10% Brain and Psi Silliness

The best explanation I've seen so far for the origin of the 10% myth:

Three Myths About the Brain

IN the early 19th century, a French neurophysiologist named Pierre Flourens conducted a series of innovative experiments. He successively removed larger and larger portions of brain tissue from a range of animals, including pigeons, chickens and frogs, and observed how their behavior was affected.

His findings were clear and reasonably consistent. “One can remove,” he wrote in 1824, “from the front, or the back, or the top or the side, a certain portion of the cerebral lobes, without destroying their function.” For mental faculties to work properly, it seemed, just a “small part of the lobe” sufficed.

Thus the foundation was laid for a popular myth: that we use only a small portion — 10 percent is the figure most often cited — of our brain. An early incarnation of the idea can be found in the work of another 19th-century scientist, Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, who in 1876 wrote of the powers of the human brain that “very few people develop very much, and perhaps nobody quite fully.”

But Flourens was wrong, in part because his methods for assessing mental capacity were crude and his animal subjects were poor models for human brain function. Today the neuroscience community uniformly rejects the notion, as it has for decades, that our brain’s potential is largely untapped.

The myth persists, however. The newly released movie “Lucy,” about a woman who acquires superhuman abilities by tapping the full potential of her brain, is only the latest and most prominent expression of this idea.


The rest of the article deals with two other popular brain myths.

Doug
 
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The myth persists, however. The newly released movie “Lucy,” about a woman who acquires superhuman abilities by tapping the full potential of her brain, is only the latest and most prominent expression of this idea.
Well... that may be right, but ther's a number of "superpowers" that are very uncommon or that can only be found in people with brain damage, like the "Savant syndrome"
What about absolute pitch, eidetic memory hyperthymesia?

Take a look at this... http://www.cracked.com/article_19661_6-real-people-with-mind-blowing-mutant-superpowers.html

From the cited article... said:
Today the neuroscience community uniformly rejects the notion, as it has for decades, that our brain’s potential is largely untapped.
Hmmm... I am very skeptical
 
Well... that may be right, but ther's a number of "superpowers" that are very uncommon or that can only be found in people with brain damage, like the "Savant syndrome"
What about absolute pitch, eidetic memory hyperthymesia?

Take a look at this... http://www.cracked.com/article_19661_6-real-people-with-mind-blowing-mutant-superpowers.html


Hmmm... I am very skeptical
While I briefly majored in piano performance, I dated a girl who'd just graduated with the same degree. You could take both of your arms and hit as many piano keys as you could and she'd name them in ascending or descending order perfectly.

Pretty incredible.

For a while I would hum an A note before sitting down with an instrument and got to where I'd normally be right. Haven't tried it in years . . . Still a long cry from her ability.
 
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While I briefly majored in piano performance, I dated a girl who'd just graduated with the same degree. You could take both of your arms and hit as many piano keys as you could and she'd name them in ascending or descending order perfectly.

Pretty incredible.

For a while I would hum an A note before sitting down with an instrument and got to where I'd normally be right. Haven't tried it in years . . . Still a long cry from her ability.
Yes, pretty impressive :)
I have played with two keyboard / piano players who both have perfect pitch and they were quite stunning. Singers typically would hate them because they were too critical about those slightly out of tune notes ... :D

Strangely they perceived the notes in very different ways. One of them said that notes had very distinctive colors, the other pianist instead said he could hear the name of notes themselves, as they were playing. Curious.

It also seems that many piano tuners acquire perfect pitch after years spent listening very closely to those vibrations, over and over again. So it's not just "genetic".
 
Yes, pretty impressive :)
I have played with two keyboard / piano players who both have perfect pitch and they were quite stunning. Singers typically would hate them because they were too critical about those slightly out of tune notes ... :D

Strangely they perceived the notes in very different ways. One of them said that notes had very distinctive colors, the other pianist instead said he could hear the name of notes themselves, as they were playing. Curious.

It also seems that many piano tuners acquire perfect pitch after years spent listening very closely to those vibrations, over and over again. So it's not just "genetic".
Personally I don't have anything like perfect pitch, mostly I'm pretty vague on the matter. But I do find certain musical performances painful to listen to, when the pitch wanders away from where I feel it should be. I think this is a somewhat subjective phenomenon where to some, the discrepancy is inaudible, to others, it adds just the right amount of creative or artistic interpretation, and to still others it's a cause of distress.
 
Personally I don't have anything like perfect pitch, mostly I'm pretty vague on the matter. But I do find certain musical performances painful to listen to, when the pitch wanders away from where I feel it should be. I think this is a somewhat subjective phenomenon where to some, the discrepancy is inaudible, to others, it adds just the right amount of creative or artistic interpretation, and to still others it's a cause of distress.
Me too, and I don't have perfect pitch. Natural scale instruments like violin can be really painful even in the hands of pros when the intonation is wandering.
I suppose many of those great classical violinists with impeccable intonation must have absolute pitch because they never miss a note, while others tend to fluctuate more and sometimes it is indeed unpleasant.
 
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