Next myth, the more people you put together, the more creative they become. Brainstorming is a guarantee for creativity and creative solutions. After months, or as I love to say, Boulder Dash and Bladder Dash, according to the American Institute of Graphic Arts and a million other research institutions, if you brainstorm in groups, you are less creative and the group is less creative. And the number of solutions and the quality of solutions is much lower. This is because of three reasons.

One is called anchoring. Anchoring is a cognitive bias.

When we begin to consider other options, we suddenly realize that we have a solution of our own by contrast.

When we consider other people’s solutions and ideas, we realize that we have our own solutions of ideas and we get anchored like the anchor of a ship and we get stuck.

We get stuck on our ideas and our solutions and our way of doing things.

And everyone gets stuck on their ideas and they think these are the best ideas and all the others are stupid.

And they fail to come up, they fail to negotiate, they fail to cope.

I mean, it creates very bad dynamic.

Groups are very bad places to hatch creative way forward.

The second effect is groupthink.

Groupthink simply means that peer pressure, intentional peer pressure, body language peer pressure, peer pressure mediated via body language, peer pressure that is circumstantial.

Something happens outside the group that affects all the members of the group simultaneously.

All these cause members of the group to think the same way.

And when everyone begins to think the same way, they verbalize it, you are very afraid to think differently.

It prevents unique ideas from being heard or spoken aloud.

There’s pressure on you to conform, to join in, to fit in, not to rock the boat.

And the third reason that groups are very bad places as hatcheries or wombs is pressure.

In groups, you feel that you are being tested, that you’re being observed.

This is precisely the reason why it’s an exceedingly bad idea to introduce cameras into courtrooms.

You feel that you have to come up with a good idea on the spot.

And everyone around you want to do the same.

They want to impress.

It becomes about impressing rather than communicating.

It becomes totally grandiose and narcissistic.

It puts incredible pressure on some people.

And then they can think.

Stress levels and anxiety levels in groups are much higher, by the way, than alone.

Next myth, left brain, right brain.

No such thing, of course. The brain is totally redundant.

Every part of the brain can replicate every other part of the brain.

If tomorrow you lose half your brain, the other half will take over, usually without too much of a problem.

We have had numerous such cases in wars, accidents, babies born with half brain, most extreme case had something like 10% of his brain.

The brain is redundant. Everything happens in multiple locations. There are copies of copies of copies of functions, copies of content, copies of memories, and ultimately a copy of your entire identity.

There is no dominant sign. It’s totally false.

I refer you to Lifescience.com. There’s an article there, Left Brain, Right Brain Myth, where they summarize the research.

Everyone uses both sides of the brains equally and equal time.

And the only thing that is true, the only thing that is true is that certain abilities and capacities, for example, speech, they are more located in one hemisphere, for example, speech is more located in the speech processing language, is more located in the left side of the brain.

Visual processing, which also is linked to artistic and plastic arts, creative efforts, that’s more on the right side.

But here’s the glitch in the I’m-nicked-in– the– niche.

The two sides communicate all the time. There’s like a zillion connections between the parts.

And they hand over functions all the time.

So while maybe the language center, Broca, there’s an area called Broca, which is central.

But many of the language functions are in outside Broca’s area, in the left hemisphere.

But when you talk, when you talk, there’s a huge amount of traffic and communication with the right side of your brain.

And many language functions and speech functions are temporarily transferred to the right side.

For example, if you have to talk about some visual, about some image or photo, you can’t, there’s no such thing. Language is in the left. Language, it’s like the cockpit in an airplane. You can’t say the cockpit is this and the airplane is this. They’re intricately, intimately connected. They’re one and the same.

The brain is a single, unitary entity. Everything works on everything all the time. All functions are carried on both sides all the time. A million pathways, like under the Senate in the United States, they have these underground, enormous kilometer long corridors. It’s the same. Capitol Hill, I mean, you extensively Congress of the Senate, you know, they’re all connected. It’s all one thing.

Midlife crisis, next myth.

In reality, there’s no such thing. In a study published in a series of studies published and summarized by NPR on the 14th of March 2016, go to the archive of NPR. You will see a great summary and it’s titled forget the red sports car.

So to cut a long story short, our studies show that only about 10% of the population suffer a crisis in midlife. This crisis is connected to specific events like parents dying or losing your job or divorcing or your wife cheating or something. It’s not a crisis because you have reached a milestone or a certain age. It’s a crisis because something happened.

And then if you divide life into decades, every decade has crisis.

Ask any adolescent, ask any child, ask anyone 20 years old who’s dating, every decade in life.

And Gail, she wrote the book, New Passages to Say Exactly This, That Every Decade Has Its Own Set of Crises

So isolating a specific decade and saying, well, that’s a crisis.

It’s nonsense because the attributes of the midlife crisis are wrong. Not true. We couldn’t find them in studies.

People who are going through their fifties and sixties and forties and fifties, they’re supposed, for example, to be much more afraid of death or they’re supposed to redirect their view instead of forward and backward. Like they’re reviewing their lives rather than looking for none of this. We couldn’t find a hint or a trace of any of these fables and confabulations. They’re wrong. They’re not true.

Actually, most of the crises in the forties and fifties, in ones, forties and fifties, most of the crises, multiple have to do with the reasons I mentioned. We all undergo challenges and we all do the stereotypical midlife crisis things, but it’s not a coherent or cohesive syndrome set of cognitions and emotions.

The next myth is personality and IQ are stable in adulthood. That’s absolutely untrue. Even personality disorders change. Personality disorders are supposed to be rigid structures. That’s the definition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, rigid structures of personality, but they’re not rigid. For example, 50% of all people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder lose their disorder after age 45. There can no longer be diagnosed.

For instance, most of the antisocial behaviors of psychopaths disappear after age 40. Antisocial behavior ameliorates in psychopaths, starting with the fifth decade of life.

The only structure that is totally rigid and almost doesn’t change ever is narcissist. Narcissistic personality disorder is the only case I am aware of where there is no discernible change between age 20 and age 60.

The psychodynamic landscape is identical. The reason is the narcissist does not exist. There’s no personality, no self. It’s a piece of fiction. It’s a story.

And like War and Peace, it never changes. And like Gun with the Wind, the movie, it never changes. A work of art is forever the Sistine Chapel, the Last Supper, Mona Lisa, they’re stuck. They never change.

So narcissistic personality disorder is a piece of fiction. It’s a work of art. It’s a literary creation. It’s a piece of literature. It’s a novel.

Of course it doesn’t change, but all others do change.

In a study published in July, in the July, August, 2003, American Psychiatric Association newsletter, page 14, they took personality data from 133,000 people. Good enough for you as a sample, I should hope.

And they found that personality changes all the time over the entire lifespan.

People, for example, become more agreeable, more willing to cooperate with others as they age.

By the way, another myth, the myth of the traculant, irritable, irascible old men. Actually, old men are far more agreeable than young men and far more cooperative.

Number two, women become less neurotic, less emotionally sensitive and emotionally dysregulated as they age, which would explain why BPD borderline actually disappears.

Number four, every men and women become less open, less eager and willing to try new experiences as they age.

All the people are far more conservative.

And number four, conscientiousness, work ethic, detail orientation increases with age.

The best workers are old people.

Examples of how personality changes, these are fundamental things. These are factors in personality and they change.

And the bonus, the mother of old myths, to paraphrase my favorite classmates, Saddam Hussein, we use only 10% of our brain capacity.

This myth began in the late 19th century. A group of wannabe psychologists, because psychology was a proto wannabe science, a group of researchers compared the learning abilities and accomplishments of a child prodigy to the average person.

And they found that child prodigies are much more intellectually stimulated than the average block, which I don’t know why they invited to make the experience.

I mean, a child prodigy is a prodigy because he is much more intellectually stimulated.

Yeah. It’s like saying that they discovered that both men and women breathe air.

Anyhow, this amazing earth shattering discovery was generalized and expanded in the 1900s.

When other researchers who did not understand how the brain functions, we still don’t understand how the brain function and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

We have no idea, no blue idea how the brain functions or any part of the brain or any neuron or neurotransmitters or anything whatsoever.

We are at the stage of cataloging. We are cataloging. We are cataloging pathways. We are cataloging biochemistry, biochemicals. We’re just cataloging. We know nothing about the brain.

And at that time, they knew even less, a lot less.

So these psychologists, researchers who knew nothing about the brain, but were sufficiently grandiose, hubristic and arrogant to say that they did, they noticed that many parts of people’s brains appeared inactive.

So they said, ah, well, the difference between prodigies and regular people is that prodigies are using more of the brain and regular people are using less of the brain.

And they gave the number 10%.

By the way, totally arbitrary. No foundation to this number.

They just gave the number 10%.

Well, sorry to tell you, it’s utterly wrong.

Modern research, a bit more modern, like 100 years later.

And I refer you to the article, do people use only 10% of their brains published in Scientific American?

Modern research shows that throughout the day, we use, hold your breath, 100% of what you have.

Now it’s very true that the majority of you don’t have much, but whatever it is you have, you use 100%.

Throughout the course of the day, notice at any given moment, you may use 10% or 20 or two.

But when you look at the entirety of the day, 24 hours, use every corner, nook and cranny, every cell, every neuron, every synapse, every axon, everything, 100%.

Everything is used, every part, every function.

So while the sections that control essential processes, breathing, autonomous functions, senses, these sections are active nonstop.

Other parts, I don’t know, parts that are responsible for language, fear response, fear response is what you have when you’re watching my videos.

Problem solving, all these are activated only when necessary. So they’re not always active.

Normally, why would they be always active?

It’s like your apartment, you know, you get up in the morning, you go to the toilet. At that moment, only 2% of your apartment is active. The toilet, I don’t know what you’re doing there. I don’t want to know. Please don’t go into details in the comment section.

But then you exit the toilet and go to the kitchen, you make coffee.

Oh, the kitchen is a bit bigger. That’s 5% of your apartment. Then you go throughout your apartment. Throughout the day, you circulate every corner of your apartment.

So 100% of your apartment is active and depends on your lifestyle.

Of course, in some people, most parts will be more active than others, but all parts are active in all people.

We make full use of all the abilities in our brains, those of us who have them.

So this was today’s video. And I hope you had great fun. And I promise to pass on the message to Campbell and to Kernberg that they have no idea what is narcissism and they should really learn from poachers online and others. And it’s never too late to start. I mean, in his eighties, nineties, he’s still a young kid. It’s never too late to start.

And I’ll put him in touch with some of the experts there. I’m sure they will put him on the straight and narrow. They will fix his thinking.

And Campbell should stop with his idiotic experiments because he got narcissism completely wrong, says the woman who wrote to me.

Bloody hell. Who am I talking to?

Okay, kiddos and kiddettes, go drink something, go to the toilet, relieve yourselves.

And I know I created a lot of negative emotionality. Do not punch a punching bag. Punch me next time you see me in a seminar after the pandemic, AC, BC before Corona, AD after distancing.

And in between the BC and the AD, yet another Jew, not Jesus this time, Sam Vaknin, much better looking with much fewer holes where it counts.