Most of us laypeople have absolutely no idea how the human brain works. Maybe that's why we so readily believe anything represented as a 'fact' about it to be true.
It's very likely that most of you reading this have heard the well known 'fact' that 'we only use 10% of our brain', and that most of you believe it. No doubt, many of you would have somehow rationalized this belief with the notion that great geniuses (such as Albert Einstein) used more than '10% of their brain', and that's what made them geniuses.
In reality though, this is one of the most ridiculous myths about the brain that has ever been spread.
Your brain is the body's most complex organ. In fact, it can even be divided into discrete 'parts' that control different aspects of our behaviour and thinking.
Seen above, the brain has many different centres associated with different functions. This is only a simple version of the diagram, and doesn't include many smaller areas of the brain which specialize in other functions, but you get the idea.
All of these areas of the brain have to function just right in order for you to function day-to-day. So let me ask you; Which parts are we using only 10% of? Or, more bluntly, which 90% do you think you could live without and still function normally?
There is no evidence to suggest that we only use a limited capacity of our brains. We simply use different parts to accomplish different tasks. Just like nobody uses every single muscle in their body at any one time because it is unnecessary (and extremely painful), using all the parts of our brain at the same time is unnecessary, because like our muscle groups, they all specialize in different things. In the long run however, we use all of our muscle groups, as well as all of our brains.
While it is true that there is still much to discover about the brain due to its complexity, it is by no means an enigma. We know quite a lot about it. Our brains have evolved over millions of years to the stage they are now because they best suit the environment we live in (or at least used to live in). Evolution never develops an organ beyond what is needed to help it survive and be competitive against other species. So then why would us humans be somehow special to develop a brain that was 90% more powerful than what was needed to survive?
The human brain actually hasn't changed much at all in the past 10,000 years since we were cavemen. Sure, the 'dumb caveman' image we all have in our minds contradicts this, but when you consider all the effort it takes to educate a child through to adulthood, we are basically taking a 'caveman baby' and feeding it a condensed form of all the knowledge attained by mankind in the past 10,000 years. In effect, all knowledge is passed down through generations, whether it be through word of mouth, or through books and now, digital media. If we were to go back in time 10,000 years and kidnap a caveman baby, dress it in modern clothes, and teach it as we would any modern day child, it would be indistinguishable (and likely just as intelligent) from any other human in society.
This myth can be even further taken apart by the fact that a stroke, which only occurs in a localized area of the brain, has such devastating effects on human behaviour, and in most cases, patients never fully recover. If the myth was true, and we only used 10% of our brain, then strokes wouldn't be a big deal at all, with each case only having 10% chance of affecting the victim badly (because hey, 90% of the brain is unused, remember?).
There are other diseases and disabilities which affect specific areas on the brain, like Parkinsons disease, and Tourettes Syndrome.
There are some people which cling onto this old, tired myth so badly that they come up with all sorts of assumptions and faulty logic to defend it. Here are some I've heard;
"It must be true because there are gifted people out there with paranormal powers"
This one is a huge can of worms and almost deserves it's own blog (stay tuned). Nevermind that 'paranormal powers' such as seeing 'auras', 'telepathy', and 'telekinesis' have never been proven (or in most cases, proven to be frauds) and if they were as real as the people claiming them think they are, then after thousands of years and thousands of experiments, you'd think some sort of reasonable evidence would have surfaced by now that makes it just as believable as something like gravity for example. In fact, the more experiments that are done in this field, the more we discover evidence that they cannot be possible.
For those of you who think that it's all just one big conspiracy from the big bad scientists not wanting us to have powers like the X-Men and preventing us all from joining the Xavier school for gifted mutants, let me tell you this. Science is not an organization. It's not even a way of thinking. It's a process. It's about weeding out the bullshit from fact through observation, experiment and evidence-based analysis. If any of the above superpowers were possible, it would have been discovered already and the person who successfully documented it would have won many nobel prizes making him/her a very rich and respected person.
"It must be true because geniuses like Albert Einstein are smarter than the average person"
While it might be true that certain people might be more intelligent than others as commonly measured through IQ scores, geniuses like Einstein still have exactly the same 'caveman brain' as the rest of us from birth. The difference between their intelligence levels and the average person, is through learning and influence.
How does the brain learn then? Well, ever heard the expression "like riding a bike, you never forget"? This is because when you learn to ride a bike, you do it over, and over, and over again. What happens in your brain when you learn something is that your neurons (brain cells) fire signals across your brain along a particular path. If we were to imagine this, it would look like a lightning bolt, with many branches going throughout your brain in a particular pattern. The more we repeat learning something, the more this pattern is 'engraved' in our brains, making for easy retrieval later on. There is theoretically no limit to the amount of 'neural pathways' your brain can store. So how do you attach a percentage like 10% to something which theoretically has no limit?
"How can you be so sure that we don't use the full potential of the brain if you only have a normal brain yourself?"
This is classic faulty logic. Why is it that people who claim this (despite also having a 'normal brain') seem to be blessed with privileged knowledge that even the most esteemed neurologists somehow don't have? Where are they getting their super-secret information from?
Sure, maybe one brain cannot possibly understand the true workings of another brain, but thousands of brains (called neurologists) researching exactly the same thing are guaranteed to know just a little bit better than you about the subject.
So there you have it. Sure, it would be super-awesome to think that within each of us rests some hidden 'engine upgrade' in our heads, enabling us to turn into superheroes and move things with our mind, tell the future, bend steel, walk through walls... But reality disagrees with us every single time we try and find out for sure.
It's a bitch, but you know what? The truth should never hurt. While the brain cannot turn us into superheroes, it is actually capable of amazing things that it does every day without us realizing. Here are some random brain facts;
- The human brain is approximately 75% water.
- The brain itself is incapable of feeling any pain. This is due to the absence of nerve endings.
- All of your thinking is done by electricity generated by chemicals and hormones in the brain.
- unconsciousness will occur after 8-10 seconds after loss of blood supply to the brain.
- Your cerebral cortex is about as thick as a tongue depressor. It grows thicker as you learn and use it.
- Number of neurons in the brain (average): 100 billion
If you'd like to know more about this topic, please read the following links:
http://gnif.org/content/view/21/40/ - A great introduction to the brain.
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/tenper.html - Do we only use 10% of our brains?
http://kidshealth.org/kid/htbw/brain.html - Your brain and nervous system.
Apologies for including two links that seem to be obviously targeted at kids, but it's a good start. ;-)
Very interesting, I like it.
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