. Rapid cuts will fast-forward us weeks or months through time, and when the song is over, the underdog is now even better at boxing/karate/football/etc., than the heavily favored opponent.
FIGURE 8.2 Final score of the All-Reality Invitational Tournament: Evil Defending Champs: 65, Scrappy Underdog Misfits: 0.
THE TRUTH: Those montages ruined modern civilization.
First, let’s not pretend that the movies and TV shows we watched as kids don’t shape how we view the world. They affect what we buy, what type of people we aspire to be, and what we expect out of our relationships. When there’s a movie about dudes on motorcycles, motorcycle sales (and motorcycle accidents) go through the roof. And movies have raised us to believe that the scrappy underdog, with one big burst of concentrated effort, can become better at something than an evil opponent who has been training at that pace for his entire life. It’s two breezy minutes from sucking at karate to being great at karate, from borderline obesity to trim fitness, from geeky girl to prom queen, from terrible garage band to awesome rock band.
In the real world, of course, the winners of the All Valley Karate Championship in The Karate Kid would be the kids whose entire lives since elementary school had been one long training montage. After all, it takes about ten thousand hours to get really good at something, according to a famous analysis by author Malcolm Gladwell. That’s two hours of practice a day, every day, for almost fourteen years. That’s probably why the evil karate kids were such dicks—they were never allowed to do anything fun.
But the difference between the Hollywood version and our reality creates a form of sticker shock when we see how difficult the real task is. We’ll call it “effort shock.”
Listen to adults complain about their lives and you’ll find that they are continually in a state of shock about how freaking impossible everything seems—career, debt, relationships, losing weight—all the big stuff feels like trying to eat through a mountain. Well, no wonder. We have this vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, and it’s laughably, catastrophically low. That’s because subconsciously, we’re picturing it getting done in a montage. In a movie, you can lose weight over the course of a three-minute track by Survivor. In the real world, you have to make yourself miserable for six months before you find yourself down a whopping four pounds. You let yourself go at a single all-you-can-eat buffet and you’ve gained it all back.
BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: Fun fact! Running for an hour burns 600 calories! There are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat! So if you want to lose 50 pounds, you’d need to run an hour a day, every day, for about a year! And the moment you stop, you’ll start gaining it back!
It all comes back to having those massively skewed expectations of the world. Even the people you think of as pessimists got that way by continually seeing the world fail to live up to their expectations, which only happened because their expectations were grossly inaccurate in the first place. Thanks for ruining civilization, Mr. Miyagi. Wax your own damned cars.
How to Use Your Brain Once You’ve Actually Practiced Enough to Be Good at Something
THE MYTH: Focus!
Little League coaches, gym teachers, and parents throughout the history of children’s sports always go to the same mantra after every dropped ball, every missed shot, every dandelion necklace in right field: “C’mon, you have to focus!” But keep in mind, great athletes don’t grow up to be PE teachers or peewee football coaches, and unless your dad is Wilt Chamberlain (and he very well might be), then it’s safe to assume that none of these adults actually know what the hell they’re talking about.
FIGURE 8.3 If you can remember to bend your knees and keep your shooting arm under the ball at a 90-degree angle and your buttocks firmly clenched with two pounds of evenly applied pressure, you will fail spectacularly. You would actually be better off running through the first verse of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”
THE TRUTH: Do the exact opposite of that!
There is actually no quicker way to sabotage yourself in a high-pressure sporting scenario than to focus. Once your body knows the mechanics of the sport, you’re better off not thinking at all. That’s because the pressure to do well forces your brain into an emergency mode that overrides all the muscle memory you’ve built up from months, sometimes even years of training. The results can be disastrous, because brains, it turns out, are notoriously bad at sports. It’s the equivalent of a team owner coming down from his box seats and suiting up to play the last thirty seconds of a game he doesn’t trust his players to win—your mind is trying to control a situation it has no business controlling. When a player focuses too hard, the consequence is called “analysis paralysis,” or as athletes know it, “choking,” and it happens at every level of sport . . . the only difference being that professionals do it on national television.
But there’s also a simple solution: singing. Just by singing to themselves, athletes can keep their brains from trying to micromanage clutch moments. It’s essentially distracting the mind with a trivial job to keep it out of the way during free throws, penalty kicks, or big putts. Humming also works just as well, as does counting backward or even repeating a mantra. So even if you want to let the screams of all those red-faced Little League coaches resonate in your head, it can help you play better . . . as long as you don’t actually do what they say.
Men Do Not Think About Sex Roughly Every Seven Seconds
THE MYTH: The human brain is a wondrous flesh-puter of endless imaginative possibilities.
Unless you attach a penis to it, in which case it’s more like a bad cable connection that keeps showing you random bits of a Real Sex: Cancun special while you’re trying to watch the game.
THE TRUTH: If that were true, life would be an apocalyptic nightmare.
It’s surprising that this myth is so stubbornly believed, and yet polls have shown that it’s quoted by smug ex-girlfriends and proudly horny teenage boys roughly every six seconds.
This paragraph that you’re reading right now is designed to encourage you to think about sweaty, salty, soul-quivering intercourse about every six to nine seconds. It should quickly become apparent how disruptive and detri
mental that kind of convulsive brain tic would be to anyone’s work, home life, or many moist, hot, throbbing social challenges that arise day to day. Sex is certainly a defining factor of human existence, and most men will readily admit to occasionally allowing their thoughts to wander—when the time is right or stimulus presents itself—to the bedroom, and the glistening boobs and lips and naked slappity rubbing found therein.
See? Pretty hard to concentrate.
To put it another way, if this were true, it would mean that all the very manly men standing in line at the bank or working on their car or piloting a jet or protesting political injustices or perpetrating political injustices or helping disabled children cross the street or parasailing or having cocktails with underwear models would have to take a mental break eight times a minute to remember how their junk works (see Figure 8.4). Other than the underwear model guy, that’d be pretty tough to swing.
FIGURE 8.4 Can you spot the most appropriate boner? The least? (Answers: Apparent.)
At a certain point during puberty, young men grow less ashamed of the weird thoughts their testicles are pumping into their brains and start bragging about them. Like most arms races, the competition to seem more sex crazed than the other guys in the locker room can get out of hand quickly. Young men who don’t realize that the other guys are lying and that stats like this are gross exaggerations are forced to conclude that there’s something wrong with themselves, at a time when sexual moderation should be encouraged most. If you’re one of these terrified young men trying to force wet tits into your brain more often than they already naturally occur there, rest assured that this stat is completely full of shit. Your friends do not lie awake all night thinking about, forgetting about, then thinking about sex again, and if they do, they probably have something very wrong with them.
Modern Technology Is the Reason You’re Depressed
Thanks to the miracle of technology, you can do all of your Christmas shopping online and avoid the fat lady ramming her cart into you at Target. You can buy a home theater system and get the cinema experience without a toddler kicking the back of your seat—you can even stream the movies so you don’t have to go to a video store. Even when you do venture out into the sun, you can browse the Web on your phone instead of interacting with the strangers on the bus or in the doctor’s waiting room. Dealing with those people is now an old-world inconvenience, like having to wash your clothes in a creek, or waiting for a raccoon to wander by the outhouse so you can wipe your ass with it.
The problem is that annoyance is something you build up a tolerance to, like alcohol or a bad smell. The less you are exposed to it, the less you’re able to handle it when it inevitably comes up. And it is inevitable—society is, after all, nothing more than humans peacefully cooperating despite our mutual distaste for one another. But dealing with incompatible people takes a set of skills that you learn from practice—something that people used to get plenty of back when they knew their neighbors and every purchase required a verbal exchange with a human. A lot of old friends first met due to those random encounters. But these days . . .
Social Media Somehow Results in Fewer Friends
Let’s say you get drunk, take off all your clothes, use a Magic Marker to cover your naked body with graphic descriptions of what you’d like to do to Michael Bublé’s pretty mouth, and then have someone take your picture. How many people on earth do you trust with that photo? A Cornell University study showed the likely number is two—that’s how many people the average person says they can confide in (about a quarter of respondents said they have no one). Those numbers are down dramatically from just twenty-five years ago. That’s right—in an era when communication was harder, when there was no Facebook or even cell phones, when you couldn’t seek out like-minded people on message boards, they still had more close friends than we do.
FIGURE 8.5 Friendship requires time, sacrifice, and shared experiences. The Internet requires a computer.
That’s because the Internet is great at giving us what we think we want: easy friendships that don’t require anything of us—shallow relationships with people who laugh and play multiplayer games with us but who don’t know our deepest secrets and shames and weaknesses. These are the people you never have to do favors for, the people who will never call you out on your b.s., the people who will never stage an intervention. If they get angry, they might insult you, but they can’t criticize you—they don’t know you well enough to offer anything like brutal honesty. That’s the kind of thing that only comes from having experienced the highs and lows together, in that magical realm where hugs and handshakes and fistfights can occur. And in fact . . .
You Have Evolved to Need Physical Contact
When someone speaks to you face-to-face, what percentage of the meaning is actually in the words, as opposed to the body language and tone of voice? According to one study, it’s 7 percent. The other 93 percent is nonverbal (no, we don’t know how they arrived at that exact number; they have a machine or something). But you don’t need a study to tell you that—a guy doesn’t wait for a girl to tell him verbally that she likes him. He knows from the sparkle in her eyes, her posture, and the way she grabs his hair and shoves his face into her boobs. E-mail loses all of that. One study showed that 40 percent of e-mail messages are misunderstood in some way.
All of your senses evolved to adapt to face-to-face interaction—you pick up signals from real-world contact, detecting and adjusting to other people’s moods on the fly, subconsciously reading ten thousand subtle facial cues. Kids born without this ability are considered mentally handicapped, while people who have lots of it are called “charismatic” and become movie stars and politicians. It’s not what they say; it’s this energy they exude that makes us feel good about ourselves. It’s not magic; it’s biology—we are social animals whose brains ooze doses of happiness chemicals when a bunch of us gather and cooperate and high-five. It’s why humans need parties and concerts and churches and protests and sports.
Things That Can Secretly Turn You into a Bad Person
Most of us go through life doing our best to be morally sound, or at least well-intentioned. And we are . . . right up until we run into one of the many seemingly inconsequential things that can turn any of us into the human embodiment of evil. Things like . . .
Caffeine: Around 80 to 90 percent of people reading this will consume caffeine in some form today. But depending on your mood, maybe you should hold off: Caffeine actually amplifies your stress level. This happens because your body doesn’t know what’s making your heart race (it could be that second cup of coffee or a hungry lion). So you down that cup of joe and your body starts pumping stress hormones out, and the next thing you know, you’re strangling a mailman because you unsubscribed to the Brookstone catalog last year, damn it.
Studies show that everyone—from teenagers to hard-core prisoners—is quicker to express anger after consuming caffeine. Lawyers have actually tried (and sometimes succeeded) in using caffeine intoxication as a defense for murder and road rage. The U.S. Army even recognizes its very anger-inducing effects, and when the damn army starts urging you to chill, maybe it’s time to set down the mochaccino and release your death grip on that dude you didn’t notice you had in a headlock.
Touch: Everything from the feel of the chair you sit on to what you’re holding can influence your behavior and the decisions you make. Scientists found that holding heavier objects, for instance, made men think more seriously about things, which in turn made them more likely to donate money to charity if asked; men holding lighter objects were less likely to donate. And people handling rough objects were more likely to see neutral situations in a bad light. And sure, maybe those studies are skewed—maybe you’re in a bad mood because some asshole scientist has been handing you pineapples for the past half hour—but the most shocking find was that your hands didn’t even have to be doing the touching. People who sat in hard chairs were more likely to maintain a hard line in negotiations and we
re less receptive to their partner’s way of thinking.
Solution: All war rooms should be beanbags and kittens as far as the eye can see.
You’re welcome, World Peace.
Going Green: According to a study published in Psychological Science, if you’re environmentally friendly, you’re more likely to be a selfish, lying, cheating, stealing douche bag. Behavioral psychologists call it moral balancing. The theory goes that the better you are in one way, the less good you feel like you have to be in others. What makes “going green” special is that with most types of good behavior—soup kitchen work, charitable donations, puppy counseling—there’s an obvious, long-term return on your investment (free rolls, tax breaks, and snuggles, respectively). With ecologically conscious behavior, there’s a less tangible reward for you. So to compensate, you give yourself more breaks when no one else is looking. You cut that plastic six-pack holder up this morning, after all; don’t you deserve to hit a few hobos with your car?
Magnets: It turns out our moral compass is as easy to fool as, well, a nonmoral compass. Scientists at MIT discovered this by pointing a magnetic wave behind the right ear of some presumably deeply weirded-out volunteers. The participants then demonstrated an impaired ability to tell the difference between right and wrong. Specifically, the study found that subjects, after being magno-wiped, were much more receptive to immoral situations as long as there was a “happy” outcome that justified the immoral means. The really creepy part? It was as fast as it was easy: The researchers found that subjects could have their morality wiped in half a second.