Notifiblog: How Stuff Works Thursday!

​If I had gone into medicine as a calling, I am certain I would have chosen to study the brain. Thus, I can't resist exploring an article on HSW called, "Top 10 Myths About the Brain."

Here are three to confound and maybe fascinate you, too!

Myth: Listening to Mozart makes you smarter. "In the 1950s, an ear, nose and throat doctor named Albert Tomatis (ed. Wikipedia gives his first name as "Alfred") began the trend, claiming success using Mozart's music to help people with speech and auditory disorders. In the 1990s, 36 students in a study at the University of California at Irvine listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata before taking an IQ test. According to Dr. Gordon Shaw, the psychologist in charge of the study, the students' IQ scores went up by about 8 points. The "Mozart effect" was born." A researcher involved in that project later asserted there was never any claim it actually made anyone smarter; it just increased performance on certain spatial-temporal tasks. Even that is questioned today.

Myth: You Can Learn Through Subliminal Messages. "A subliminal message (meaning, below "limen," or our conscious perception threshold) is a message embedded into images or sound meant to penetrate into our subconscious and influence our behavior. The first person to coin the term was James Vicary, a market researcher. In 1957, Vicary stated that he inserted messages into a showing of a movie in New Jersey. The messages, which flashed for 1/3000th of a second, told moviegoers to drink Coca-Cola and eat popcorn." However, Vicary's assertion that sales of Coke and popcorn increased by 18% was a flat-out lie. Another experiment done in Canada over television failed completely. Sorry, you can no longer commit a crime and then tell the judge a suggestion in a song made you do it.

Myth: The Human Brain Is the Biggest Brain. It's not. "The relationship between brain size and intelligence isn't really about the actual weight of the brain; it's about the ratio of brain weight to the entire body weight. For humans, that ratio is about 1-to-50. For most other mammals, it's 1-to-180, and for birds, it's 1-to-220. The brain takes up more weight in a human than it does in other animals." Humans have the most cerebral cortex, and therein is the difference, apparently.

Cheers, eh!