The 10% Myth and what it implies

”We humans are only using 10% of our brain!!!!!!” bla bla bla. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this dumb myth, especially because I thought everyone knows better by now. But Hollywood movies like “Lucy” reinforce this over and over again.

I sometimes wonder why people think it’s a good idea to get their scientific knowledge from the movie industry …

Anyway, yes, it’s a myth and most articles I stumbled upon blamed the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie for it because it says:

Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average person develops only 10 percent of his latent mental ability. Dale Carnegie, by helping business men and women to develop their latent possibilities, created one of the most significant movements in adult education
(Source)

And who is that “Professor William James”? The other culprit everyone blames:

We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme.
(Source)

The second quote was from “The Energies of Men” by Prof. James … 1908.

If a myth has that long of a time frame to grow and find its way into everyone’s minds (hehe …), it’s not surprising that it’s hard to get it out of the minds. Especially when it’s such a comforting myth!

If you can tell yourself “people that are smarter than be can use more of their brain, it’s not my fault that I suck!” you won’t want to switch to ”I suck because I don’t put much effort in learning new things.” Not saying everyone can do everything, but you can do a lot if you’re determined enough. _{_{_{_{_{_{_{_{_{_{Hive account@suesa}}}}}}}}}}

But why try? Life is so comfortable the way it is!

But enough with the philosophy, you didn’t click this post just for a “this is wrong, now feel bad about your life”.

The 10% myth can be somewhat justified if you look at the brain, this magnificent, misunderstood organ because it’s not completely made out of neurons!

Your brain isn’t just a mass of cells that control your body and store your memory, there are many cells that act as a support system! They’re called “glial cells” (glia = Greek for glue) and for a long time, it was thought that they do … basically nothing. Their name already indicates that early scientists assumed they just act as glue to hold everything together.

But that’s absolutely untrue. In fact, glial cells have multiple functions.

Microglia act as the brain’s immune system, as it’s mostly cut-off from the rest of the body by the blood-brain barrier. Astrocytes take care of the neurons and “feed” them. Oligodendrocytes serve as electric isolation.

And if you take all these cells together, you’ll quickly notice that they’re a huge part of the brain which we don’t use for thinking. So technically we only actively use a small part of our brain. But the part we don’t use can’t be accessed and even if it could, it wouldn’t really change much.

Now, let’s assume, despite everything I just stated above, we were using only 10% of our neurons. Let’s assume evolution somehow totally failed and created something so big that causes so many problems (childbirth is mostly a problem because of our large heads) and then we only use 10% of it.

Right now, our brain uses up about 20% of all the energy our body needs a day. And in contrary to other organs, it always uses a lot of energy. And if energy is low, all reserves are directed to the brain. Your brain would “accept” the death of the rest of a system for it to survive. This is called “the selfish brain”, more about that if you click the according link in my sources.

So imagine you suddenly unlock those magic 90% and achieve 100% capacity (at which you already are if you don’t have a brain injury, can’t say it often enough). You’d also need ten times more energy. Which is … 200% of what your body needs a day?

I don’t even know if you could eat that much AND MORE (pumping it up to almost 300% of your daily calorie intake), because at this point, you’ve only fed your brain, not your body. I’m pretty sure this would mess up your whole organism in no time and you’d die.

And I don’t think you’d be able to think straight in that condition. Not because you have so much more capacity all of sudden but because your brain cells are just dying off because of the lack of nutrition.

Conclusion: Myths like this are dumb and one should think that simply thinking about what they imply debunks them pretty fast.

Conclusion number two: If Hollywood was more scientific, most movies would end after the first 20 minutes because their heroes would just die in some dumb way.

Conclusion number three: I’d watch that

EDIT: Several people only skim the post and think that the last part is the truth and implies we are in fact only using a fraction of our brain. That is not true! It was pure speculation! We use our full brain, 100%.