Three brain myths are repeated on an almost daily basis in news stories around the world. Let's consider them one by one in the hopes that we can finally squash them.
Pity the poor human brain. People have misunderstood it for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians thought it was a useless organ and tugged it out of dead pharaohs through the nose. Aristotle thought the brain was a cooling unit for the heart. Philosophers in the Middle Ages believed that certain brain cavities full of spinal fluid housed the human soul.
You'd think we'd know better nowadays, given that neuroscientists can peer inside a human skull to observe a living, functioning brain. Sadly, we still have fairy tales mixed in with the facts. For example, Ben Carson, the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and a former neurosurgeon, made a bit of a gaffe last month when he called the human brain a perfect storehouse of life's memories. Just electrify the right neurons, he claimed, and anyone can recite "verbatim, a book they read 60 years ago." This is a fiction that scientists debunked decades ago. The brain is not a video recorder. Memories are distributed throughout your brain in bits and pieces, biased by your beliefs and feelings, and assembled in the moment.
