Neuromyths, part 1: We only use 10% of our brains

The underlying message: We can 'unlock' the potential of the remaining 90%.

Do you remember the movie “Lucy” by Luc Besson? The film was advertised with the strapline “The average person uses 10% of their brain capacity. Imagine what she could do with 100%.” Who wouldn’t want to believe that they have vast reserves of latent brainpower just waiting to be unlocked?!

The origin of this myth is a statement (or rather a part of the statement) given by psychologist William James in the early 1900s. James noticed that “Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general.”1

Years later, in the preface to Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,'' Lowell Thomas stated that “Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average person develops only 10 percent of his latent mental ability.” Carnegie’s book became a bestseller, and Lowell Thomas’s interpretation survives to this day. However, no one remembers that James in his original observation also stated that, “Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.” This part of James’s original work was not mentioned by Lowell Thomas, and this is how neuromyths are born.

Also fuelling the 10% myth are misinterpretations of neuroscientific research.

• In the 1930s Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield's work led him to describe some areas of the brain as a “silent cortex”, areas of non-functional “uncommitted cortex”. Today these regions are better known as “association cortex” and instead of lying dormant, they are involved in our most sophisticated mental functions.2
• If most people only used 10% of their brain, then damage to the brain would result in little or no effect on brain function. However, we know that even the slightest damage (as a result of a stroke or other traumatic brain injury) can cause dramatic effects.
• There’s also the commonplace but mistaken estimate that neurons are outnumbered by glial cells (non-neuronal cells in the brain and spinal cord) by ten to one, which could be misinterpreted as meaning that just 10% of all our brain cells are involved in mental functions.3

The idea that we use only a small fraction of our brains makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view. The brain is energy-hungry, accounting for 20% of our energy consumption even though it only makes up 2% of our body mass. Evolution by natural selection tends to remove the inefficient so it is unlikely that we would have such a costly organ that is mostly redundant.4

So how much of the brain do we use? The simple answer is 100%, all of the time. Unfortunately for some motivational speakers, there is no spare neural matter lying around waiting to be given a job to do.

So can we develop the brain then? Yes, of course, we can. We can improve brain performance through practice and exposure to new stimuli. The brain is plastic. It can grow and develop. Just about everything we do will have an impact on the brain. Performing new activities will ‘grow’ certain areas of the brain by building new connections between neurons and strengthening certain pathways.

In short: Do we have huge potential to learn new skills and recover from an injury? Yes. Do we only use 10% of our brains? No.

Magda / www.magdavoigt.com

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References:

1. The Letters of William James to Wincenty Lutoslawski
2. Great Myths of the Brain by Christian Jarrett
3. The search for true numbers of neurons and glial cells in the human brain: A review of 150 years of cell counting, Christopher S von Bartheld, Jami Bahney, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Jun 2016
4. Great Myths of the Brain by Christian Jarrett