Ben Carson told HUD staff he could zap their brains into reciting whole books read 60 years ago. Wha

[WhiteTara]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/07/ben-carson-incorrectly-told-hud-staff-he-could-zap-their-brains-into-reciting-books-read-60-years-ago/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.b2304e116a47

By now, everyone’s aware that Ben Carson likened slaves to immigrants during a staff speech Monday to mark his first full week as secretary of housing and urban development. The comparison did not play nicely on social media. (On Twitter, actor Samuel L. Jackson announced his disapproval with a phrase that cannot be reprinted here.)

But Carson’s remarks about slavery were not his only statements to receive scrutiny.

As a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1987, Carson famously separated infant twins conjoined at the head. But on Monday, he told a factually wrong parable about the brain. Specifically, Carson said, the brain was incapable of forgetting and could be electrically stimulated into perfect recall — a statement that, even though made by one of the most famous former neurosurgeons alive, was far more fiction than science.

snip

He went on: “It can process more than 2 million bits of information per second. You can’t overload it. Have you ever heard people say, ‘Don’t do all that, you’ll overload your brain.’ You can’t overload the human brain. If you learned one new fact every second, it would take you more than 3 million years to challenge the capacity of your brain.”

The insinuation that Carson could zap a patient into reciting, from cover to cover, a book read in 1957 was not true, experts said.

This man is certifiable!

[gratuitous]

1. Of course it's not true

But it will become true by virtue of being repeated ad nauseam in comments sections all over the internets. The short answer is, if this dumbass assertion was true, wouldn't court trial eyewitness testimony involve a lot more skull probes?

[democrank]

2. I miss the good old days

when we had to disprove things like Reagan's claim that ketchup was a vegetable.

[samnsara]

3. he is obviously an idiot savant

[WhiteTara]

5. Actually, I would never let that guy

near me with a scalpel. I'm inclined to think that you could have stopped at idiot.

[Shrike47]

4. So why isn't law enforcement using this wonderful discovery?

Think of all those witnesses who could recall the perps faces!

One does wonder about Carson.

[Fred Sanders]

6. Carson is yet another of the false talkers you are not supposed to take literally, OK? You have to

guess at what he means, like when he once said slaves were immigrants looking for a better life as they lay like cordwood in the bottom of slave ships.....he meant slaves were imports, not immigrants as such, get it?

Liberals are so sensitive about accuracy.