Ask the average person what percentage of our brain we use and the majority will say 10%, very few will say we use 100%, which would be the correct answer. Imaging methods have shown that even simple tasks produce activity throughout the whole brain.

So where did this 10% myth come from?  It seems to be traced back to the American psychologist William James, who in his 1906 speech ‘The Energies of Men’ said:

“We make use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”

He never actually stated a percentage, yet somehow along the way this ‘undeveloped potential’ was picked up and morphed into a percentage. One example is a 1929 ad that ran in The World Almanac, which read:

‘Scientists and psychologists tell us we only use 10 percent of our brain power’.

But it really took hold and was popularized in 1936 when American writer Lowell Thomas, in the preface to Dale Carnegies best seller How to Win Friends and Influence People, falsely stated that:

“Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average man develops only ten percent of his latent mental ability.”

Then there was no stopping it. Fortunes and careers have been made over the years with self-help books tapping into this myth. Individuals involved with the paranormal have championed this ‘fact’ to explain the potential for psychic powers.

Even Uri Geller, remember him? He made a career out of convincing people he could bend metal with his mind. He claims in his book, Uri Geller  Mind-Power Book:

“Most of us only use 10 percent of our brains if that.”

Having us believe that he has tapped into some, if not all of the remaining 90%.

Think about it logically, if big chunks of our brain were never used, then damaging them would have no effect on us.

Funny, unique and interactive in his entertaining conference keynotes and workshops, Bob Gray reveals the untapped potential in each of us. His empowering systems and their many applications in the business world give participants immediate ‘walk away’ value. Book Bob Gray today as your next conference keynote speaker.  Watch Bob in action.

The post The 10% Brain Myth appeared first on Funny Motivational Speaker, Entertaining Humorist - Bob Gray.

What you need to know about Brain Games is quite disheartening. A popular Brain Training company was fined $2M in 2016 for deceptive advertising, claiming amongst other things that their Brain Games could help stave off memory loss, Dementia and even Alzheimer’s. But it turns out they have no science to back it up.

The ads claimed that spending 10-15 minutes a day 3 times a week with their Brain Games would ‘unlock your full potential in every aspect of life.’

‘Brain Games’ enable you to play the exercises quicker, fooling many people into believing they are actually getting smarter.

If you constantly play a video game, through familiarity, you will get better at that video game, but it won’t make you better at things that matter, like better job performance or actually increasing your ability to remember better.

If you truly want to exercise your brain, the activity needs to be something new.

It needs to be challenging, like learning a new language, learning to play an instrument or taking up a new sport.

And it needs to be fun, emotional and physical enjoyment is important to the brains learning process. So unless you’re playing Brain Games for any reason than having fun, save your money and……forget about them!

An App to Remember….literally. Download my new App for remembering people. It downloads their photo from the web.

Funny, unique and interactive in his entertaining conference keynotes and workshops, Bob Gray reveals the untapped potential in each of us. His empowering systems and their many applications in the business world give participants immediate ‘walk away’ value.  Watch Bob’s video to see if he is a fit as your next conference keynote speaker. Book Bob Gray here or call 905-430-3115

The post What You Need To Know About Brain Games appeared first on Funny Motivational Speaker, Entertaining Humorist - Bob Gray.

The post Remember names…lend your brain some money! appeared first on Funny Motivational Speaker, Entertaining Humorist - Bob Gray.

Yet whether it’s in the corporate world, or the elementary school, learning languages is still a rudimentary struggle. Teachers hand out vocabulary lists and verb charts and students old and young spend restless evenings going over and over these lists as if literally trying to drill the words and declensions into their heads.

If any area of learning could benefit from memory systems it would be this. Learning languages, after all, is entirely about memorization. If you don’t already have the basics of a language already in your head, how can you hope to create complex thoughts and expressions?

Applying memory techniques to the learning of a language could take a whole book unto itself. The most we can hope to accomplish in this short piece is to map out a few of the basics for the beginner. With a few hints and tips your approach to a new language may just seem a little less daunting.

 Vocabulary

No matter how sophisticated or nuanced the grammar of a language may be and how well a person can learn it, no one can say that he or she knows anything about a language unless they know its basic building blocks: vocabulary. Without good vocabulary skills all other facets of a language are useless. Consequently, most of your attention and effort should be focused on the learning of vocabulary, at least when first starting out with a new language.

It becomes easier to approach foreign languages when you realize that they are usually part of much larger entities called language groups. English, for instance, is part of a group called the Indo-European languages, which includes most other European languages, such as French, German, Italian, Spanish and Latin. Consequently, each of these languages contains a number of words with similar sounds and meanings.

An example of this is the word mother. In French it is Mere, in German Muter, In Italian Madre. These similarities have much to do with the linguistic origins of modern European languages, which were predominantly Greek and Latin. Such words can be easy to remember because of their similarities to words we already know and use.

The basics for learning foreign words are very similar to the image based techniques used to memorize other forms of information. Let’s look at a few examples.

The French word for foot is pied. How can we mentally link these two words together? Try visualizing a giant bare foot squashing into a thick blueberry pie. The blueberry filling squirts out and hits you in the face. You’ve been ‘pied’!

The German word for piano is klavier. Imagine a huge piano in your front room made of CLAY, you want to sit down and play it but you FEAR it will crumble. CLAY FEAR/Klavier

The Mandarin Chinese word for hello is nee-hao. Imagine coming up to someone you’re going to say hello to. Instead of saying anything to this person, you instead deliver a swift KNEE to the groin. The person bends over, HOW-ling in pain. KNEE  HOW/Nee-hao

Now try a few examples for yourself.

The French word for ‘to eat’ is manger.

The Italian word for purchase is acquisto.

The Chinese word for Thank you is shie-shie.

The Spanish word for Dining Room is el comedor

 Pronunciation

Learning new foreign words is all well and good… until you use them on native speakers and they start laughing at you because instead of asking where you can buy a coffee, you tell them you’re wearing dirty underwear. Correct pronunciation is a crucial ingredient for affective linguistics and sometimes proper pronunciation is not all that obvious on paper. Going back to our French word for foot, although it is written as pied,  it is pronounced ‘pee-yay’.

Another one that isn’t obvious on paper is the name of the great German poet Goethe. If you had never heard the name spoken aloud before, there is no way of you ever knowing that its proper articulation is ‘ger-tuh’ with a hard ‘g’.

Memory techniques can help in this area as well. A microphone and speaker, (a personal address system) is often referred to as a P.A. system. You could imagine shoving your FOOT into a large loud speaker P.A. (pee-yay). For the poet Goethe, you can imagine coming up to the poet and grabbing or girding onto him very tightly. Girding him as if you squeeze the breath out of him and he makes a ‘tuh’ sound as he exhales. Or even the image of him reciting poetry while walking across a metal GIRDER.

So good luck, or as they say in Japan, がんばろう…but that’s a whole new chapter!

The post Learning a Foreign Language appeared first on Funny Motivational Speaker, Entertaining Humorist - Bob Gray.

Answer this problem quickly.

A coffee and a cookie together cost $1.10. The coffee cost $1 more than the cookie. How much does the coffee cost?

Most people say $1, which is wrong.

The coffee costs $1.05 and the cookie 5¢.

Our brain often takes shortcuts based on how important it thinks accuracy is over speed. It usually opts for speed, giving rules of thumb too much consideration over straight logic.

This is evident when we make assumptions about someone based on how they are dressed and even how they speak.

By the way, if you know of a place that sells coffee and a cookie for $1.10…let me know!

Funny, unique and interactive in his entertaining conference keynotes and workshops, Bob Gray reveals the untapped potential in each of us. His empowering systems and their many applications in the business world give participants immediate ‘walk away’ value. Book Bob Gray today as your next conference keynote speaker.

The post Your Brain Lies To You appeared first on Funny Motivational Speaker, Entertaining Humorist - Bob Gray.

Not enough space in my brain.

So I have to save it for the important stuff!

As a conference keynote speakerwho speaks on memory,  I have had every brain myth thrown at me at one time or another over the years.

One of the most common is, “I only have so much space in my brain, so I have to save the precious amount left for the important stuff.” It’s as if by learning something new they will have to dump or jettison some other more important stored information.

I actually get this most frequently when I challenge people to learn and develop the skill set of having a ‘trained’ memory. I put it up there with “I just don’t have time.” I think more realistically they are saying “I’m in a comfort zone….leave me alone.” Which is fine, but understand, it has nothing to do with any storage capacity your brain has!

No person exists, or has ever existed, who has come close to using the full potential of the brain.

Let me share with you a couple of statistics I learned many years ago, which to this day remain the most incredible statistics I have ever come across. They both address the absurdness that we ‘fill’ our brains up like a tap filling a water bottle.

The first is from Mark Rosenzweig a pioneer in brain plasticity research. He found that if the brain were fed 100 pieces of data, like a word or image, each second for 100 years, it would barely use up one tenth of its storage capacity!

Here’s my favourite:

Understanding that the brain contains a minimum of 1,000,000,000,000 neurons or nerve cells each of which has the potential to connect or interact with anywhere from 1 to 100,000 other neurons, it was for the longest time believed that the total number of permutations or interactions between these cells was the number 1, followed by 800 noughts! Incredible.

Incredible until you read that Professor Petr Anokhin from Moscow University concluded that this figure was totally underestimated. His new number, if written out in regular size script, (and this blows me away every time I mention it), is:

The number 1, followed by 10.5 million KILOMETERS of figures in length. That’s over 250 times the circumference of the Earth!

You’d probably run out of ink.

So the next time you hear someone say, I’ve only got so much room up there, you can throw them those statistics….if you can remember them that is….

Funny, unique and interactive in his entertaining conference keynotes and workshops, Bob Gray reveals the untapped potential in each of us. His empowering systems and their many applications in the business world give participants immediate ‘walk away’ value. Book Bob Gray today as your next conference keynote speaker.

The post “My Brain Hurts.. I’ve Only Got So Much Space Up There.” appeared first on Funny Motivational Speaker, Entertaining Humorist - Bob Gray.

Ask the average person what percentage of our brain we use and the majority will say 10%, very few will say we use 100%, which would be the correct answer. Imaging methods have shown that even simple tasks produce activity throughout the whole brain.

So where did this 10% myth come from?  It seems to be traced back to the American psychologist William James, who in his 1906 speech ‘The Energies of Men’ said:

“We make use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”

He never actually stated a percentage, yet somehow along the way this ‘undeveloped potential’ was picked up and morphed into a percentage. One example is a 1929 ad that ran in The World Almanac, which read:

‘Scientists and psychologists tell us we only use 10 percent of our brain power’.

But it really took hold and was popularized in 1936 when American writer Lowell Thomas, in the preface to Dale Carnegies best seller How to Win Friends and Influence People, falsely stated that:

“Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average man develops only ten percent of his latent mental ability.”

Then there was no stopping it. Fortunes and careers have been made over the years with self-help books tapping into this myth. Individuals involved with the paranormal have championed this ‘fact’ to explain the potential for psychic powers.

Even Uri Geller, remember him? He made a career out of convincing people he could bend metal with his mind. He claims in his book, Uri Geller  Mind-Power Book:

“Most of us only use 10 percent of our brains if that.”

Having us believe that he has tapped into some, if not all of the remaining 90%.

Think about it logically, if big chunks of our brain were never used, then damaging them would have no effect on us.

Please share, below. You can also join me on Twitter, Facebook and or LinkedIn for more brain/memory information, links are at the top of the page.

Cheers, Bob
Motivational Speaker

The post “We only use 10% of our Brains anyway!” appeared first on Funny Motivational Speaker, Entertaining Humorist - Bob Gray.