Science Wisdom and Common Sense—Foolish Things We Believe

By Roy Williams - Apr 16 , 2009

An email was recently passed along to me by one of my readers that said,

Some months ago you alluded to research being done that would reveal the fact that things ‘you heard’ were as or more effective than things you saw. In other words, the spoken word is retained more than science gives it credit for. Has there been any more development on this research and can you reveal who is doing the research? —– Lloyd

Time constrains me from answering most email, but I did steal a moment to answer this one:

Dear Lloyd,

Your comment, “more than science gives it credit for,” is intriguing to me. To which scientists are you referring? My experience has been that the only people who pretend sight to be supreme are not scientists at all, but are merely quoting “traditional wisdom.”

Roy H. Williams

Here’s an interesting tidbit for you: The human tongue perceives five different tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, a Japanese term that translates loosely as ‘meaty’ or ‘savory.’ And the receptors for all five of these tastes are spread more or less evenly across the tongue. This may come as a surprise to you if you are familiar with the tongue map of virtually every school biology text that shows sweet, salty, sour, and bitter to be localized to different regions. Scientists today regard this “tongue map” as one of science’s most enduring myths.’

But it’s not the only one.

Here are some quotes I pulled off the web in less than a single minute:

“Psychologists believe that we only use perhaps 2 percent of our potential brain power.”
“You probably already know that most of us use only 5 percent of our brain power.”
“We only use about 6 percent of our brain when awake, but 21 percent when sleeping.”

Did you notice how not one of these writers told us where they got their data? In his book, Synaptic Self, neurologist Joseph LeDoux writes, “Everyone has heard a few things about the wrinkled blob in the noggin, for instance, that we use only 10 percent of it. But who came up with this number? It’s hard to imagine how 90 percent of the brain, lacking in value for most of us most of the time, could ever have come into existence. Researchers have been looking into what the brain does for many years now, and from what they have discovered, it doesn’t seem that most of it is, in fact, resting idly.”‘

Yes, we’ve been using 100 percent of our brains all along; it’s just that we’ve had our attention directed at all the wrong things.

Have you ever been told that “93% of all human communication is non-verbal”? Or that “One picture is worth a thousand words”? Or that “some people are visual, some are auditory, and some are kinesthetic”?

In truth, each of these statements is utterly incongruent with everything that is known about the brain. According to leading neurologists such as Alan Baddeley, Steven Pinker, Ricardo Gattass and Silvia Helena Cardoso, every human is uniquely gifted to attach complex meanings to sound. It’s the one area of sensory perception in which we are superior to the animals, thanks to a dramatically oversized auditory association area and a highly developed Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area. (The brains of deaf people access the visual association area and the somatosensory cortex to supply the signals that are missing from auditory association.)

Traditional wisdom is usually far more tradition than wisdom. Are you ready to kick it to the curb? Ten years ago, gathering the facts was difficult, but now we’ve got the Internet. So the only excuse you have for not knowing is that you really don’t care.

But you do care about the truth. Don’t you?’