Your brain is like a board meeting

...grayish, quarrelsome and grudgingly efficient

-----

Post # 2, a long time coming.

Like most productive things I do these days, this comes as a means of procrastinating slightly more productive things. However, I've realized I don't just need an outlet, I need a place to give voice to the kinds of ideas that are stirring around despite the fact that I haven't yet acquired the requisite professional accreditation.

Note: now that I'm affiliated with a university and a research group, all views posted here are my own.

I'll start smallish, since tackling any one of the main spiels I've been working on is daunting. Let's do some fun facts. The heavier stuff will come later.

You're not like Other People. You monster.

Everybody talks about brains these days: lawyers, supplement marketers, educators and doting suburban moms, and many more. But when I say I'm doing neuroscience in graduate school, people sometimes literally take a step back, as though I'm this radioactive mad genius. I'm here to tell you -- brain science isn't brain surgery, and for that matter while brain surgery is dang hard, that's probably more as a result of the skills required -- complete mental focus, steady and dexterous hands, unerring step-by-step procedural thinking, grace under pressure etc. -- than the pure knowledge.

What we've learned about our squishy mind-sponges in the last century or two is incredible, but it was acquired at a slow grind, and so while expertise is still expertise, I think anybody could learn about 50% of everything we brain folks have to tell you (that's useful in daily life, anyway) in a weekend or two, if it were just laid out properly.

Let's play MYTHBUSTERS! I'll do a round every now and then, since I don't just want you to know when they're wrong, but how wrong they are and what's actually right. Sadly, I can't offer you death-defying pyrotechnics in blog form, but bear with me.

This is your brain on drugs. Though probably the normal amount, and 20 years ago.

Round 1: We only use 10% of our brains.

No ma'am. Or at least, not in the way this implies. In fact, we probably use most of our brains most of the time -- for any given task, there are a huge number of areas that work together to support that function, and every area seems to be involved in a ton of different tasks. I loves me some analogies, so while you, dear reader, will hear many if you're the kind to just read a million entries back-to-front at 2 in the morning, I'll start with one that's popular right now.

Your brain is like a group of people. Think of your stereotypical all-hands business meeting, for instance. You've got a bunch of different specialists all engaged in conversation to try and tackle a series of problems for that week. When the boss brings up an issue, generally everybody will try to weigh in with their perspective -- the budget people on bottom line, the PR people on publicity, engineers with logistics, and so on. Sitting quietly and playing Fruit Ninja isn't how they get themselves noticed and their concerns heard, even if they're not experts on this particular question. When the topic changes, different people become more prominent, but everybody's got a role to play.

Well ok, so I guess that's the opposite of true. Save your employees, wear a bike helmet.

That's why those blobs you see showing an area "lighting up" during a particular task are so hard to get and interpret -- the whole brain is generally active, and you're only seeing the areas with a 1%, 2%, maybe a 5% increase over the usual amount. So in the end, it's the sum of everybody's contributions that matter, and anybody who trumpets "SCIENTISTS FIND BRAIN CENTER FOR POLITICAL PARTY" is blowing smoke.

That's all for today, off to a meeting. (With a person. That kind.)