Sorry Carol as I meant to add that I suspect this is how students' are
viewing the question as many truly do believe in the myth of
multi-tasking; i.e. doing two things at once.
Joan
Carol DeVolder wrote:
All of it. It's your attention that is divided, not your brain. :)
Oh, wait--if you're texting while driving you aren't using any of it.
c
On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 2:32 PM, Joan Warmbold <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
If I'm day dreaming about my plans for Valentine's Day while
"listening" to a lecture, how much of my brain is being used to
listen to the lecture? If I'm texting while driving, how much of
my brain am I using for driving?
Joan
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Carol DeVolder wrote:
When this Spring semester began a few weeks ago, I gave a short
pre-test to students in my 3rd-year level Brain and Behavior
classes. One question read something like, "Generally we use
_____." the answers were a. 10%, b. 20%, c. either the left half
or the right half of the brain exclusively. d. our entire brain.
Sadly, in two sections of approximately 30 students, a little
over half chose an incorrect answer. This is after three years of
college, and all of these students have had Intro Psych and I
know they covered at least one chapter on biopsych in it. I
didn't look at which item they chose most often, but I may go
back and do just that. I wonder if I give it at the end of the
semester I can compare and see an "improvement" from 10% (choice
a) to 20% (choice b). Sigh...makes me want to bang my head
against the wall.
On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Mike Palij <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
So, I'm watching the last couple of minutes of the Super Bowl
(for non-U.S.
Tipsters, it is a football [no, not soccer] game) and a
commercial for a new
movie comes on. Now, I've tried to turn off my attention
when commercials
come on but then I hear a voice over say something like "what
if you could
use more than 20% of your brain?" It is for a movie starring
Bradley Cooper
and Robert De Niro (Oh! How the mighty have fallen!) titled
"Limitless".
My first response was "well, I hope those folks would stop
making commercials
like this" but I digress. This was the first time I heard of
people only using 20%
instead of the traditional 10% (for debunking the 10% myth of
brain usage, see:
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/tenper.html
and/or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10%25_of_brain_myth )
Now I'm wondering: "Did I mis-hear the commercial? Did they
really say
20% instead of 10%?" A quick search of the InterWebs
indicate that
indeed, we must be getting smarter because we are now using 20%.
Consider the following article that previews the movie
"Limitless":
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/dec/22/limitless-trailer-bradley-cooper
So, if drugs can make you use more of your brain, clearly
drugs are a
good thing (which is an argument I imagine used by
undergraduates who
use provigil and adderall to keep pepped up during the
semester). In
any event, I guess we should expect students to ask about why
we only
use 20% of our brains and have an answer prepared for them:
"Only some people in Hollywood appear to use only 20% of
their brains."
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
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