Shadowing Practice: Neuromyths. | All In The Mind - Learn English Speaking with Video
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This is the BBC.
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This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK.
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Hello, here's a quick quiz for you.
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True or false?
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We only use 10 % of our brains.
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Some of us are left -brained and logical, and others are more right -brained and creative.
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Brain training can make us cleverer.
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Answers coming up in the next half an hour.
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Today, I've come to meet neuroscientists from all over the country
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who are getting together to discuss some of the big myths about the brain, why we seem to want to believe that they're true, and why even scientists themselves aren't immune to them.
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I'm at the British Neuroscience Association's Christmas Symposium in London, and all day researchers are taking to the stage to tell us which ideas have evidence behind them and which don't.
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I'll be catching up with some of them to see what I can learn.
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You'll sometimes hear people say they are a left -brained logical type, or a more artistic, touchy -feely, right -brained kind of person.
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Staff development courses in businesses might train people to tap into
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the right side of their brain to allow them to better access their creative side.
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But do we really have a tendency to use one side of the brain a whole lot more than the other?
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And if we do, does it actually affect our personality?
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Left -handedness comes into it too, and that of course brings up a whole history of myths.
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So to set us straight, here's Professor Chris McManus from University College London.
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Now, you've spent many years studying left and right -handedness, so let's start with those.
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Is it true that left -handers die on average seven years earlier than right -handers?
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That is one of the great myths.
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It's utterly, completely, totally wrong.
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And where's this come from?
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It all goes back to a paper published in Nature, the Great Scientific Journal, in 1989, I think it was, which showed some data based on baseball players,
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because baseball players, they know whether they bat with the right
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or the left hand and he looked at when they were born and how old they were when they died.
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And it claimed that the left -handers died much earlier than the right -handers.
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Looking at the paper now, the statistics are all over the place.
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You couldn't see an effect on a simple statistic.
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My undergraduates would have seen the problem.
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But they came up with some incredibly complicated statistic, claimed it was significant, and the thing hit the newspapers everywhere.
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But it's wrong.
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What about left -handers' brains?
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Are left -handers' brains different at all?
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Finding a statistical signature in the brain of handedness is very hard indeed.
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We don't know of anything which, if I show you a scan, will allow you to say that's a right -handed brain or a left -handed brain.
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I ran into that in a court case a couple of years ago where somebody was accused of murder.
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The pathologist said it must have been done by a left -hander.
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The person themselves said they were right -handed
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and people wanted a test to find out whether they were truly right -handed
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or left -handed and there is none like
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that all you can do in the end is what we did
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which is to test them on a whole load of things do they do this faster
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or slower with this hand or that hand
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but there's no signature in the brain that you can look at
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and what about the idea that some people are more left -brained
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and some people are more right -brained and
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that this has an impact on their personalities
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and their skills this is this is such a complicated one the first thing is
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if you take people are they logical are they intuitive yes
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of course people differ this is what we call personality people
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have different personalities they do things differently they prefer different things some people like painting other people like programming computers
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and so on so there's no doubt
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that people differ that's one of the great truths of psychology whether
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that relates to the sides of the brain though is another matter we know
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that some things are done in different parts of the brain.
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I know I'm talking to you with the left half of my brain
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because I've had my brain scanned and that's what's doing most of the the work there.
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But of course it doesn't mean my right hemisphere is turned off at the moment, it's gone to sleep because I'm talking to you, there's nothing for it to do.
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It's doing all sorts of things.
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It's looking at you, it's interpreting your emotions, it's trying to decide whether I'm talking too fast, too slow, it's looking at all sorts of things.
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So both halves are doing many things but language is mostly in the left hemisphere.
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If I look at your face to recognise your expressions, that is mostly in the right hemisphere.
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But it doesn't mean we don't use both of them most of the time.
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Will it vary between different people though?
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Is it true that some people are using their right a bit more
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and some people are using their left a bit more?
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If you take something like language, some people are very different.
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The test I had to see that I was using my left half of my brain for talking, about five to ten percent of people,
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it will show that they're using the right half of their brain for talking.
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And it's not that you do it a bit of one or the other, you tend to be one or the other.
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So there's no doubt there are differences there and that's what makes it so extremely interesting.
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Brains aren't all the same.
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It's not just that some are slightly bigger or smaller or slightly different shaped.
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Some are actually organised very differently to others.
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So you might have language mostly using the left side of your brain, or you might have it using the right side of your brain instead.
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But would that affect your personality and whether you're logical or intuitive?
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As far as we can tell, no. Where you have these things in the brain mostly doesn't seem to affect the way you are.
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It's a bit like in a computer.
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You can put the processor wherever you like you can change
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the shape of the outside box you can do many things but it doesn't change the way the processing is going on.
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But what about on courses where people are told
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that they're going to be taught how to tap more into their right brain to tap into their creative side?
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It may well teach them to be more creative
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but it won't do anything to their brain specifically in the right and left hemispheres.
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I always talk about
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that book by Betty Edwards called Drawing on the right side
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of the brain huge bestseller it sold millions over the years it's wonderful
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if you actually want to learn to draw better there's nothing
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wrong with it it's a way of learning to draw just don't use it to learn neuroscience it's rubbish
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so do you think it's more of a metaphor then maybe a useful metaphor
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but does it matter then if people are being taught it does it matter
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if children are being taught this or
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if people learn this on courses it is a metaphor
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and it's very useful we need language for describing how we differ that's why we're talking in personality about extroversion
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and eroticism and so on we need words for describing how people differ
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and this is clearly a way that some people differ
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so i don't see any problems there at all the trouble we're talking about somebody being right -brained
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or left -brained is that it implies
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that it's fixed you can't override it that's the way you are
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and at that point it's probably not helpful for somebody to say you're right -brained
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and then they say well i'll never learn to do maths, will I?
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So it acts as a block against learning.
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And most people can learn most things if they try hard enough.
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Thank you very much, Chris McManus.
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Pleasure.
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We mentioned courses taking place in businesses, but there are also some neuromyths getting promoted to a much younger audience,
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to children in schools, without teachers realising that they're not always based on good evidence.
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Dr Duncan Astell is from the University of Cambridge.
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What are some of the worst neuromyths that you've come across being used in schools?
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Gosh, so some of my favourites.
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You often hear, well, we only use 5 or 10 or whatever percent of our brains.
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Very popular one is learning style, so the idea that different children have different brains
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that learn in different ways and will learn best when the information is delivered in their preferred style.
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So you'll have your visual learners or your kinesthetic learners or your auditory learners.
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Because that's a very popular neuromyth for which there's no compelling evidence.
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So are there no evidence for any of these things?
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How do they get into schools in the first place then?
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They get into schools because there's a great demand for interventions to help kids who are struggling at school.
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And that is then combined with a system where there's no regulation
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or system of checks and balances to actually test whether any of the claims
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that are made by these products are true and kind of stack up in terms of the science.
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So it's that combination of a great demand from families and children and schools with no regulation whatsoever.
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And I think that provides a very fertile ground for neuromyths.
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So what sorts of other things are schools paying for?
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I guess brain gym is the most common one.
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So brain gym is a series of exercises.
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It has brain in the title, so you might think that it has a basis in neuroscience.
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But as a neuroscientist, I can't find any compelling evidence for it.
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And it's very sketchy whether there's any good evidence that it is effective.
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It involves exercises like sort of pressing on different parts of the body, the idea that it might boost children's brain power and readiness to learn.
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And we have been in touch with Brain Gym
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and they say it's based on the changes that they notice in children before and after they've taken part.
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So if they're seeing it makes a difference in children, does it matter whether or not it's a scientifically proven method that they're using?
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Well, I think if schools and families are being asked to pay for a product, then there should be compelling evidence that it works.
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And anecdotal evidence that people have noticed changes, I don't think is good enough scientific evidence that it does work.
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So studies need to have proper control groups.
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The children need to be those for whom the intervention is intended.
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And it needs to be done by people independent of the people who produce the programme itself.
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Now, they did also say to us that there are two peer -reviewed studies, both from more than 25 years ago.
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Would that kind of evidence do?
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The studies need to be on the groups for whom it's intended.
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They need to be sufficiently powered.
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They need to have good active control groups so we can control for things like the placebo effect.
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And I don't think that those studies have those.
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And why doesn't this research get done then?
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These are more than 25 years old.
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Why isn't this research going on so that people know once and for all, does it work or doesn't it?
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Well, sometimes the research is done, but then it doesn't get published.
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because it's hard to publish studies that show null results, even though they are incredibly useful to the wider literature.
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Also, educational interventions are really hard to run well.
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They're really hard to get good control groups for, and so it requires a massive investment.
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And some of these neuromyths have been discussed for a long time now, yet they seem to stick, and they're still being talked about in schools.
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Why do you think they stick?
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I think one of the reasons they stick is
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because they seem like intuitively simple solutions for complex problems it's
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really hard to study children who are struggling in school
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and that's because they're a very heterogeneous bunch of individuals
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so there might be lots of different routes to being a struggling learner
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so when someone comes in with an intervention that seems very intuitive it seems very simple
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there's a real allure to it and especially if it's got brain
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or neuroscience attached to it it gives the impression
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that it has a foundation in science
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and i do feel sorry for head teachers in a way
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because they're not neuroscience researchers
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so how are they supposed to be able to judge what's good
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and what's not
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if they've got people coming in showing them interventions being very very enthusiastic about them then
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if someone says your kids could do better in your school
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if you took on this thing then you're going to want to aren't you?
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I totally agree
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so in our lab we spend a lot of time heading out to schools helping with teacher training
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and I think
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that actually as scientists we need to do a better job
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of engaging with the education system going through what makes for a good study, what makes for good evidence that might improve your practice and
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so I think
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that there's a strong role for scientists to play in helping teachers make decisions about changes that they make in the classroom.
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And are teachers still being taught this when they do their education degrees?
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It's hard to know what is in the teacher training
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but I visit a lot of primary schools
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and I usually start by going through some neuromyths and
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when I tell them about something like brain gym for example they all nod sagely.
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I've yet to go to a primary school in the UK
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that has not heard of or tried Brain Gym at some point and some still are using it.
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And what are your rules of thumb for assessing an intervention to work out whether or not it's any good?
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Firstly, what's the theory behind it?
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Is there a good theory as to why it might work?
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Secondly, is there good peer -reviewed evidence that's been conducted by someone independent of the people who created the program itself?
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Does that research have a good control group ideally an active control group
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and are the groups the children for whom the intervention is intended
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and finally is there a good outcome that makes sense so
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if an intervention is designed to help children read
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or do maths is that the outcome measure and
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if it doesn't necessarily work for the reasons that are described
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but does seem to make a difference you know getting children up
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and about inactive in the classroom might be a good idea does it matter
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if it's if it's not you know completely the way they say it happens.
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I have no problem whatsoever
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if kids enjoy getting up for five minutes midway through a lesson
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and getting active and I can well believe that that might help them switch on.
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The problem is when that's being marketed as a product
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and being paid for by schools when just the activities that a teacher dreams up could be just as effective.
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Thank you very much
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of course some of the myths we believe about the brain
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go back a very long way take the female brain assumed
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since at least the 18th century to be different from the male brain
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and of course not as good smaller fond of pink
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and naturally no good at reading maps
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but cordelia fine from the university of melbourne in australia won
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the royal society science book prize last year for forensically taking
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apart some of these myths she's joining the conference through the magic of technology
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so I did the same and she told me
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while there are sex differences in the brain thanks to genetics
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and hormonal differences between the sexes the impact isn't quite so straightforward.
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Every time a scientist reports a sex difference in the brain it seems like it's pointing towards males
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and females having brains that are ever more divergent
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but the sex differences
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that you can see even in non -human animals can depend on the in social environmental conditions
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that that animal has experienced
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so the sex difference can depend on having experienced stress for example
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or particular kinds of housing conditions
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and sometimes the sex differences in the brain you see can actually reverse depending on what those differences are.
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So how do these differences add up then if at all?
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Sex differences in the brain seem to mix up rather than add up
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if you think of being able to line males
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and females up on a continuum
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that goes from the sort of most masculine brain to the
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most feminine brain rather people have quite idiosyncratic mosaics of you know more male typical
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and more female features and the second important thing
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that often gets overlooked is
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that whenever we find a sex difference in the brain we
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tend to think okay well what's what difference in behavior is
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that difference in the brain creating
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but actually in many ways many animals including humans males and females behave in quite similar ways Please.
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But they have to do that in bodies that can be different sizes, have different chemicals and hormones running through them.
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And sometimes sex differences can actually serve to compensate for another sex difference
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or to cancel each other out in order to enable the two sexes of the species to actually behave the same.
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So do you have any examples of that in humans or other animals?
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Well, one, for example, is in a kind of songbird.
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So songbirds are one of the few animal species where neuroscientists
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have actually had a real success story in terms of linking genetic and hormonal differences to sex differences in the brain, to sex differences in behavior,
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which is actually a much harder pathway to plot out than popular writers would have us realize
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but in many songbirds these links have been made
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and there's a sort of song control center in the in the male brain
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and female brain but it's much larger in the male brain
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and that is the basis of the male's ability to be the songster of the species
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but there's another canary species called the african weaver bird where there's still
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that same sex difference in the size of that song control center
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but in females there's much more gene expression going on in
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that part of the brain and in fact
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that genetic sex difference seems to compensate
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or cancel out the sex difference in the brain size
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and both males and females sing together in a very similar way
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so that's an example of where you have two sex differences in the brain
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but they're actually cancelling each other out to create similarity of behaviour.
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So do you think when it comes to people have we over exaggerated the differences
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that there are between men and women based on their brains?
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Well, one of the real issues in sex differences research, whether you're talking about brains or behavior or trying to link the two,
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is that there's been quite an issue with false positive results.
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People are interested in whether men and women are different.
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And it's very easy and apparently intuitive for researchers to test for sex differences.
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And the problem here is that if you don't find a difference, then you can often tend not to even report it.
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And so that similarity kind of disappears, never to be found again.
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So the research is skewed by what's published and what's not, because if there aren't any results, if you don't find the differences, those non -significant results tend not to get published.
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That's right.
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And it's even very difficult to search for sex similarities in research databases.
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And when you talk to the public about some of the myths there are about differences between male
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and female brains and where those differences come from
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and what size those are and how they may be smaller than they think, what sort of reactions do you get?
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Do you think we want to look for these differences somehow?
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I suppose in terms of the public reception, you know, one frustrating reaction that one can get is
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that it's a denial of science to deny
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that there are sex differences in the brain or that they have fundamental importance for how men and women behave, that it's a sort of form of political correctness.
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But really the purpose here is to offer people ways of making sense of what is a really complex area
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and asking important questions about the reliability of findings, the size of findings, the generalizability of findings,
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thinking in a more sophisticated way about the origins of sex
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differences in the brain of course in the brain doesn't mean innate what they mean for behavior
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so you can as I said one sex difference can compensate
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for another it doesn't necessarily have an impact on behavior
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and you know thinking in a more knowledgeable way about evolutionary explanations
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so it's all about giving people tools and information to assess the data themselves.
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Do you have any favorite myths that you'd like people to know are myths?
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I think the most important myth to bust is probably a myth peddled by a certain very well -selling book
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that male brain is is not designed to spot dust
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spot dust that one's definitely a myth cordelia fine this is all in the mind on bbc radio 4
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and today we're at the british neuroscience associations annual conference on the topic of neuromyths those stories about the brain
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that we just can't resist believing dr ann cook is chief executive of the association.
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Why do these myths persist do you think?
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I think partly it's because they appeal.
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There is something appealing about say the 10 % of your brain myth that we only use 10 % of your brain.
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It's nice to think that we've got another 90 % that
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if we could tap into we could be anybody we wanted to be.
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I think sometimes there are a number of alternative hypotheses
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and one of them turns out to be simpler
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and easier to understand than the others and perhaps cheaper to implement or even, dare I say it, to market to people.
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The Mozart effect would be a good one for that.
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So that was based on a piece of science.
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It was a hypothesis that listening to Mozart increased the IQ and that was found to be the case.
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It was actually in adults, not in children.
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But it was picked up by various people, it was picked up by some policy makers, it was picked up by lots of companies selling Mozart to actually pay to children, even though the study wasn't in children.
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And there have since been other studies which have shown that is not to the effect.
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But it's so nice to think about it, isn't it?
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All I need to do is listen to some Mozart and I will improve my intelligence.
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Yeah, and other studies since have found that U2 and blur is just as good.
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So you could have the blur effect and the U2 effect, and that only lasts about 15 minutes anyway, so it's not even very long
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but some of these myths have been around for a really long time haven't they
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so I guess you could say
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that myths about the brain have been since you know time began
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but they keep arising some of them persist it wasn't till quite recently quite scarily recently
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that it was thought that babies couldn't feel pain
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and you know quite invasive procedures would be carried out without anaesthetic
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because there was this misunderstanding about neuroscience and it's through neuroscience
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that we now know that isn't the case of course
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and the used to be thought that autism was caused by the mother's behavior these
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so -called refrigerator mothers and now a lot of research has shown that obviously isn't the case.
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I think it's a common thing everyone is fascinated by the
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brain there's a real appetite for knowing about the brain
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and the nervous system and that makes perhaps neuroscience especially prone to these myths being perpetuated.
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Does it matter that it's not true
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that we only use 10 % of our brains and that lots of people believe that?
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I think there's a lot to be said for, if it's helpful for someone to actually believe in something, then great, you know, why not?
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I think it can matter.
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I do feel quite strongly when vulnerable people are potentially preyed upon by,
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you know, selling something which purports to be based on science and actually isn't.
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And I think that exploitative side of neuromyths can be very damaging
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and I think there can be something damaging about putting people in pigeonholes as well.
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The kind of classic, the learning styles, which has been shown time and time again to not have any scientific evidence
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but still children are put into one of a certain type of learning style.
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You know, pigeonholing people, especially when they're young, can actually be quite limiting so I think that can be damaging too.
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What is the best way of countering these myths, do you think?
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Because psychological research shows that myth -busting isn't in fact that effective and that telling people that it's all a myth, which is exactly, I appreciate what I'm doing right now in this programme,
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doesn't actually change people's minds.
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What should we do?
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I think it's important to, although accept that there are these reasons for neuromyths persisting,
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to continue to put out good information and to really empower people to have access to information through websites,
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through talks, through being able to talk to scientists directly, through schools, through everyday life you know there's more
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and more kind of science in shopping centres and things like this
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so it's really giving people the tools to assess things and question things themselves you know is this real or not.
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And let me ask you one last thing do you ever
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find yourself in a social situation where somebody confidently asserts
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that something about the brain is true that you know to be untrue
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and have you got some good way of dealing with that?
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Usually I would start by asking them why they held
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that belief so trying to understand something of where they're coming from I think
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if you come in and say no no no that's all wrong
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and i know more than you and super
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that doesn't really get you anywhere but people believe things for reasons
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and sometimes for really good reasons so it's trying to understand where they get
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that from and then if it's appropriate to kind of pick
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that apart a bit and to come up with some information
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that they might not have come across before
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and then just to kind of let them draw the conclusion as much as possible that's the most effective way
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That sounds good.
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You're doing it in a nice way.
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That's good.
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I try to be nice.
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Thank you very much, Anne Cook.
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Now, before we go, one thing that's been discovered about the brain in recent years is its capacity to change.
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Neuroplasticity means that it can form new connections throughout life.
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So how about training your brain to perform better?
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There are hundreds of brain training games out there.
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Could they hold the answer?
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Dr Emma Winnell is from Cardiff University and is talking at the conference today about brain training.
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So first of all, what is meant by brain training?
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We really mean repetitively completing tasks that are specially designed to train particular cognitive functions of the brain.
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And what sort of claims have been made about it?
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Some people have claims that it can improve memory in people suffering from conditions such as dementia.
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Across the board, really, in terms of medical conditions, even things like autism, learning disabilities.
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The claims span a far -reaching field in terms of diseases and also in the healthy population.
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So some people have claimed that they can improve intelligence, for example, which might be very useful for people thinking of exams and things like that.
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And how much evidence is there that some brain training games can do something
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that then tips over into other kinds of skills?
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So the evidence is mixed.
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You may play a brain training game that looks at memory.
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Your memory will likely get better on that game.
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But will that transfer into your real life?
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Will that improve your memory and kind of everyday tasks?
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And there are some studies, although there aren't many, to support what we call transfer effects.
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So transfer from the computer game into everyday life.
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And in your research, you've been looking specifically at the very serious condition Huntington's disease.
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How are you using brain training there?
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Yes, that's right.
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So Huntington's disease is a neurodegenerative disease and we are conducting a feasibility study.
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So we are looking at whether brain training on a computer can be feasible in this patient population
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because we know that people with Huntington's disease struggle with motivation sometimes
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and apathy so I'm really interested in whether people are able to play the brain training computer games
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because Huntington's disease is associated with problems with movement
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so are people physically able to do it
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and do they want to do it as well
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because that's very important there's also a very interesting question about
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how regularly you might play brain training computer games you know
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if I were to say to you you'd have to play this game for five hours a day
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versus ten minutes a day There's that trade -off, isn't there, between the amount of time and energy, resource you put into it versus the benefit that you think you will achieve.
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And what are you hoping it might do for these patients?
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If we establish feasibility, and we would have to do that, the brain training games may well help these particular patients.
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There are other studies in similar conditions, such as Parkinson's disease,
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which have demonstrated improvements in cognitive function the big question for me is whether the patients in themselves report improvement
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so we're asking patients whether they feel they've got better in a range of measures including cognitive
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and movement measures but also we've got some objective tests to see whether they have got better
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and it's interesting that you're trying it with a condition that's
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so serious you almost think or something like brain training couldn't possibly make a difference
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but obviously there's a possibility that it might
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or you wouldn't be trying certainly and it may well be
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that it's given as well as drugs
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or in combination with very much people are prepared to have a go at it
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and just to see what happens
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so do you think one day in the future we might go to the doctors
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and be prescribed video games as part of the kind of treatment we're getting for different conditions i think
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that we need to broaden our kind of horizons in terms
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of treatments i think as part of the bigger picture It could be a really useful tool.
412
Well, very best of luck with your research.
413
Thank you very much, Emma Wynel.
414
That is all for our myth -busting from the British Neuroscience Association Christmas Symposium.
415
And it's the last in this series of All in the Mind.
416
Thank you very much for listening and for all your emails and tweets.
417
It's lovely to hear from you.
418
We'll be back in the spring.
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Thanks for listening to the All in the Mind podcast from the BBC.
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It's produced in association with The Open University and
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if you go to the All in the Mind website you'll
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find links to their work on issues in mental health and social care.
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Speaking Goals for This Clip
This video is perfect for english speaking practice and IELTS speaking practice, targeting fluency in discussing complex ideas—like debunking myths—with clarity. You’ll learn to structure questions, explain research, and counter false claims, all while maintaining a natural flow. It’s ideal for shadowing (or shadowspeak), as the dialogue mixes casual quiz-style openings with academic insights, helping you adapt your tone from conversational to informative.
Phrase Bank
- "Here's a quick quiz for you. True or false?" – Great for engaging listeners.
- "Answers coming up in the next half an hour" – Builds anticipation in storytelling.
- "to set us straight" – A natural way to introduce a factual correction.
- "the statistics are all over the place" – Useful for criticizing flawed data.
- "there is none like that" – Simplifies explaining the absence of a solution.
Fix Your Weak Spots
This clip helps with improve english pronunciation by focusing on rhythm in longer sentences. Notice how the speaker pauses after phrases like "Now, you've spent many years studying left and right-handedness" to emphasize key points. Practice shadow speak by mimicking these pauses—they make complex ideas easier to follow. Also, pay attention to stress in words like "neuroscientists" (neuro-SCI-en-tists) and "statistical" (sta-TIS-ti-cal) to sound more natural. Mastering these details will boost your confidence in both casual and formal speaking contexts.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if I show you a scan, will allow · If we establish feasibility, and we would have |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've come · you've spent · you've come |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is supported · are left · were born |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | kids who are · people who produce · children who are |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.