We Use All 100 Percent of Our Brain

Homer: All right brain, you don't like me, and I don't like you.
But let's just get me through this, and I can get back to killing

you with beer.

Brain: It's a deal!

There are many myths about our brains, such as we use only 10 percent of our brain — and many other amazing facts, as revealed in a fascinating new book by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, two leading neuroscientists.

They write in their book that not only that we don't use just 10 percent of our brain, but also that even simple tasks actually produce activity throughout the entire brain.

Many people like this old myth because it gives them a hope that they could do so much more if they could use even a tiny bit of that other 90 percent.

Yawning is often related to sleepiness and boredom but it actually wake up our brain activities. We get more oxygen into our blood system while yawning.

Blind people hear better - this is also a myth, because, when tested, blind people are not better at detecting faint sounds. But they do have better memory. Since they can't rely on their vision, they constantly rely on their memory and it seams that this improves some other abilities by taking advantage of brain space that isn't being used for vision.

Playing video games practices multi-tasking and this increases one's abilityto pay attention to many things at the same time. In one study, college students who played action games regularly processed information more quickly, could track more objects at once, and had better task-switching abilities. So, allowing your children to play computer games may not be such a bad thing after all.

Another myth about our brain is that we are more intelligent if our brain is bigger - after all, Einstein's brain was no larger than the average person's.

Exercise helps keep your brain fit. Not sudoku or crosswords. In fact, exercise is the single most useful thing you can do to maintain your cognitive abilities later in life; elderly people who have been athletic all their lives do much better mentally than sedentary people of the same age.

Stupid tunes are hard to forget. There's nothing more annoying than the line of a song playing over and over again in your head. Blame it on your brain's ability to recall sequences. We need to remember sequences every day, from the movements involved in signing your name or in making coffee, to the correct route you need to take off the motorway to get home.
One way is to introduce other sequences that interfere with the reinforcement of the memory. So find another infectious song, and hope the cure doesn't become more annoying than the original problem!