Neuroscience Myths Debunked: The Truth About Brain Usage and Memory

though. It's like taking a space shuttle and then filling with full of rocks. Why have you done that? That's not a good survival trait. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a byite-size masterclass in podcast form. I'm Jason Goodger, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. In this episode, we're joined by author, psychologist, and longtime BBC Science Focus contributor, Dr. Dean Bernett, to debunk some of the biggest myths in psychology. So, Dean, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. Much appreciated. Oh, you're welcome. So, today we're going to be busting some common and pervasive myths in psychology. Yes. So, let's let's start with a big one that seems to be like a zombie. It just won't die. And that's that we only use 10% of our brains. So, first off, where does this come from? It's hard to say. It's um there's a few sort of different sources I found, but one particularly uh sort of know uh plausible seeing one is that it's from like the turn of the 20th century when people started investigating anatomy and

um exploring the actual science of it and it comes from some studies where someone had the top of their skull removed and was just being prodded with electrodes to sort of see what parts of the brain do what. Now obviously this is a very rudimentary method of testing the brain but what I read that sort of 10% of the surface of the brain if you poke it with an electrode the body does something so it's like 10% of the top of the brain is involved in uh voluntary muscular control which you know that sounds about right and the motor cortex is quite small quite sort of restricted but there's also lots of different like reflexes bits but the brain does more than that a lot more than that so that's not exactly uh helpful you know but it's

sort of become quite um it's also a very you know helpful myth for those who want to spread you know we've only just scratched the surface of what our potential is and therefore there's lots of gray area there for people who have you know psychic abilities on their mind things like that so you know you can see why it stays around but that's so I think that's the basis of the myth that I've encountered there may be others but it's always you know a misunderstanding of what counts as the brain doing something yeah how about sort of how much of our brain are we using at a single given time. You know, is that sort of fed into this myth in a sense? But it's also in a very realistic sense. The 10% is actually

quite optimistic. It's like an overestimation. Our brain um you know, it's the most energy demanding hungry organ in the body. It makes up 2% of our mass, but use like 25% of our body's reserves just staying alive. So, you know, in the terms of evolution, if we didn't need all that, we wouldn't have it. Simple as that. If you find a species which evolved an organ which is like 10% useful, 90% redundant but also consumed all the energy, pointless exercise. You know, that's not a good survival trait. Like know it's like taking a space shuttle like and then filling with full of rocks. Well, why wasn't that? That's just pointless. If it doesn't do that, it's going to succeed. All the brain's tissue is doing something if it's just staying

alive, you know. It's just the act it needs to stay active to exist. You know, that's when brain stops doing anything that it's essentially dead. So it's a very posy stable setup like it has to keep doing something at least baseline activity. So the brain's always every part of the brain is always doing something. It's always active when it comes to sort of being used mean functional in terms of like oh I want to actively do this now. I want to focus on this. I want to think about this. I want to you know like use a lot of me like in a traumatic situation your memory system boost. Um yeah when you want to raise activity and do something because of the way the blood supply the circulation

system of the brain is so restricted because the brain is so densely packed in the head in your head the human brain is any bigger our head bigger and that would be very problematic for you know the birthing process for just maintenance of just being able to stay alive because it's too demanding so on so we're at a real sort of real fine balance between how much brain we can have and how big our heads can be but part the result of that is the blood supply of the brain is quite limited you can't like you can't shove pipes into a supercomput just not going to happen. So the brain has a sort of limit capacity to shunt resources around. Some estimates I've seen say that yeah you can sort of we use way

more than 10% of our brain. You can only actively accelerate amplify the use of like 3% at once because you know we only have so much resources going to it. The rest is needed to the brain to stay alive. example I've likened it to is like a restaurant with 100 tables but only like four waiters and you know like those could work as hard as they can but you never have more than four tables being served at once because it's physically impossible and that's sort of how the metabolic side of the brain works. It's always there everyone's sat down, everyone's seated and the restaurant's working. If you want to actually do something, you have limited resources to do that. And that's why we can get so easily overwhelmed and

so like lose focus or get distracted because know it's not doesn't take a great deal for us to go oh what was I doing and then you have to shunt it somewhere else and then you've lost the previous thing and so on. So you know 10% would be quite a step up in that regard. But yeah, we are using every part of our brain just all at the same time. If that makes any sense to you as ever, it's a more complex situation than the stubborn myths would have us believe. Yeah. So, let's stick with the brain. I'm kind of my job. Yeah. And you know, a lot of people say, "Oh, I'm I'm leftrained or I'm rightrained." And this seems to not want to go away as well. So, what do we know about that?

Yeah. the left brain. No, left brain analytical, logical, rightrained artistic, creative. That's a very stubborn myth as well. Like um if not so much anymore, but there's a period when if you went on Facebook for like 10 minutes, you got like, you know, stare at this revolving statue. If it turns left, you're right. If it turns right, you're left brain. Like it's it's ambiguous stimulation. That's a whole other thing. Yeah. I mean, I first looked into this, I thought like, oh, that's just nonsense that's easily debunked. But frustratingly, for someone who's here to debunk stuff, there is an element of truth to it. Um the brain has two hemispheres like it's like two walnuts glued together you know and um they do have you know each side has a

hypoc campus an amygdala like lobe so each side is like corresponding but it does seem to be functional differences between the hemispheres and this is a sort of a very general um summary of it but by and large the left side of the brain is all about big picture stuff you know the dystopic what's what's the whole situation whereas the right side is the specifics. So like the left side sees the trees, the left side sees the forest, the right side sees the trees and you know we see like the left side of the brain the sort of um parietal cortex seems to handle more language, words, sentences. The same part of the brain on the right side seems to be more about tones, sounds, so the individual

elements of it. And that you can sort of see why that would mean like people think the rest the right side of the brain is more emotional because emotions would be more fundamental than sort of abstract concept thoughts because they evolved first they're more sort of baseline brain function and then you can sort of see like if someone is thinking about the whole picture logically then they would employ the left side of the brain more than the right side where someone is more impulsive reactive and you know like flights of fancy type stuff not you know want to see what's where things go Then yeah, you can see that being a more creative output to create but it's also like that's still a very crude uh overgeneralization of the

situation. Imagine someone wants to create like a masterpiece. They you know a sort of sculpture from scratch or a huge mosaic. They would logically have to see the big picture. you know to put everything together which is very much in this framework a left brain process or someone was like you know very fundamentally analytical wants to look at every individual detail like in a spreadsheet or individual elements of something that would be like the individual elements which would be a right brain process. So while like the general theme is the left brain is big picture, the right brain is fine detail, the how that is expressed, how that comes across is far more uh variable from situation, person to person, context to context than this

simple you're left brain, you're a nerd, you're right, like you're you're you're away with the fairies. That's that's a very crude over summarization. But you know, it's a simple one. It's a simple answer which people like and stick to. People like, oh yeah, I'm like that because I'm leftrained. I'm like that cuz I'm right brain. People just like a simple explanation for things they do. But that's almost on the verge of well yeah of course I do that. I'm a Sagittarius which is like I'm not entirely sure that all right fine you do you. But you know that's um yeah it does edge into that territory very quickly and it's not really helpful in that regard. So, let's move on to another one which I find really

interesting that you see everywhere um in popular culture in movies and in um certain panel shows from the '9s with dubious moral standards. And that's the polygraph, the lie detector. Yeah. So, what's the theory behind this? Well, I think there's a certain misconception in the wider culture that a polygraph like that detects actual deception like so like it measures what you're saying and can detect untruths or inaccuracies or dishonesty. It can't do that. There's no technology around which can do that. You can't analyze someone's speech output and say ah this one is inaccurate because um you know or actively deceptive which is what the

point of it is detecting know someone lying. The principle of it is you know a polygraph means basically measures lots of things like lots of measurements. It's measuring your body's like orthonomic activity the baseline activity of your body know like your heart rate your the skin conductance like your pulse and you know um blood pressure things like that which alter in response to lots of things. that in this case if you're talking about stressful stimulations you're you're being aroused not in the explicit sense but in the sort of fundamental biological sense like your nervous system activity is increased in this respect. So the theory is that when you lie, when

you're telling a lie, you are stressed by the act of lying and your body responds to that and then you the poly when you're being attachment to a polygraph that detects this arousal response you have in response to lying and therefore whoever observes the output of the polygraph can tell that you are being deceptive. You're lying and know it's a straightforward theory. It's a certain there's a logic to it and there are people out there who insist that it does work. It's a well, you know, it's a documented process, but there are far more scientists who insist that it's not a viable tool. Not it doesn't do what it says it does because while yes, there are certain situations, occasions when lying will cause a stress response, that's not the only thing that causes

stress response. Like if you had a list of, you know, everything that causes a stress response to the human body, lying would be quite low down that. So you know you actually have to appreciate that the research which sort of supports polygraph's work al usually done in labs where people have turned up there voluntarily know in a very sterile environment like they know there's no consequences it's just I'm just volunteering for the study you know they ask you uh you know a few questions and the usual procedure is you ask someone straightforward questions which have no bearing anything like is your name Fred and you say no unless your name is Fred in which case you say yes because you know you basically tell

the truth and that then they a reading of okay what's this person's bio levels look like when they're not lying so then when they do lie they can see where the spike happens oh this is a lie that is a very sort of neutral safe environment now where lie detectors normally occur is like police interrogations or you know on national television on dubious reality shows when also there where there are big consequences to well either lie or tell the truth so usually like you're being interrogated by the police as part of a suspect in a criminal investigation you'd have a polygraph they say did you kill that guy mean that's a stressful situation to be in regardless of whether you did it or not but also know police

interrogation tend to not be neutral they are very sort of leading you know police do their jobs but they're not scientists they're not doing this by the book in that respect so like there's so many different things which kind of really affect the output of a polygraph if you know a caffeine spike can have like a drastic effect of bio levels and every time you see this producing interrogation someone have a coffee beforehand which is totally fine logical like yeah I need a coffee for this but then that's going to throw off all your levels and very active interrogation so like know is your name Steve and then you in a police station being surrounded by you know people who could you know who will decide your fate

if this test goes badly you could go to jail you know if you and that's you know whether you're guilty or not that's going to sort of be a really stressful situation and you know this is why I think anywhere on earth are know polygraph results permissible in court because the science behind them is simply not supportive of it. I know a lot of time it's basically just like shaking a magic eightball like are you guilty all point to yes I meant the ball is spoken that's not a legal system you can rely on and um there are some approaches like Japan have a different approach they're bit more sort of uh accepted there because they have uh well one of the methods they use is the inter

interrog it's not interrogation it's like an interview by someone not involved like they don't know what the situation is there it's a neutral person and the person in polygraph has multiple choice answers to questions some of which pertain to the crime some which don't like you know um in this crime that happened was the weapon you know axe knife hammer and they answer them you know basically it's not like doesn't the answer is it response to seeing the correct answer it's like oh no like it wasn't axe like spike so that's a bit more nuanced a bit more you know um robust but it's still not a reliable thing um so yeah like but it's it's a very compelling concept cept a machine

which can tell whether you're lying and know there's also a big industry behind it. People offer this service and it can be a useful tool how someone reacts when attached to polygraph when they think that you can tell they're lying. That's can be useful information in and of itself. It's just not you know court miss information because it's not robust. It's a sort of it's a trick and that's not really you know okay fine you can find a way to use that fair enough. But in terms of proper robust evidence and you know irrefutable data, they're not really any good in that respect. So you mentioned earlier the kind of revolving um test that comes up on the internet. Are you leftrained or you rightrained

and um another thing that comes up quite a lot on the internet and this sort of thing is personality tests. So where do these come from? And you know can we learn anything from them? There is a big industry behind personality tests. Um personality tests are a vi you know personality studies are like a viable psychological field. There's a lot of work gone into them. Uh it is a very tricky one to sort of um provide any sort of concrete conclusive data about because you know it's what you know how do you define someone's personality and what are the results of

it. I mean one of my earlier books I likened it to you're trying to study the anatomy of a cat by picking through the hairball it's coughed up. is okay there's there's some information there but are you going to sort of you know subtract okay this hair is here so that must mean the cat intestine shape you know it's not really something you can it's a lot of steps between what you've got and what you're looking for but you know a lot of data a lot of like factor analysis can help you know find certain traits like the big five personality tests or you know the certain elements like the introversion extroversion scale those are things which people sort of do find useful but yeah there's The famous one being the

MyersBriggs personality test which is very familiar very it fits a lot of people's bio like I am an MBTI or whatever that means. Um but it's not actually based on any useful science. It's it's put together by two women who like at the time housewives. They weren't like qualified scientists. They became recognized as personality experts by putting this together. we talk about Myers and Briggs and um you know it's what it does it gives a very sort of uh straightforward and easily conceived metric of an individual and people want that people want to say like oh this person is scores this on the test therefore they are that sort of person here's how you deal with them

here's how you interact with them this person scores this on the test that's a different person you put them over here with these people you put these people so it puts it like a easily understood framework work on individual humans which is really useful for managers and people overseeing like you know students and stuff like that but it's not based on any sort of hard or robust science it's not even reliable in the sense that someone is they use a lot in interviews now actual workplaces like you must do the mybriggs test and the employees do them and the questions like are you good at working in a team now this assumes that every employee the potential employee who fills one of

these in is completely and utterly be honest at all times, you know, whether without a polygraph and um you know, totally clueless as to about what the agenda of this is. You know, they say, "I must answer correctly and I don't you know, I'm totally unaware of the consequences." But if you want to get a job at a company and they say, "Are you good at work in a team?" You say, "No, no, I hate other humans." No one does that. Yes, I am. It's almost like you know if they were totally passive it might be something use but then there won't be like these are people who have their own lives and autonomy and you know personality test used in this way assume otherwise they argue that oh no everyone who fills

these in is being totally honest and never changes personality and is the exact same in every individual situation which they're not humans just nowhere near that simple even you do find someone who seems to be consistent they have their own internal life which cannot be measured by personality tests or just multiple choice questions. They have a lot going on upstairs because we are incredibly complex entities, you know, and personality tests of the sort of more commercial sort, they really try and hide that fact. They try and ignore or even suppress that eventuality that people are complex and do not behave according to metrics or frameworks which would make life much easier for managers

and leaders and stuff like that. But that doesn't mean it's true just because people want it to be true. But it is a very compelling uh you know idea which makes it very profitable. I mean I actually have been told that because I wrote about this for the Guardian back in 2013 but why these things don't work and I actually did you know a friend of mine was working for a university psychology department at the time and the vice chancellor of the university said I've just spoken to them you know the people who supply these tests and uh in exchange for like many millions of pounds we're going to do them to all our students so we know we get the best students with the best personalities and

obviously like psychology department like absolutely not we're not doing that you know that completely undermines their credibility it's like the physics department or the astronomy department saying yes but are you Sagittarius like we only accept Leo's like well that would be utterly mindbendingly dumb for the professional science course. So they had to put the kaibos on it and use my article like look see read that's what it is. So I know I cost the people who made it a lot of money at some point which I'm you know personally quite proud of and I won't do it again but um but you know it's it's that sort of thing like it's an industry now and you can't really you know money talks even though it's not telling you

anything useful but it does. So yeah, it's a very compelling myth which a lot of people have bought into and therefore it'll it's still around and isn't seem to be going anywhere. So how about a sort of similar thing that often pops up in movies and pop culture and that's the ink block test. Ah right. Yeah. The raw shack. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, obviously Roshack obviously the Alan Mo super superhero roshack which is a whole other thing but um yeah the roshack test is a really old uh psychological test back in the very early days of psychoanalysis when you know Freud invented the concept and for a while it was kind of a free-for-all you know like Freud's ideas were you know quite groundbreaking and uh you

know very sort of influential haven't really been sort of uh proven by later science but this it's one of the things because it was so fundamental and so profoundly influence ial people sort of think like well he was right and therefore we must stick to his ideas but um that's sort of like saying you know these days you should fly abroad on the on the Wright brothers plane because you know no they invented was they did but we've we moved on we have enhanced the design since but no they invented therefore we should always stick to that I don't think I don't want to go to France on that sounds like a bad idea but is that sort of you know approach sometimes but the old plot raw shack thing it is in a

sense it works. You say someone, okay, look at this completely random, you know, sort of assembly of black and white colors in this total pattern. What do you see? And you arguably are getting something useful from that and at least something valid. said, "Well, I see, you know, like blood or I see you see someone in a negative mindset or a positive mindset or they go to a certain, you know, someone keeps saying and saying, I see uh mother's face, my mother's intestines, my mother's like, okay, I'm getting a theme here." Like, but the problem is it's completely non-reproducible. Like there's no sort of metric to it. There's

no sort of like established okay 10% people will see it like this or like every normal person will see this, but then someone who's having psychological issues will see this instead. It's totally subjective. is totally sort of based on the individual and therefore there's no consistency to it whatsoever. So it's it can't really be used as a diagnostic tool in any sort of you know scientifically approved way because you know someone looks at and said oh I see um butterflies eating mud okay no one else has ever said that no one else has said it again but you said it great what do you do with that you know what do you what does that tell you and there are certain schools of thought in psychology

and clinical psychology which say you should have a bespoke approach to every single patient and rather than sort of say rather than sort of fit the p patient the diagnosis fit the diagnosis of the patient. So like you know you have signs of depression, you have signs of anxiety, you have signs of bipolar disorder, you have signs of schizophrenia like these are all people can manifest all these things but you know they which one's the most common let's put them in this box and that people argue you shouldn't do that. So a test like this would be so like well just see what they say. you can be handy in that respect, but again it's there's not really anything you can do with it in the scientific sense to just like

okay you saw random pattern and you said you saw this great know that's that's maybe useful maybe not how do you tell it's it's a very sort of um it's a very old school approach where you could just wing it and these days winging it is frowned upon in mental health care because um well I think for obvious reasons. Yeah. So, another one that's um that I've heard a lot about recently, which um sort of I've got a dog in this fight because I'm in my mid-40s and um it's that we're least happy in our mid4s. So, where's this come from? Yeah. Having just arrived my mid-40s myself, I had my birthday like a couple of weeks ago and two days after my birthday, my ankle just went. Oh, there we go. That's that seems like quite a

cliche, doesn't it? Yeah. So, um I get that. I mean it I'm not entirely sure how robust that is as a phenomenon is for like some sort of you know a switch goes off in your head when you turn 42 or whatever and then you suddenly lack certain neurotransmitters or like your reward system is gets bit exhausted. Um I imagine it's uh a consequence of you know reaching that point in your life when you have perhaps the most responsibilities and your you know your you sort of know you're physically past your prime you start noticing glitches and aches and stuff where you didn't before. I know people in their 20s and 30s don't notice that so much or if they do they don't realize it's going to get

worse which um also like 40 is like the midpoint I think if you realize that people like people assume like you live 70 80 years then at 40 you like oh right now I'm at the this midpoint but I do think it's a it like to be a combination of things there are cognitive issues that happen like you know when you start to at 40 there are certain milestones which sort of then you sort of lose physical efficacy here or if you don't work on it you know there are ways avoid it. But you know it's you know there's certain sort of steps throughout your 40s and 50s which say okay this is the point where people tend to experience a loss of this hormone or this particular thing and you know

especially when obviously women have the menopausal thing to worry about as well you know permenopausal that sort of kicks in around this time as well. I know so many women my age who are just dealing with that right now. So that's obviously going to be a big part of that. When you're 40 like you people at 40 now tend to have kids in like their teens. So that's work that can be a stressful experience, you know, it's likely. So it's probably a confluence of different factors that happen at this point in your life which will impact your happiness. But it's not obviously it's not a hard and fast rule. There'll be plenty of people in their 40s who have never felt better. Um you especially because you know these days

you can takes a long time to get going in terms of career and life chances and stuff. So I know people in their 40s who only just started having children and or just finally got their career and they're very pleased. So you know it's I think it's a confluence of things in the modern world rather than anything particularly biological but you could be wrong about that. There's so many different factors to consider. So let's go on to another sort of popular one in in pop culture and that's that we can use hypnosis to uh retrieve buried memories. So is there any truth in that and you know where does it come from this concept?

Well, hypnosis itself is sort of a tricky one. It involves like you know very being a very suggestive state. So you know it involves sort of completely focusing on the person or the hypnotist or the process to the point where you know you external thoughts are sort of missing. Normally your mind's wandering here and there. You've got the background narrative going on. And with hypnosis you don't have that. I think this is the theory anyway. So if someone says you're a chicken now, so like that thought enters your head in more significant ways. I guess I'm a chicken and then you act like well like I was told I thought I'm a chicken. I guess you know that's a sort of thinking behind it. The buried memories thing is tricky. So there are ways which that

could be feasible in that you know certain memories lurk in your brain and you can't retrieve them because there not enough connections to them like you've got this sort of dist of memories which you use like which are you know your identity your understanding of the world your expectations your you know how you work things out and if you've had like a memory formed which isn't sort of linked to that very much connections between like your mind your frontal loes and that particular memory engram So it's harder to retrieve it, you know, to have a very certain route through it, you know, like whereas like a memory of your partner's face or where you work or like your first childhood Christmas,

whatever. These can all be very vivid because you've retrieved them many times. They're connected so many other memories. They're just there, easily accessed, you know, at the top of your brain and the more lower buried ones are trickier to access. So it's feasible that you could be put in a hypnotic state to retrieve a memory. But the problem with that is uh a you know recent research suggests that particularly obsolete memories like all memories you never use they are there's a good chance they'll be cleared away like removed by the brain. The brain is always quote unquote defragging uh because you know brain space is useful and like a memory doesn't use is a

wasted resource. So we talked about the resource stuff. So you know there's a certain biological process which clear up unused collections all the time. So a lot of memories will be just gone um because we don't we never use them don't need them anymore. It's not like a sort of constant process but it's like you know some in the background constantly tidying things up scraping things away. So some of these memories will just be gone. Um while it's possible I know hypnotic state could allow you to access that really old memory you can't remember anymore because the hypnotic state is so um suggestive it can also lead to bically confabulation sort of creation of a memory. So we say like,

you know, need to remember where you were when you were like 17 years old. It's like Tuesday afternoon, uh, July 6th, uh, you know, it's you're in a where were you then? And who has that sort of information in their memory? That's not how our memories work. We rely on like experiences, feelings, like landmarks. We don't actually have a time stamp on our individual memories. But because hypnosis is being like you're so suggestive, you could feel then compelled to come up with something and like oh I was in my bedroom doing like now you may believe that wholeheartedly and the other person hypnosis like oh there you are. See we got this now. How do you know that memor is real? How do you know that's accurate? Because unless you were

there and have a detailed record of it there's no way to know either way. You know like there's a lot of this happens in like you know um you know the whole false memories people try to you know interro not interrogate but you know uh interview people they thought were involved in like serious crimes and they end up saying yes they were they have memories of this happening and they never did. There was suggestion by the therapist who know didn't know any better if we been extremely generous but it still happened. But you know you still have false memory is a lot easier to create than people realize you know but it's also how do you know basically how do you know like someone like memory

from 27 years ago very precise how that's wrong or right you weren't there the whole point of this is you need them to remember and they don't so you say tell me something from this time and they tell you something is well must be true then that's not how it works so that's why like retrograde amnesia that's when soap operas is very rare compared to how it's often pops up in media but it's also very hard to appreciate whether it's were they treated or not cuz I'm said oh yes I remember this now after like 10 years of therapy like well do you like are you saying do you remember it or do you think you remember it because you've created this whole other memory for what you think should be doing these are all

things which are really problematic when it comes to retrieving memories and memory research we unless you were there it's actually becoming easier as people like live the life online so you can know odds are now 10 years ago oh there on Facebook there you are it tagged us that's what happened so you can check now which is actually makes it strangely better but yeah for a while wasn't really like how do you know essentially how do you know if someone's memory is real or not? Your memor is a lot more flexible and plastic and changeable than this sort of approach would suggest. And another one that often comes up is um we're able to learn in our sleep. So if I play like an audio textbook or something as I'm sleeping

somehow some of that information will I'll absorb some of it. So where does that come from? There may be something to that in that when you're asleep like your brain is still really active. Uh I think someone you know that scan stuff you it might you know your body isn't but certain parts of the brain aren't really doing anything but overall like the energy your brain is only like 5% less than when you're awake. Brain's always doing stuff in the background. It's always like again it's never off. um never 10% and that but it's a tricky one because obviously when you it depends how awake or asleep you are because obviously there different

levels of sleep nonrem 123 andm sleep and like you go through cycles of those every night so sometimes if you're at RM2 perhaps you know if there's something playing in the background your so your unconscious mind is still detecting things like your senses are still working to a certain extent there's a thing called um the first night effect which is why you never sleep as well in a hotel or different on the first night that you in your own bed although it might be like twice the size of your room might be much more comfortable much more luxurious bed might be much nicer but when you fall asleep there's part going I'm this isn't my home this isn't my place I don't know what happens here so you're always slightly sort of like

there's always that part which always slightly sensitive to anything any sound any sort of change like this is not my place so um you know it is always a part of your brain which is kind of aware surroundings at least at the earlier sleep levels so if you were you know listed into something whilst in that sort of state then yeah I can sort of see you retain some information from it and it's also particularly uh quite it might sort of be conflated with the fact that when they say you sleep on a problem you know if you can't think of a solution go to sleep on it and come back to me later that is good advice because when you're asleep your brain is sort of taking right here's all the stuff I've um

learned today is all my day's memories I'll integrate these into my you know existing memories to file them away otherwise I'll just sit it being confusing and cluttered. So when you sleep, your brain is more flexible. It's like it's opened up all new connections to old things. So it's open up new pathways. And during that time, you know, think like when you're sort of stuck on a problem, you can't think of a new solution. You have more chance to think of a solution when you when your brain in sort of sleepy state. You like think of dreams that all over the shop and like when you wake up, you ah I've got it. Cuz your brain is sort of more flexible now. It's new channels have

opened up. new options have occurred because you're in a sleepy state and so there might be something to do with that as in obviously when people like think I can't figure this out you go to sleep wake up ah got it you say oh you learn when you're asleep can obviously that's that's a sort of like also valid conclusion from that as well not quite the same thing but you know when you're your sleep brain or like a tired brain or just woken up brain is more flexible is more sort of pliable which means you can come up with new uh new thought patterns new ideas, new concepts. Like people who work in the creative field like they sometimes will keep a note by their bed, notepad because that's what your brain is doing

like the two things are connected which they wouldn't normally connect because your sleepy state and then ah great an idea and then sort of pass out again and then you wake up and go what the hell was that? But know it's it's it's a well-known thing. So I can see that would feed into that uh notion as well. Yeah, I know that I do that sometimes. I wake up and I think I've got a great idea. I'll go back to sleep and then in the morning it'll say something just like start a wheelie bin cleaning service. Where did that come from?

I think that was why it great bargains. So let's finish up with one final one that doesn't seem to die. Um which is playing classical music to children or infants even makes them more intelligent. Yeah. Yeah, you hear about that particularly when they're in the womb in utero. I think there is some evidence which suggests there does seem to be, you know, some sort of benefit from this. Uh problem with that is it's obviously going to be really hard to tell like cause and effect because obviously if you have babies who are played Mozart while in the womb, you have to wait quite a few years before you can measure their intelligence in any sort of feasible way. And even then that's not including the fact that

intelligence measuring is quite a complex and controversial subject in its own right. So yeah, so to do a cognitive assessment of a baby is hard and like you maybe say like well when do they reach their milestones and I think there is some evidence suggests that if you do stuff like that play classical music in the womb you do tend to see them advance a bit quicker than the peers who don't have that and I think the rationale is that obviously when your baby's in the womb the brain is developing there and then it's being exposed to complex sounds more complex than obviously typical background noise of the womb. One would assume it's been a while. If the brain's been exposed to that, then it's going to respond to it. So like think if it's if

if the developing brain has more complex sens sensations to deal with then potentially it would then very earlier stages develop the ability to deal with complex stimula faster than brain which hasn't had to do that. So it's responding to okay this is something I've got to deal with. I'll just log that in see what that is to see if that's useful. I don't know. I don't I'm I'm literally not born yet. But um you can sort of see at the very foundational stage if that sort of experience is there. It would perhaps accelerate the brain's development to like oh this is complex stuff. I'm going to have to you know develop in this direction or develop this way to sort of deal with

that to process that or at least react to it. And yeah so you can sort of see how that might be a advantage for you know developing children and developing babies to sort of like early exposure to complex stuff. I think they've tried other stuff too, but I can't I haven't seen the data for a while, but I think there is something to it, but it's one of those again people take the ball and run with it because yeah, there's a slight effect if you play classical music to a child in the womb uh gone to right play Mozart every day all day, you know, just strap a iPod to your waist and then they'll be a genius by age six. That's not really also Mozart as well of course was a child prodigy. Obviously, he was like

four years old and doing conertos. M that's not typical. So I think there's also the idea that oh you sort of transfer Mozart genius directly into because he was a child genius. So you know you can sort of see that feeds into that myth as well. So well not a myth but you know that exaggeration that sort of a preconception that it's all it's straightforward it's direct. It happens every time. No but there's something to it but again a sense of moderation wouldn't wouldn't hurt you. So Dr. Dean Bernett thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Much appreciated. Thank you for watching this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Dean Bernett. To discover more about

the topics we've just discussed, check out his latest book, Why Your Parents Are Hung Up on Your Phone.