Was recently asked which scientific 'myth' I'd like to see banished forever
Obviously, given my field and output, I had to choose 'we only use 10% of our brains'
It's not just a silly thing that leads to shoddy movie plots. It's worse than that
For one thing, the origins of the 'we only use 10% of our brain' notion are unclear. But analysis suggests it came about *at least* a century ago. Believe it or not, our understanding of the brain has improved by orders of magnitude since then
/1
And that's assuming the 10% of the brain myth stems from valid contemporary 19th/early 20th century science. But there's no conclusive evidence for this. At best it arose via word-of-mouth distortions/misunderstandings of scientific findings at the time
But even then, these 'findings' would have been severely hampered by the very crude methods available at the time. As in, if a 19th century scientist says 'we can only identify what 10% of the brain does', fair enough. That's reasonable
/2
But a 19th century scientist didn't have to tools we have now, nowhere near. It'd be like a small child saying "I can only lift 10% of the weight of this weekly grocery shop" and everyone saying "Oh, so 90% of every grocery shop is unused? Good to know"
But regardless of the actual origins, the 10% of the brain myth is wrong. Not once, but TWICE
Because 100% of the brain is used, for something. We may not know what, but it's definitely there for a reason.
However...
/3
... if we take 'use' to mean 'to activate to complete a task', 10% of the brain is a significant OVERestimate
The brain is an intensely resource-hungry, and very dense, organ. There's not much room for blood vessels to get in amongst the compacted neural tissue
According to some studies, this limits our ability to shunt essential resources from one part of the brain to another, to the extent that we can only 'activate' 3% of our brain regions at once.
Which is less than 10%, obviously
/4
Think of it as like the brain being a busy restaurant with 100 tables, but only 5 waiting staff. Those staff can be as competent and fast as is physically possible. The restaurant is all 'used', but a max of only 5 tables can be waited on at any one time.
Basically, the 10% myth is not only wrong, but wrong *twice*, in two separate directions. It massively underestimates how much of the brain is used, and overestimates how much of the brain can be 'activated' to do something at any one time
/5
That leads to another aspect of the the 10% of the brain myth is wrong
The brain is a WILDLY demanding organ. It#s 2% of our body weight, but uses at least 20% of our body's energy, just by sitting there and being alive
Point is, the brutal logic of evolution means that if we only used 10% of our brains, we'd only *have* 10% of our brain
Perhaps we do have some beachball-cranium'ed primate ancestor with a brain 10 times the size of ours? You'd think we'd have spotted that by now, though
/6
Ultimately, having a brain as biologically demanding as ours, but only using 10% of it, is like bolting a 1-ton supercomputer onto your Ford Focus, just to keep the clock updated and play MP3s. It's just massively self-sabotaging
However, despite it being so wrong, my main problem with the 'we only use 10% of our brain' myth is that it provides a get-out-of-jail-free card to any hack or charlatan who makes claims that depend on ignorance or misrepresentation of how the brain works
/7
Your psychics, mediums, ESP enthusiasts, faith healers etc
You can provide people with reams of evidence that such claims are impossible in so many ways, but they can say "Ah, but we only use 10% of our brains, so..."
In essence, the 'We only use 10% of our brain' myth provides a (massive) 'unknown' space for pseudoscientific/bogus brain-based claims to hide in. All the 'established' [i.e. actual] neuroscience is within the 10%, so anything it disagrees with it must be from the 90%
/8
And the more people who accept that 'we only use 10% of our brains' as fact, the more fertile terrain those who depend on brain-based ignorance will have to exploit
And that's, you know... bad? At least I think it is.
I actually go into even more depth about the physical constraints of the brain (and how they should actually be embraced, not dismissed) in my latest book, Emotional Ignorance
https://amazon.co.uk/Emotional-Ignorance-Dean-Burnett/dp/178335173X
It'd be cool if you bought it. For me, at least
/end
With which one should I start?
@Garwboy great, now we'll have plenty of new bad movie plots about activating more than 3% of the brain!
That was a very informative post, I knew about the 10% myth but it's really nice to have it in context.
@Garwboy Not wishing to distract from your great thread but:
"Ultimately, having a brain as biologically demanding as ours, but only using 10% of it, is like bolting a 1-ton supercomputer onto your Ford Focus, just to keep the clock updated and play MP3s."
This describes most mobile phones these days :)
@Garwboy I think the "only use 10% of our brain" cliche' refers more to what some believe we are *capable* of.
But no matter how stupid a person is, they use 100% of the organ regardless.
Does the brain use more energy when we think hard about things?
Having in mind that lot's of times the solution pop's up when you are just doing something else, or waking up or something like that .. an intriguing question.
Thinking "hard" is most likely a waste of energy and time.
@Garwboy Physically impossible, however. A "beachball-cranium'ed primate ancestor with a brain 10 times the size of ours" would require a hoop-skirt-hipped female able to give birth to such a ginormous head.
The cranium's size is limited by the size of the female's hips.
FEMALES RULE EVOLUTON.
@Garwboy
I always assumed the 10% (if true) to indicate that at birth we don't know what 10% are going to be used, and during growing up, we 'decide' what 10% to use.
A bit like a printer only printing ink on 5% of the paper: you *could* say we only needed 5% of the paper for the ink, but then you'd have a small piece of fully black paper.
@Garwboy For what it's worth, there are shoddy movie plots about _everything_.
It's just that most people in most fields don't realize that television and film dramas are as bad in _every_ field as they notice them to be in _their own_ fields.
Barristers will tell you how ridiculous the portrayals of trials are. Telephone engineers will tell you that that's not how calls are traced. SOCOs cringe at evidence blunders. And so forth.
A myth persists out there that “93%of communication is nonverbal.” See here, here, and here. These are just a few among the many articles I could find perpetuating this claim. Whether you’re aware of this idea about communication or not, or have ever given it any thought or attention,...
It's the like the currently developing myth that "half of all ants in the colony are freeloaders who do nothing"
(large numbers of ants indeed stand around apparently "doing nothing" but we don't yet understand what this means and it's very unlikely they are 'freeloaders' that's not evolutionarily efficient, they have a purpose and it could be something incredible... or something dead simple.)
@futurebird @Garwboy is VERY important even if large % of ants ARE idle modt of the time because it means when something comes up that requires lots of work, the colony has reaources and doesnt get stressed and fails.
Alot of human organizations fsil to learn this
That's the "cool" possibility. But they could also just be storing food, or waiting on standby for a big disaster.
It's the same thing as construction sites. You have some things that require a lot of people for short periods of time but everyone likes to blame it on unions being lazy.
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