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The Cost of Neuromyths
25 Plays20 days ago
This episode of Neuroblast explores the real-world consequences of neuromyths, from lost opportunities to economic costs. Athena shares her personal story of overcoming misconceptions about her cognitive abilities, while Tracey highlights the broader societal impact. Together, they discuss how evidence-based science can dismantle harmful myths and unlock human potential.
Original music by: Julian Starr
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Transcript
Introduction to Neuroblast and Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Neuroblast, where we break down myths and reveal the real-world impact they can have on our lives.
00:00:20
Speaker
Today we're going to do something a little different. My name is Tracy Tokuhama Espinosa, and I'm an educational consultant around the world, and I also teach a course at Harvard University called the Neuroscience of Learning.
00:00:31
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And I'm Athena Stevens. I'm a writer, actor, creative, entrepreneur, and neuroscience student. And -- coming out as someone who has a brain injury.
00:00:45
Speaker
Today's episode is about the cost of believing in neuromyths. And I'm not just
Athena's Journey with Cerebral Palsy
00:00:50
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talking about financial costs, but the loss of potential, of human potential, of missed opportunities and the emotional toll that myths about the brain can play on individuals and on society as a whole.
00:01:01
Speaker
ah How do I cue you? i mean, what do I say to you then? -- Ask me a question! Okay. So Athena, your own personal story really reveals a lot of these costs of neuromyths in society. um Can you share a bit with us?
00:01:17
Speaker
Sure. So let's go way, way back real quickly to 40 years ago. um I was born with cerebral palsy due to oxygen deprivation at birth.
00:01:31
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Specifically, I was born with dyskinetic cerebral palsy. which affects the basal ganglia, so that is the inner, inner, inner bit of the brain, the real hub, which is not the typical form of cerebral palsy or cerebral palsy, as people call it, but it affects -- --.
00:01:55
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My movements all for limbs, obviously. It affects my speech. So growing up in the 80s and 90 s it was an absolute fight by my family to...
00:02:11
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get me out of an educational system that was for individuals with cognitive and behavioral disabilities intand into what's called mainstream education.
00:02:27
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That is education with the quote-unquote normal kids. Although we've all grown up and none of us are normal. That's really the first cost I would say that came acutely clear to me about neuromyths with growing up with the assumption that just because I had a brain injury, it affected my mind and my cognition.
00:02:57
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And then I thought after I graduated high school, got into really good college, did my master's, I thought all that was over and I wouldn't need to ah address that ever again.
00:03:14
Speaker
So in the general school system, there's a, just because they weren't, I think that you're bringing up a huge point that has to do with, you know, you're bringing it up to what it does most and people because they have little contact with people who might be slightly different or who have had different early life experiences or who may have what appear to be physical differences or things like that, they've made judgment calls. And that sort of, you know, judging a book by its cover idea of making presumptions
00:03:47
Speaker
um You find that that was much more apparent in your early years of education or it also existed throughout university? It did not exist in university, I would have to say, because I went to one of the --.
00:04:02
Speaker
liberal arts
Post-Graduation Challenges and Societal Myths
00:04:03
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colleges. So you get into one of those and it's like there's a neon sign above - your head that says, I am smart, I got in.
00:04:13
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um Which is really a challenge, I think, for all of the elite you know universities to start looking at themselves and going, how do we integrate all learners into our community.
00:04:27
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But so for four years or so, I had a reprieve because I got into this highly competitive school. It was a foregone conclusion that I was bright.
00:04:40
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And so the work was done for me. And so it wasn't until I got out - and completely forgot about this association and about the fact that most people didn't have a contact with other students with disabilities growing up. That
Impact of Neuromyths on Education and Potential
00:05:01
Speaker
I forgot these neuromyths existed and was something that I had to battle day by day head on because I didn't know anyone growing up who didn't have contact with someone with a disability in their classroom.
00:05:20
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Because they all knew me. So by definition, that made no sense because - everyone I knew knew someone with a disability and that was me.
00:05:34
Speaker
And that also gets to this huge idea of these, you know, we were talking about the costs and we talk about the human, ah and we talk about the human, you know, sacrifice. and And are you allowing everybody to reach their own potentials when you've got these myths that sort of,
00:05:51
Speaker
you know, close out or don't allow certain people into certain groups or or into certain educational settings. um You'll recall that we had a student in your in your course in the summer school at Harvard and and he had autism and he was really battling trying to show that people with autism could actually be successful at the university level. um They just needed, you know, the way that we do school might have to have some adaptations, right? And so, um and that's really a fascinating, um you know, question mark there, because people feel that there's such a big economic cost, or we have to invest so much, but it's actually the opposite.
00:06:30
Speaker
We lose potential um in people by not doing maybe the bare minimum, which we were talking about, and and allowing for maybe more - universal design for learning where you have met the needs of all your learners and given all the resources so that people get what they need at the moments that they need it in order to be able to to thrive in that setting. So that that's been missing. But I think that in addition to that, maybe, um I don't know if you've had direct experience with this, but sometimes you get entire...
00:07:02
Speaker
school systems that buy into some of these mythical understandings of how people should be, or if somebody with cerebral palsy, we presume that they cannot do things, but the entire system um has to be reeducated. And so whole segments of society are sort of missing out on on the true human potential of all their members.
00:07:24
Speaker
So I am dealing with this right now. um I was an Associate Artist at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. um Various things happened that they didn't have the access that was needed and the pretaccessend that the needed. They knew I had
00:07:47
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Cerebral palsy. They asked me to write in perform plays - having cerebral palsy. And then something came up where this structure was lacking. And I said I can't do this because I have a brain injury.
00:08:10
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And then I lost my job. Lawyers that got involved and six months later, I got a letter from their lawyer saying, point number one we admit that Athena Stevens has cerebral palsy.
00:08:26
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Point number two, we dispute the fact that she has a brain injury. And these are lawyers that are being paid hundreds of dollars an hour and my first instinct what to do is - exactly what you're doing Tracey and laugh. But the more I thought about it, the more disturbing it got. Because I realized that none of the board and none of the managers, none of the lawyers,
00:09:01
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had any contact with people that had brain injuries like me. So they all
Brain Misunderstandings and Legal Challenges
00:09:09
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believe in a myth that someone with a brain injury does not look like me, even though my diagnosis is cerebral palsy. Yeah.
00:09:25
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Yeah. So it's a general lack of understanding, I'd say, overall about how the brain works that gives birth to all of these myths, right? And and especially in this case, just mislabeling or misunderstanding that the brain really runs the show and does everything.
00:09:44
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And there's other kinds of discrimination things that that come out. And I think that um one of the other examples that yeah that you had noted um came-- comes from things that because people don't see differences or see different kinds of people in different settings, they don't understand. So this is one thing that comes up.
00:10:03
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But this is can be extended to other educational settings. For example, and there's a myth that, for example, girls are bad at math or bad at science or whatever.
00:10:14
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And you say, well, where does that come from? And they say,
Athena's Neuroscience Pursuit and Insights
00:10:17
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well, just look, there's no women in the science fields. And then It's sort of like, this is this is my truth. My truth is because it's not there, this exists, there this deficit in women exists or whatever.
00:10:30
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And similarly, you know, why don't see women like you in the theater, you know, therefore, you know, this is a deficit. This is something that doesn't um belong here just because they haven't seen it before. And so maybe you could speak a little bit about how those things, just lack of contact and basic understanding has led to so many of these myths.
00:10:51
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Yeah, I think it , I think you said this few weeks ago. It shuts down potential. um I have a friend that grew up in the Soviet Union who has taught that women can't be scientists.
00:11:06
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She has a brilliant mind. um Tracy's over here going, hello. Um, but I think more to the point,
00:11:18
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I'm still very much in in the middle of the legal throes of what's happened with a - - Shakespeare's Globe. But my first instinct was to say, um maybe I don't have a brain injury.
00:11:31
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And what's really disturbing is all of my friends started going, I am so sorry, I assumed you did have a brain injury. So this really is weirdly why I got into neuroscience and why started taking courses at Harvard - Extension School.
00:11:56
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Because i went, at least I'm curious, which is more than I can say about this CEO over here. What is the nature of my brain injury?
00:12:07
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What is being published? About - cerebral palsy, ah about about neurological issues, about basal ganglia damage, which encompasses not just cerebral palsy, but Parkinson's, Huntington's, dementia, all the hot button stuff that we are all - interested in .
00:12:31
Speaker
I want you to be a part of that debate. But that is that's just turned it all so positive, right? Because you've touched on this big idea of the huge you know psychological toll it can play and and the questions that it makes you have about your own existence, your own self, by being you know forced to sort of explain yourself to people who should actually know better and they just don't. And so that, I don't know, maybe um if you could speak a bit more about that because it really,
00:13:02
Speaker
you're saying that the self-doubt, and this also might be so true for many other people who don't have your outgoing nature, right? If you were doubted or questioned, you just stop engaging then. and And that is, you know, isolation is the worst thing you can do to to an individual, you know, and and that takes away all of your identity issues. It just sounds like ah such a negative downward um spiral.
00:13:26
Speaker
Can you speak a little bit more to that point about the emotional toll that these kinds of myths can have on, your own self-perception, and you've actually turned that into a positive. You said, no, I'm going to now you know, I'm going to go be a neuroscientist instead of, well, I wonder if I do have a ah brain injury or not. You're actually trying to embrace that.
00:13:47
Speaker
Sure. I will say three things in - respect to that. The first is, and I think this is important for anyone that has had to deal with discrimination or awful things.
00:14:03
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yes, I am making a good thing from it. I'm getting a degree from Harvard that doesn't replace or undo the fact that it never should have happened.
00:14:16
Speaker
So don't ever anyone replace the silver lining with the actual injustice. Now, that it doesn't mean that I don't have the responsibility to make something out of the bad because, my gosh, look at how I began.
00:14:37
Speaker
Um You know, I had the cards stacked against me from day one. You've got to do something with a hand your dealt, can't just fold out in the game.
00:14:50
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second
Advice on Overcoming Limitations and Perseverance
00:14:51
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thing I would say to that is when Sandy Totsberg, who everyone knows from the Great British Bake-Off, she's a friend of mine, when she and a bunch of other women started the Women's Equality Party here, she said something that I will never forget, and that is,
00:15:11
Speaker
What if the cure for cancer is in the mind yeah of a little girl right now?
00:15:21
Speaker
And I believe you but in that human potential across the board. That's why I love humans and I love life because you don't know what you can spark off by being yourself - if you are given room to be a yourself. And that goes for everybody. A friend of mine has a daughter with a severe, severe
00:15:49
Speaker
brain injury, multiple disabilities, and the stories that this child had sparked off in my head as a writer, just by being her joyful self, she's not verbal.
00:16:05
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She has cognition, but it's different than other people, but I could not have written the stories I have written without that child in all of its complexity.
00:16:19
Speaker
Sadly, didn't do it overnight. I spent a lot of time crying on my couch and watching K-dramas, um because it took that long to And of course, having basal ganglia damage means that you have difficulties with emotional - ah regulation. As we know, I wrote my paper on this this summer.
00:16:47
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So I would say to all of the people listening, and I bet there's lot who are exhausted, who are questioning themselves, who are feeling like they can't do something, feeling like they've been shut down, you don't need to rise up right now.
00:17:12
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The time will come. I, what happened to me was I said, I'm going to audit these two classes at the Harvard Extension School.
00:17:25
Speaker
That was the autumn 2023. And two teachers that I was auditing from came up to me and said, you can do this. And not only can you do this, we need you in neuroscience.
00:17:41
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And I never wanted to be a scientist. I always only wanted to be creative and a writer. But having people when the time was right and I was rested and I had cried my tears and watched my K-dramas say, you can do this, let's go.
00:18:05
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that's when things started to make sense again. So even if you are on the couch crying today, please keep living and keep trying new things. I am begging you, don't give up.
00:18:25
Speaker
Don't go back. Keep, even if it's moving an inch forward when you can, keep moving and find out where you're needed .
00:18:38
Speaker
That is such wonderful, wonderful advice. And you you you nailed all of the different reasons that having these neuromythical understandings, rather than basing information on on evidence, or even just trying at the most basic level to understand people whose brains work a little bit differently. It's...
00:18:58
Speaker
it's, we have a saying in our class, you've heard me say it a million times that, you know, we know ourselves better by knowing the other. And the more others you can know, and the more other ways there are to approach the world or think about things or different kinds of special brains is really just the eye opener you need to be able to understand yourself better. So I would just encourage, you know, this is a great way to get rid of these terrible mythical situations in which we limit the potential of different people by doing that. So I really, am it's hard to look inside yourself and try to think, okay, what is it that I'm missing?
00:19:36
Speaker
But I think that's a really good starting point. And maybe a takeaway for all of our listeners is that they really, um aside from not giving up, I think you should also, you know, be broadening and thinking out, who is it that I could also say something to today? You know what, I really...
00:19:53
Speaker
appreciated that insight or what a great head you have for this kinds of ideas and just so that people can see where they can grow into a lot of their strengths that they might already have that maybe they themselves don't even see.
00:20:05
Speaker
um Just like you didn't see you were a neuroscientist until somebody pointed out, hey, but you can do this. and If I can add to that one more element and bring it full circle,
00:20:16
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ah All of those kids that I was with when I was a child that had behavior disorders or cognitive challenges and -- I felt really, really
Reflections and Next Episode Teaser
00:20:28
Speaker
scared around it very often.
00:20:31
Speaker
Only now am I realizing, God, what a gift to be able to see, you know, - - severe disabilities up close that I wouldn't have been able to see and know what it's like. The number of times it comes up on my test where,
00:20:52
Speaker
you know, under the exam someone will go, what is Williams' disease? And I know that because I knew three children with it. Wow. Um, so in even, even those early years were pressing me not only to become a bigger, better artist, not only to have a bigger heart, but to be a better scientist as well.
00:21:20
Speaker
Wonderful. Wow. What a great um great way to to bring this to a close because I think it's so positive to celebrate. Even now, you can look back at things that maybe even before you weren't so appreciative of, but also having the ability to have contact.
00:21:36
Speaker
Next time on Neuroblast, we're going to dive into another myth somewhat related, which is also very much connected to how we limit people's potential, which has to do with critical periods.
00:21:48
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And some people might have told you once upon a time, Athena, oh, well, you didn't learn a foreign language by this age. You'll never learn it. Or you didn't learn to walk. <Oh, it was walk!> Yeah. Yes, exactly.
00:22:02
Speaker
You've been told many limitations, which are all mythical, which is really interesting. And so um here's the teaser we're going to leave you with. um There is nothing you learn in school.
00:22:13
Speaker
that has a critical period. What's much more important is the order of introduction of concepts. And we, we'll talk about that next time when we meet. So thank you. And thank you, Athena, for these wonderful insights. I mean, every single time I talk to you, I learn something new. And, and it's really just ah not just about you. It's about humanity. So I love it. Thank you very much.
00:22:35
Speaker
Thank you. We'll see you next week, guys, on Neuro blast.
00:22:51
Speaker
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