The brain tends to fascinate scientists and the public alike. The downside of this popularity is the wide exposure to distorted snippets of neuroscience facts and ideas in popular culture. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to find that many of us harbor strong but false beliefs about the brain and the ways it works, like: “we only use 10% of the brain” and “creativity is located in the right brain hemisphere.”Given our current methods, we might not know exactly all that’s true about the brain, but we do know that some popular beliefs are demonstrably false.

In this "Brain Awareness Week" special, we will review how prevalent the 10 most common myths about the brain are, as well as how these misconceptions arose, why they are false, and what we think is actually true.

About The Speaker

Pascal Wallisch serves as a clinical assistant professor of psychology at New York University, where he heads the Fox lab. He was the first one in his family to go to college. While in college - at the Free University of Berlin, he became a scholar of the German National Merit Foundation. He attended grad school at the University of Chicago, where he wrote a bestselling book on scientific programming in neuroscience and won a university-wide grad student teaching award as well as the first Eagleman Prize in Mathematics and Physics. He did postdocs at NYU CNS, and after joining the faculty in the Department of Psychology at NYU, he won the "Golden Dozen" award for excellence in teaching. Pascal has published on a wide range of topics, including neural response properties, dresses, movie ratings, cognitive diversity, color vision, and music.

Adults 21+ only.