brain

WTF Fun Fact 13122 – The Benefits of Recreational Fear

It turns out fear isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, recreational fear – the kind of fear you experience on purpose by going to haunted houses or watching horror flicks – can be good for your brain.

Seeking out recreational fear

We know some fear can create a stress response in the body that can be harmful. But our body’s ability to feel fear is, overall, a good thing. It tells us to get away from danger and keeps us alive.

But what about the people who seek out fear?

Even a game of peek-a-boo as a baby starts to prime our bodies for being caught off guard. And it can be exhilarating. When we get a little older, we may tell ghost stories around the campfire. In many ways, we seek out fear. As adults, we may go on roller coasters, see slasher or suspense films, or participate in risky activities like mountain biking or skydiving.

But why do we go after this feeling?

According to Smithsonian Magazine (cited below), “One hypothesis is that recreational fear is a form of play behavior, which is widespread in the animal kingdom and ubiquitous among humans. When an organism plays, it learns important skills and develops strategies for survival.”

The benefits of fear

By seeking out recreational fear, we put ourselves in a situation that has little risk. And perhaps scaring ourselves in a controlled situation can help us cope with real fear later on.

You can learn a lot about yourself by the way you react to fear. It’s just that not many of us like to acknowledge that feeling or explore it.

Researchers at the Recreational Fear Lab, a research center at Aarhus University, Denmark are looking into the science of fear and trying to learn more about our responses to stress. One thing they’re looking at is the relationship between fear and enjoyment. After all, some people really seem to go after scary experiences in order to hit a “sweet spot” between boring and terrifying.

The question of what makes recreational fear appealing to some is still up for debate. But researchers suspect that “even though fear itself may be unpleasant, recreational fear is not only fun—it may be good for us.”

One suggestion is to not be so afraid of fear, especially when you can control the parameters.

“With research findings such as these in mind, we should maybe think twice about shielding kids and young people too zealously from playful forms of fear.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “Can Experiencing Horror Help Your Brain?” — Smithsonian Magazine

Advertisements
Advertisements

WTF Fun Fact 13073 – Teens Tune Out

Got teenagers? Do you feel like they listen to you? If not, it’s likely because our brains rewire themselves to tune out our parents in our teen years. In fact, Stanford University research shows that teens tune out their mothers’ voices around the age of 13.

How teens tune out

More specifically, according to Stanford (cited below), “Around age 13, kids’ brains no longer find their moms’ voices uniquely rewarding, and they tune into unfamiliar voices more.”

Of course, this doesn’t give a person a free pass not to listen to their mom. But it does seem to be an evolutionary mechanism. Our brains are preparing to separate us from our parents in the long run – something we all have to do in order to become successful adults.

Clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences Daniel Abrams, Ph.D. told Stanford News: “Just as an infant knows to tune into her mother’s voice, an adolescent knows to tune into novel voices. As a teen, you don’t know you’re doing this. You’re just being you: You’ve got your friends and new companions and you want to spend time with them. Your mind is increasingly sensitive to and attracted to these unfamiliar voices.”

Rewarding signals

All of these changes have to do with the reward centers of the brain. The brain prioritizes stimuli (like certain voices) that activate the reward centers. Unfamiliar voices start to stimulate the brain more around age 13. So while they are still capable of listening to their moms, teens simply don’t get the same level of stimulation and comfort from her familiar voice as they did as children.

In most ways, this is a good thing. It’s a sign that their brain is maturing and getting ready to engage with the world independently from their parents. This allows them to become “socially adept outside their families” – something required for any adult.

How things change over time

Under the age of 12, kids can identify their mom’s voice with great precision, and it tends to activate reward centers and emotion-processing regions of the brain. But if you’re a mom, take heart. Your voice is what sets your child’s brain up for their social and emotional future.

According to co-author Percy Mistry, Ph.D., “The mother’s voice is the sound source that teaches young kids all about the social-emotional world and language development.”

But things change as we grow up. And the switch towards privileging unfamiliar voices between ages 13 and 14 happens at the same time in all genders. — WTF fun facts

Source: “The teen brain tunes in less to Mom’s voice, more to unfamiliar voices, study finds” — Stanford University

Advertisements
Advertisements
Advertisements

WTF Fun Fact 12820 – Do We Only Use 10% of Our Brains? No.

For some reason, Hollywood writers and purveyors of pseudoscience really love to say humans only use 10% of their brains. Why? Well, because it opens the door to making us think there’s a wealth of unlocked potential if only we could [insert Hollywood storyline] or buy some junk supplement to unlock the rest.

But it’s just not true. What an evolutionary waste that would be if it had any basis in fact!

Myth becomes “fact”

According to Britannica (and many, many scientific sources and fact-checking websites): “It’s one of Hollywood’s favorite bits of pseudoscience: human beings use only 10 percent of their brain, and awakening the remaining 90 percent—supposedly dormant—allows otherwise ordinary human beings to display extraordinary mental abilities. In Phenomenon (1996), John Travolta gains the ability to predict earthquakes and instantly learns foreign languages. Scarlett Johansson becomes a superpowered martial-arts master in Lucy (2014). And in Limitless (2011) Bradley Cooper writes a novel overnight.”

We don’t blame Hollywood – they make stuff up to sell movies all the time. It’s the fact that we started believing the plots of films that’s truly disturbing. In fact, Britannica reports that “65 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, ‘People only use 10 percent of their brain on a daily basis.'”

Yikes.

Why do we believe we only use 10% of our brains?

Let’s not look to place blame on anyone but ourselves. Most of us repeat interesting things we hear without ever investigating whether or not they’re true.

But next time you hear someone spout off this garbage “fun fact,” you can hit back with some actual science.

For starters:

  • If only 10% of our brains were functional, why does nearly every brain injury affect our lives in some way? If we only used 10%, we could damage the rest with no repercussions.
  • Why would humans have evolved our most unique characteristic – the very thing that makes us human – to be 90% useless? It makes no evolutionary sense. That space could be used for more useful things if it were just empty grey matter.
  • Positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans show that there is activity in far more than 10% of our brain. In fact, there is no part of the brain that lacks some sort of electrical activity (even if we don’t yet know precisely what it does).

The origins of the 10% myth

So, the 10% myth is just complete bull. But It likely has its origins in the American self-help industry.

People like to blame 19th-century psychologist William James (or even Albert Einstein) for implying that there is unlocked potential in the human brain. And while they may be true, that doesn’t indicate inactive brain matter. It just means we could think harder if we really tried.

Britannica also states that one early claim that the self-help industry glommed onto appeared in the preface to Dale Carnegie’s 1936 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Since then, “The idea that we have harnessed only a fraction of our brain’s full potential has been a staple for motivational gurus, New Age hucksters, and uninspired screenwriters ever since.”

But it’s a load of bologna. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Do We Really Use Only 10 Percent of Our Brain?” — Britannica

Advertisements
Advertisements

WTF Fun Fact 12764 – Mindfulness Meditation Changes the Brain

We need more large-scale studies to make definitive claims, but mindfulness meditation seems to have some cool cognitive benefits. In fact, we can see on brain scans that people who practice mindfulness meditation experience changes in their brains.

Minding your thoughts

Mindfulness practice encourages people to stop and spend time noticing their thoughts and then letting go of the ones that are negative, disorganized, or aren’t serving a positive purpose. It’s designed to help us notice and control our thinking. (As opposed to most meditation practices, which center around emptying the mind of thoughts.)

The part of the brain affected by mindfulness practice is called the amygdala. This is also called the “fight or flight” center because it is linked to fear and emotional responses. Brain scans have shown that mindfulness practice helps shrink the amygdala. While that may sound like a bad thing, an overactive amygdala can be bad for concentration, mood, and emotional regulation.

Regulating the amygdala

However, mindfulness has been shown to help increase the connections between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. That’s a good thing because those connections help us regulate our emotional responses.

We need our amygdala, we just don’t want it to be hyperactive. And when we practice mindfulness, our bodies get better at regulating those emotional responses.

While some of the effects of mindfulness have been overstated in the press, there is evidence that it can modestly increase physical health and compassion and even reduce bias in addition to negative thought patterns.

The popularity of mindfulness meditation

A U.S. survey found that the percentage of adults practicing some type of mantra-based meditation, mindfulness meditation, or spiritual meditation in the previous year tripled between 2012 and 2017 (from 4.1% to 14.2%). Even among children (4 to 17 years of age), the percentage increased from less than 1% to over 5%. These emotional regulation techniques continue to grow in popularity.

Of course, there’s a lot we still don’t know about mindfulness and meditation in general, and they’re not always the best practices for everyone.

There are also different types of mindfulness meditation to practice, each with slightly different outcomes. For example, body scanning can help reduce negative thoughts. But practices in which participants are asked to observe their thoughts can sometimes lead to more negative thinking, especially among those who have just started practicing the skill and can’t let go of those thoughts easily.

In the end, it may be best for those who are new to mindfulness and observing their thoughts to do so with guidance from a teacher or tool so that they can stay on the right track and get the most out of their mindfulness practices. – WTF fun facts

Source: “10 Things We Know About the Science of Meditation” — Mindful

Advertisements
Advertisements

WTF Fun Fact 12455 – Meditation Relieves Pain

Pain is a sensitive topic (no pun intended). It’s subjective, for starters, so some people genuinely feel pain more (and pain affects them more) than others. When you’re in pain, it’s hard to conceive of something like meditation as a potential remedy. And to be fair, if you’ve never done it before, trying it for the first time minutes after you break your leg isn’t going to help.

Meditation has also become controversial since some people associate it with religion. But it doesn’t have to be Buddhist – most meditation is completely secular or customized to include elements of the practitioner’s own faith.

And here’s why it matters: we have an epidemic of painkiller use going on worldwide that has killed millions. Pharmaceutical companies are getting the blame, but that doesn’t do much good to people already experiencing addiction to opiates, for example. And recommending meditation to those people won’t replace receiving professional help at this point.

However, knowing that meditation can be a powerful tool can help set up those of us who have yet to experience serious acute or chronic pain for more success in managing it in the future. That doesn’t mean painkillers will become a thing of the past, but having a set of tools designed to draw on your own inner strength couldn’t hurt, right? (Again, no pun intended.)

So, as we pointed out in the photo, research from Wake Forest University and published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that meditation decreased the intensity of a subject’s pain by 40%. Pain also affects us in other ways that tend to make it worse by setting off a stress chain reaction in our bodies. Those overall feelings of unpleasantness were reduced by 57% in the group of meditators. Scans of their brains confirmed this, so researchers didn’t just take their word for it.

Even morphine didn’t have that kind of success in pain reduction.

But there are a few things worth keeping in mind:
– These were experienced meditators who had been trained to do it correctly (the technique used was called “focused attention”)
– While every subject experienced some pain reduction, it varied, with some only reporting an 11% reduction
– They did not later give these same people morphine; the researchers relied on known data about the pain reduction morphine provides
– While the study has been replicated, it was small, so more research needs to be done before we assume everyone can meditate their way through the pain

Despite these caveats, it’s pretty amazing to think about the power we have over our own bodies. –  WTF fun facts

Source: “Meditation instead of morphine — not so fast” — LA Times

Advertisements
Advertisements
Advertisements

WTF Fun Fact 12447 – The Tongue of a Woodpecker

We never really thought about it up until now, but it makes sense that woodpeckers would have to have some kind of mechanism to protect their brains from getting tossed around in their skulls while they hammer away. But in 2010, a team of Chinese scientists figured it out – and it’s fascinating.

To be honest, we didn’t even realize woodpeckers have such long tongues. But doing all that pecking is a way to chip into beetle grub nests, and their long tongues allow them to get in there without having to bash a big old hole in the tree like the Kool-Aid Man.

A woodpecker’s head strikes with around 1,000 times the force of gravity, about ten times more than what would definitely kill a human.

Their sharp beaks help them out a lot, as do their strong neck muscles, but up until relatively recently, no one knew how their heads could absorb the shock of that motion.

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Why woodpeckers can hammer without getting headaches” — Birdwatching Daily

Advertisements
Advertisements

WTF Fun Fact 12403 – Your Brain on Math

Mathematics is a strange beast. It uses our language, but it isn’t quite the same – our brains hear it entirely differently from everyday speech. For example: when we hear a sentence like “cats like warm milk,” our brains process that information mainly in the left hemisphere. Something like “eight plus one is nine,” though, will fire neurons in both.

A study published in the journal Current Biology took a closer look at how our brains process mathematics (as opposed to regular speech). While our brains process ordinary language in the left hemisphere, math triggers neurons in both hemispheres.

The neuroscientists from the Universities of Tübingen and Bonn said in an interview: “We found that different neurons fired during additions than during subtractions.”

Esther Kutter, a doctoral candidate involved with the research group, confirmed: “Even when we replaced the mathematical symbols with words, the effect remained the same. For example, when subjects were asked to calculate ‘5 and 3’, their addition neurons sprang back into action; whereas for ‘7 less 4,’ their subtraction neurons did.”

The lead author of the study Prof. Dr. Dr. Florian Mormann of the Department of Epileptology at University Hospital Bonn, remarked on the study’s significance: “This study marks an important step towards a better understanding of one of our most important symbolic abilities, namely calculating with numbers.” – WTF Fun Facts

Source: Math Neurons” Fire Differently Depending On Whether You Add Or Subtract — IFL Science

Advertisements
Advertisements
Advertisements
Advertisements