Jason Silva on Misconceptions | Brain Games

so the brain games episode on
misconceptions I think could be a
metaphor for the entire brain games
series and for all notions of how we
perceive reality you know we tend to
take for granted our perception then
what brain games makes clear time and
again is that we actually only get
limited information from the world and
our brain is rendering an estimation a
guesstimation in any given time creating
this illusion that we call reality and
we’re constantly having the rug pulled
from underneath our feet when we unravel
these misconceptions on brain games the
one things that we look at in as
examples of common misconceptions is the
notion that we only use 10% of our brain
this is better seen as a metaphor that
perhaps we don’t utilize our brain to
its full potential but the truth of the
matter is the entirety of our brain is
getting used it’s not like one little
part is active and the rest is somehow
dormant we use all of our brain another
common misconception is the notion of
multitasking we live in a multi-screen
world all these screens competing for
your attention an infinite amount of
signals competing for that cognitive
limited resource of your attention
attention is the new oil we live in the
attention economy and the idea the
equals somehow multitask you can
actually lend your cognition to multiple
things at once is a fallacy the only
thing you can hope to do is switch
rapidly between tasks but the result
ultimately is causing you even more
fatigue and a feeling of being
fragmented where you don’t really know
where to place your attention the truth
of the matter is it’s always best to
focus on one thing at once because
that’s the only thing you’re cognitively
able to do truly truly what we know
about our brains is often a realization
that things that we’ve taken for granted
for a very long time are nothing more
than misconceptions