A Normal Brain Functions 100%, No More or Less

There have been a lot of story about the brain and when people talk about these made up theories and stories, they say it with all confidence like that have operated on a brain before. With the confidence that this people have when they talk, it means that what they talk about need to have a root somewhere and this is just how all myths come into play.

You must have heard that you only use 10% of your brain while the rest is just lying fallow. Movies like Lucy even supported the notion that if we used 100% of our brains, we would act with super powers but this is not true. You see, the Idea came from neuroscientists Wilder Penfield who electrically probed the brain of seizure patients and because he didn't see certain movements in the body, and so came with the idea that we do not use all parts of our brain but because certain parts of our brain do not have physical functions doesn't mean they don't have their function. With recent studies, we have been able to see that every part of the brain does different activities.

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One myth that I need to talk about before I put my final full stop for this post is saying that our brain fully develops at age 25. The majority of these myth idea comes from the prefrontal cortex of the brain which is in charge of attention, and decision making. While it is a later developing region of the brain, it doesn't mean it doesn't develop.

In fact, the prefrontal cortex develops 2 years after the birth of a child but continues to develop as we grow through adolescent. Before you think the brain is not develop enough before 25, you should know that the brain is 80% developed at age 3 and the gray matter volume is peak at age 11 to 14. So, our brain is developed well enough before age 25 while the white matter of the brain peaks at age 29 which is above the 25 mark.

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Have you been told that you have a left brain or a right brain, and so you are either analytic or creative respectively because it affects your personality. I was told that I was a left brain person as a child and I would wonder why my brain will not sit the middle, thereby leaving the other parts of the skull empty, or why my brain will decide to use only one half when it can perform at optimum when it uses the full but these questions ended when I was in high school and I had to draw the brain and know the function of each part.

The idea of left and right brain came from the observation that some people are right handed while some are left handed. Researchers then discovered that the right hemisphere of the brain controls the left part of the body and vice-versa and this was where the idea came into play that it could be possible that the hemisphere could be responsible for other things including thought and processing.

It started in 1981, when the Nobel prize for Physiology and Medicine was given to Roger W. Sperry who was studying the cutting of the brain bridge between the hemispheres to treat epilepsy, and he noticed that the brain hemisphere had different functions where people used more of the left hemisphere for language and the right hemisphere for functions that are non-verbal. Although he didn't mention that the left or right hemisphere ruled anyone, the media went with the information that emotions were for right brained and facts were for left brained people, and even though the science community denied it, the news was already gone. Science has shown that one hemisphere cannot dominate personality.

^Reference

^{https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4428296/
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001767
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2040300/
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04554-y
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7076118/
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A02172.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext}