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

[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.

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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!