10% of your brain

[mmcirvin]

If you want to disabuse somebody of the myth that "we only use 10% of our brains", this article by Barry Beyerstein (PDF) is probably the most complete slam-dunk you'll ever find.

Unfortunately, it is a comically poor OCR scan. (Also, check out that cartoon at the beginning!)

Beyerstein never quite pins down the ultimate source of the myth. His best guess is that it is a distortion of something William James said in a lecture around 1906, which was both probably metaphorical and based on the decidedly incomplete state of functional neurology at the time. Various experimental results in neurology (cited in the article) sound as if they could have been misunderstood as support for the myth, and are often cited as the source of it, but most of them appeared after it was already long established. The one thing that's clear is that the self-help industry is and has always been responsible for propagating it.

Einstein had nothing to do with it. He's often claimed to have said that he did what he did by tapping into the 90% of reserve capacity that most people never use, but there is no evidence that he ever said this. Besides, it doesn't strike me as a likely Einstein quote. He was not the humble saint that his public image implies, and he had a stubborn certainty of the absolute correctness of certain of his ideas about physics. But as far as I know he always regarded his public status as a super-genius as faintly ridiculous, and it would be unlikely for him to state that he had discovered an untapped mental power, except possibly as a joke.

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Vestigal brain tissue could've evolved as a defense against hungry zombies.

Here's a highly scientific model designed to investigate this possibility:
http://zombies.insertdisc.com/mattcordes/

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The most interesting thing I learned from the article is that that guy who studies the hydrocephalic teenagers is generally regarded as kind of a crank, and seems to be interpreting some of his results with, shall we say, an idée fixe in mind.

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

I always just assumed that people got that idea from the cortex, which provides the voluntary motor control? Isn't it like 10% of the brain mass?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The combined sensory and motor cortex are something like 10% of the whole cortex, and the rest is sometimes called "silent cortex", a misleading term that might have reinforced the legend, though it seems not to be the origin.