The myth that we only use 10% of our brains, explained

"We only use 10% of our brains". I'm sure you've heard this "fact" for as long as you can remember. It's been floating around forever and is often repeated by authority figures - sometimes even teachers. Hell, they even made a terrible movie about it.

The reality of course is that we use 100% of our brains. So how did this myth come to be? I'll explain:

This is the performance tab of Windows Task Manager for my machine. Note that 9% of the CPU is currently being utilized. Now, if we were to apply this myth to my PC, even though 9% of the processor is being used, it's actually at 100% of the available processing power - and that the other 91% is completely unavailable to me. That would mean that the engineers at Intel created an 8 core CPU chip at 3Ghz, but made sure to lock it down so that only 10% of it is actually available to the consumer.

Does that sound dumb? So is the myth.

As I alluded to above, the myth got started when someone made the (incorrect) statement that we only use 10% of our brains. Instead of taking this as "We [usually] only use [around] 10% of our brains [at any given moment]", people assumed it meant "We [are] only [able to] use 10% of our brains [ever]." Like all interesting and intelligent sounding nugget-sized myths, this got spread around and repeated and entered the vernacular as an accepted fact.

In fact, we use all of our brains. But again, we don't use it all at once. Just like my CPU, usually most of our brains are sitting idle until we need it.

Think of it like this. This is the process list of my PC. Note there are 126 processes currently in use - however if you look at the CPU utilization column, none of them are currently using the CPU even though it's being used. They're sitting idle, waiting for something to come up that will require them - in which case they'll execute their task then release resources and sit idle again. Our brains are the exact same way (except Chrome isn't eating up 99.99999% of our memories).

When we need to start driving, or listening, or conversing, or debating, or concentrating, or playing a game, or arguing, or reminiscing, or looking for a lost item, etc. our brains begin switching on various sections to perform these tasks. Once the task is completed, the sections go back to idle.

Maybe this is why it's so mentally draining to be on an hour long conference call, or to listen to your incessant whining DEBBIE.

And if you think about it further, the myth makes even less sense. If it were true, we could sustain brain injuries and – so long as we didn't injure the small 10% that we use – we'd be totally fine and would show no symptoms whatsoever.

Instead, we know that any injury to any part of the brain will have unforeseen and sometimes unbelievable consequences. For example, some stroke victims are unable to recognize pictures of objects shown to them, such as a bicycle. Yet if you asked them to draw a bicycle, they could do so with amazing precision...then be completely unable to recognize what they just drew. Some stroke victims are unable to dream. Some people with brain tumors become sexual deviants like pedophiles, then return to being a completely normal person once the tumor has been removed. The list goes on and on and on.

Then there's the evolution factor. Our brains use most of the energy we consume – more than any other organ. (One of the reasons hypoglycemics have cognitive impairment and can even lose consciousness when their sugar bottoms out.) It would make ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE why we would have such a large mostly useless organ in our bodies taking up so much energy if it weren't being used. It would make much more sense that creatures with a large complex brain that actually USED 100% of it would live and thrive and those who sunk so much energy into an organ without a return on investment would simply die off. (Yes, I know there's more to evolution and natural selection than this – I'm summarizing for this post.)

I hope this post was informative for you – or at least, that you enjoyed the pretty pictures.

tl;dr: We use 100% of our brains, just not all at once. And if anyone tells you differently you punch them right in their goddamn whore mouth.

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