I updated 4 beliefs this week, including life on Venus, multiple intelligence, human’s five senses and use of 10% of our brains.
Introduction
In a previous post, I wrote about the need to constantly keep our beliefs updated.
To recap, in the book Thinking in Bets, author Annie Duke cited Daniel Gilbert’s experiments that shows
our default is to believe that what we hear and read is true.
Duke suggested that people actually form abstract beliefs as follows:
- We hear something;
- We believe it to be true;
- Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or inclination, we vet
Such belief formation process can be very costly, especially if the beliefs are faulty. Further,
pre-existing beliefs influence the way we experience the world
In this post, I updated 4 beliefs I had held to be true till now.
There may be life on Venus …
… though we’re less certain about this than a month ago.
This was the trigger for this post. A month ago, I got quite excited by the news about signs of life on Venus.
A team led by Jane Greaves at Cardiff University have attributed a microwave signal detected in the Venusian atmosphere to the presence of phosphine, a small molecule associated with anaerobic microbial life on Earth.
C&EN, 2020 Sep 17th: Phosphine detected in the clouds of Venus
Earlier this week, we have a revision of the belief. Scientists who reviewed the paper stated their doubts about the conclusions. In other words,
It’s too early to discard the work by Greaves and her team yet, but it might also have been too early to celebrate it too.
Wired, 2020 Oct 29th: Scientists found signs of life on Venus. Now they’re not so sure
My takeaway from the Wired article, though, is more uplifting. It shows that, at least in the realm of planetary science, the scientific method is still respected by participants and functional:
Publication, scrutiny, gathering more results then going back to the drawing board are all part of the scientific method. This is the incremental nature of science, which doesn’t work in eureka moments.
I can definitely name more than one human organization where “science and reason” exist to serve the diktat of the ruling elite.
In any case, the rate at which scientific opinions change reinforces the need to constantly keep our beliefs updated.
Human beings have more than 5 senses
Another fact from Wired UK podcast was that, in addition to the commonly known five senses, human beings also have the sense of “interoception“. This is:
the sense of the internal state of the body, … [which] can be both conscious and non-conscious.
Interoceptive signals arise from many different physiological systems of the body. Examples include cardiovascular, as in sensing our own heartbeats; and respiratory systems, as in sensing our own breathing.
This brought me to ask “what other senses do human beings have?”. Which leads me to the following five more senses, as suggested by Smithsonian Magazine:
- Sense of balance — the inner ear is to this sense as the eye is to vision
- Proprioception: a sense of how our bodies are positioned.
- Sense of body temperature,
- Nociception: a sense of pain.
- Sense of acceleration and the passage of time.
This would make the science syllabus in primary schools more complicated than it is now. Even then, the truth is worth learning.
Multiple intelligences versus General Intelligence
The third of 4 beliefs I updated this week relates to something I learnt earlier on in my career. While training as a teacher, one of the first theories I learnt was Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. This claims that human intelligence can be differentiated into different modalities. Gardner initially suggested the following eight modalities:
- Musical-rhythmic and harmonic
- Visual-spatial
- Verbal-linguistic
- Logical-mathematical
- Bodily-kinesthetic
- Interpersonal
- Intrapersonal
- Naturalistic
Further, Gardner suggested that these modalities are relatively independent of each other.
One of the effects of the above is that it led teachers to deemphasize IQ, which was then the predominant single measure of intelligence. On the positive side, this gave more opportunities for students to be recognized as being “good” in some areas in school. It also gave educators some theoretical support during parent-teacher meetings with demanding tiger parents.
Gardner’s theory has always been subject to criticisms. In particular, the suggestion about the independence of intelligence does not stand up to empirical evidence. In a 2020 Feb review of an article in Psychology Today, the magazine found that,
[while] there are different cognitive abilities on which the same individual can score relatively high or low … there is an underlying association between mental abilities, and it is key to the concept of general intelligence, or what intelligence researchers call g. The g factor becomes evident in statistical analysis of individuals’ scores on different cognitive tests—if a person scores relatively high on one, she also tends to perform relatively well on the others.
I personally think the theory of multiple intelligence is very empowering for students who are not all-rounders. However, I also have enough experience, both during teaching and in the commercial world, to recognize the underlying association of different forms of intelligence.
Rather than arguing about one theory being “more rigorous” than the other, I would focus on application. A way forward is to suggest that a student starts by focusing on an area of particular interest and strength. Then, upon acquiring mastery in this one area, to rely on the underlying association to acquire mastery in another related area.
We use 100% of our brains
I first heard about the “We only use 10% of our brains” myth as a student. My response was to borrow Scott Witt’s How to be Twice as Smart during my next visit to the local library. I suppose if I had known about the drug NZT-48 from the movie Limitless and could afford it, I would have gone for it.
According to Christian Jarrett, writing for Wired, the myth could have various sources of origin, including a misquote of Einstein. Further, the myth was still going strong. As late as in 2012, close to half of school teachers surveyed in Britain and The Netherlands endorsed the myth.
The evidence that we do in fact use all our brains is best described in this article by Stephen L. Chew in Psychological Science. Chew described the use of modern technology including PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans and fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) in tracking brain activities. In an accompanying PowerPoint slide, he showed an actual PET scan of a healthy person. This shows:
The entire brain is constantly active, even in periods of sleep: regulating, monitoring, sensing, interpreting, reasoning, planning, and acting. Even people with degenerative neural disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease still use more than 10% of their brains.
Stephen L. Chew, 2018: Myth – We Only Use 10% of Our Brains
Conclusion
So there you have it, my own list of 4 beliefs updated this week.
I hope you have found this informative. I wish even more this will prompt you to keep your own beliefs updated frequently. For further reading of other misconceptions, I highly recommend the Information is Beautiful website.
