The living dead shuffle through a fog of half-truths about the brain. These ideas often feel intuitively right, circulate widely in schools, and promise quick fixes. Yet many common brain mise en place techniques collapse under the scrutiny of neuroscience.
One of the most persistent is the idea of “learning styles,” the belief that students learn best when instruction matches a preferred sensory mode. Despite its popularity, research shows no evidence that tailoring instruction to visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic types improves learning (Betts et al., 2019). An international report compiled by the Online Learning Consortium (Betts et al., 2019) highlighted a high prevalence of teachers endorsing sensory-based learning styles despite the absence of empirical support for their effectiveness. When teachers shape lessons around these kinds of neuromyths, they divert time and energy away from practices that support genuine learning.
Another widespread myth is that humans only use 10% of their brain. This claim, endlessly recycled in popular culture, is contradicted by decades of neuroscience showing that, at any time, our brains are active over a large number of interconnected areas (Lebbe, 2019). Similarly, the belief that one hemisphere of the brain dominates learning (the “left-brain logical / right-brain creative” myth) oversimplifies the complex neural networks that operate across both hemispheres at once (Lebbe, 2019). These stories persist partly because of a cultural distance between neuroscience and education (Howard-Jones, 2014), but oversimplified models lead to oversimplified teaching, which leads in turn to tasteless brains.
Speed-related myths also find their way into classrooms, such as the idea that faster neural processing equals smarter thinking. Research shows that neural transmission is far slower than most people expect, and that the information rate that our brains operate at varies depending on the activity (Zheng & Meister, 2025). Meaningful cognition cannot be rushed, which is why effective learning environments must allow time for students to process, consolidate, and reflect. This becomes particularly important when multilingual learners, autistic students, and those with processing differences may require extra time for deliberate thought.
A tasty-brain classroom rejects these myths in favour of evidence-based principles. Dispelling neuromyths is therefore more than an academic exercise: it is a professional responsibility. By grounding practice in research rather than folklore, teachers honour the complexity of the human brain and create conditions where every student, regardless of pace, background, or OneSchool profile, can build the neural architecture which no epicurious zombie could resist.
