I received this in an e-mail earlier today…

Your Subconscious Self
You’re only aware of what goes on in 10% of your brain. Find out what’s going on in the rest!

OK, so it’s just a stupid web test, right? Harmless, yeah? I dunno… it’s not that walking around with the conception that we use only 10% of our brains will really make any difference in most of our waking lives, but it’s an incorrect concept. Precious brain estate is wasted when you have ideas that are wrong… and wrong ideas like this provide wastes of energy like that test.

So, is it a waste of energy to respond to this test? I don’t think it is, to an extent. If the time I spend discussing why the test is pointless ends up persuading people that tests like that are pointless, then I consider that a net gain in energy, especially since every person that ends up convinced will walk away and have the ability to spread the word, literally.

But a more sinister aspect of the 10% brain usage myth exists, and it exists in those who would try to take advantage of otherse. There are products and methodologies out there which claim to increase your personal usage of your brain. What people expect from greater brain usage ranges from enhanced intelligence to enhanced emotions to curing depression to the emergence of psychic abilities!

It’s too bad that we all, in actuality, use 100% of our brains. The proof comes from Darwin, in a sense, and it goes like this: our brains use a LOT of energy. If we were only using 10% of our brain, then that would be a lot of wasted energy. Selection pressure would tend towards individuals that had smaller brain sizes but retained all the benefits that we currently enjoy from our brains, as it would be much more difficult for big-brained individuals to survive in comparison with their smaller-brained competitors. Keep in mind that we’re not talking about selection pressure in a modern environment, but in the raw wilderness. Since our brains turned out to be the size that they are, there must be something else going on in the 10% myth.

I don’t have all the sources, but they’re found easily enough–there were a series of brain scans done at some point (maybe blood flow?) and, seeing that approximately 10-15% of the brain appeared to have a greater activity than the rest of the brain, somebody postulated that we only use that much of our brain. However, whatever the metric they used, it’s only one way of detecting brain activity. Much of our brain is active at all times, though parts of it shut down when we’re performing certain activities, but not enough to say that we only use 10% of our brain, anyway.

That may not even be how the myth began. It might have been a non-scientist reading some chart and drawing the (incorrect) conclusion about brain usage from those charts. Then all he had to do was make up a few numbers, point to the chart, and say, “hey, look, doesn’t this make sense?” Why somebody would do that and why somebody else would believe that are up for debate, but it happened somehow, now, didn’t it?

It’s prevalent now because we’ve heard it so many times–it’s become a part of our collective self-knowledge. But it’s not correct… if you’ve got a brain, you’re using 100% of it. How much of that is conscious and how much is non-conscious? That’s a very difficult question to answer because defining consciousness in terms of the physical mappings of the brain is nearly impossible for us to answer at this time, scientifically speaking. There isn’t any dividing line between conscious and non-conscious in our brains… that is to say, we don’t have “conscious” neurons and “non-conscious” neurons… a single neuron may participate in either level of thought, both, or neither!

There’s a LOT more to say about the brain, but the bottom line is that the 10% Myth is very much a myth, and the more you learn about the brain, the more you realize just how wrong that myth is.

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