I Use 100% of My Brain and You Can Too! The Nature of Pervasive Myths

I’m currently reading Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential, which has been quite enjoyable so far.  One data point from the book, however, stands out.  The popular educational belief that each of us has a preferred learning style (e.g. audio, visual, kinetic, etc), is a myth unsupported by any experimentally based evidence.  Fascinating as that is, what really interests me is how the study proving that came out in 2008, yet I have had multiple instances since then in professional environments where the learning styles myth was pushed as fact. 

Myths like this have a pervasive nature to them that’s hard to dislodge.  Six years after it was disproven, a survey of British teachers showed 96% of them still believed in it.  If those in charge of teaching—theoretically those most likely to update their thoughts on learning techniques based on the most recent evidence—are still misled, what does that say for the rest of us?  Heaven knows there are a plethora of myths out there still taken as gospel by most of us: left brain-right brain distinctions, classical music makes babies smarter, people only use 10% of their brains, opposites attract, and cardio kills gains.

There are plenty of reasons myths like this take hold and never let go, but I think the biggest is that we like simple answers to complex problems.  Life is complex and no one wants to dig through the muck to find a “maybe” instead of a definitive answer.  Take the learning styles myth.  Which would you prefer: recognizing that every single learning situation has different context that continually shifts, and you have to adjust your style, effort, and intention to match it…or just say you learn best with pretty pictures and call it a day?

That’s part of why demagogues are so successful—we look at them and think “They’ve got this all figured out, why not support them?”  They offer up simple—and wrong—answers to some of life’s most complex problems, and people go along with it because that’s easier than coming to grips with how much of life is outside of our ability to impact.  That is the true answer to all of this, unfortunately—you have to recognize the vast difference between what you can control and what you wish you could control.  No one says that’s easy, but it’s necessary if you want to avoid falling prey to the latest charlatan with an answer to all of your problems.