One of the most confidently repeated pieces of trivia in human history is also completely made up. The idea that humans use only 10% of their brains has been cited in classrooms, on motivational posters, and in at least one film starring Scarlett Johansson, and it is entirely false. But reading some of these confessions will make you wonder...
Brain imaging technology shows that virtually all areas of the brain are active at some point throughout the day. Millions of people spent decades believing they had ninety percent of untapped mental potential sitting dormant. They did not. We are using all of it. This is as good as it gets.
A survey of 2,000 Americans over 65 found that 36% wish they had known earlier in life what they know now about love, finances, and health – and that same percentage believes they would have made genuinely different decisions if they had. When asked which decade they would most like to relive, the majority chose their 30s, with their 20s coming in second.
This makes you think, because most people in their 20s and 30s are convinced they are doing everything wrong. The seniors, looking back at those decades, remember them as the best years of their lives. Time, as always, has impeccable comedic timing.
In 1999, Australian director Baz Luhrmann released a spoken word track called Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen, built around a fictional commencement speech written by columnist Mary Schmich. It is essentially a list of life advice set to music, and it contains more genuinely useful information per minute than most formal educations manage across years.
Wear sunscreen. Do not worry about the future. Keep your old love letters. Stretch. The song was a global hit and is still shared at graduations decades later, because it turns out the things people learn too late are remarkably consistent across generations. Mary Schmich figured them all out in a newspaper column in 1997. Most of us are still catching up.
The idea that blood turns blue without oxygen is one of those facts that lodged itself into an entire generation's brain during a school science lesson and has never been questioned since. It is also completely wrong. Human blood is always red.
Deoxygenated blood is simply a darker, deeper shade of red rather than the bright crimson of oxygenated blood. The veins visible through the skin appear blue because of the way different wavelengths of light penetrate and reflect through tissue, not because of anything happening inside the blood itself. Nobody's blood has ever been blue. It was never blue. We were all just sitting there nodding.
The most expensive lesson in business history was learned by a Blockbuster executive who sat across the table from Reed Hastings in the year 2000, listened to a pitch to acquire a small DVD rental company called Netflix for $50 million, and said no.
Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Netflix is currently valued at over $200 billion. The executive who passed on that meeting has never been publicly named, which is either a mercy or a missed opportunity for the greatest "I told you so" in corporate history. But one thing is for sure, he probably wished he had known a little earlier what the power of the internet would bring us.
In 2013, Welsh IT engineer James Howells threw away a hard drive during a home clear-out. On that hard drive were 8,000 Bitcoin. By the time he realized what he had done, the drive was buried somewhere in a Newport landfill under thousands of tons of waste. What followed was a twelve-year saga of repeated attempts to convince the local council to allow him to excavate the site.
He made offers to share the recovered fortune, was involved in legal battles, and had a mounting pile of bills that would make anyone sit quietly in a dark room. The council said no every time. He has now given up entirely. He is probably still telling himself: "I was today years old when I learned not to throw things away without checking twice."
