Sam Talks About...

You probably never really thought about this before, and neither had I really until I read about it about a month ago. But it turns out that your eyes are pretty much the least important player in vision. You might be pretty sceptical at this point, so I want you to close your eyes and imagine a boat. Done it? Okay, good, you just saw something without using your eyes! At this point you're probably wondering where I'm going with this. ell I'm about to show you how much work has to be put in to be able to see something properly and hopefully you'll realise just how impressive the machinery  in-between your ears really is. First, let's start with how we can go from an array of photoreceptors in the retina to a complex image of the world around us in 3D. First you have the two types of photoreceptors in the primary visual system; rod cells can detect low level light but they do not give very good acuity and they do not give colour vision, cone cells can detect col

You probably never really thought about this before, and neither had I really until I read about it about a month ago. But it turns out that your eyes are pretty much the least important player in vision. You might be pretty sceptical at this point, so I want you to close your eyes and imagine a boat. Done it? Okay, good, you just saw something without using your eyes! At this point you're probably wondering where I'm going with this. ell I'm about to show you how much work has to be put in to be able to see something properly and hopefully you'll realise just how impressive the machinery  in-between your ears really is. First, let's start with how we can go from an array of photoreceptors in the retina to a complex image of the world around us in 3D. First you have the two types of photoreceptors in the primary visual system; rod cells can detect low level light but they do not give very good acuity and they do not give colour vision, cone cells can detect col

Now I know a lot of you have just had a minor panic attack reading the title, but don't fear! If you're sat in your superhero onesie reading this at 3pm in bed or fretting about not having a job yet, there is plenty you can do to change this trend. So most of you in your 20's reading this will probably be thinking that most of your development was done and dusted by now, wrong! While you've spent your childhood and teenaged years developing physically and (hopefully) mentally, your brain goes through one last growth spurt before you are truly a developed adult. This growth spurt also happens to coincide with the mast majority of major life events that will shape your future life trajectory (I really like that phrase) eg first proper job, first house, marriage (hopefully only once!) etc etc. Now while most of your brain's growth spurts have been mostly symmetrical, this last one is very heavily biased towards the prefrontal cortex. This area is involved in all th

First, thanks to everyone who read and shared and commented on my first blog post, it's greatly appreciated! In this next post I'd like to take on another very common neuromyth... You are either a left-brained thinker or a right-brained thinker I'm in no doubt that you have heard of this at some point in your life, and at face value it seems to be logical- there are people who are right or left handed, or footed, most people have an eye that is stronger than the other etc etc... but how did people come up with the idea that you can have a dominant brain hemisphere? how can there be brained-ness (probably not a real word)? Well, many people who push this kind of thinking about the brain normally use this kind of logic: if the left hemisphere is more involved in emotion and communication etc then people who are more in touch with their own and other people's emotions must be left brain dominant; and as the right brain is more involved in logic and reasonin

Hi there! Welcome to my new blog all about the world and how we can play a role in it! I will talk about a number of subjects- mostly related to neuroscience and cognition, but also science related issues that I like to think about. But to start this blog off, I'd like to put out yet more information to debunk a very well circulated myth about how the human brain works, and also show how re-interpreting this myth can give us a very important message. You only use 10% of your brain This myth has been around for years, yet nobody really knows where it came from. This myth creates the idea that only a tiny portion of our brains are actually important, and the rest is merely sitting there like a grey ball of mush. Not only is this entirely wrong, it would make absolutely no sense evolutionarily. What would be the point in having such a huge brain if it wasn't going to be used? Surely if we only needed 10% of our brains then we would have evolved to have brains that are 10 tim