The 10% brain usage- A myth

All of us must have heard these at least once from our teachers- “We use only 10-11% of our brain”. But then what about the great scientists: “Albert Einstein”, “Stephen William Hawking”, “Isaac Newton”, “Aristotle”, “Srinivasa Ramanujan”, etc.? Did these greatest minds of all time used just “10%” of their brains?

Let’s have a look at some numbers which completely prove that the “10% brain usage” is completely a myth.

Neurologist Barry Gordon describes the myth as completely incorrect, adding, “We use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time.”

Neuro-scientist “Barry Beyerstein” has given several points which proves that the myth being false:

1. If 90% of the brain is normally unused, then damage to these parts should not harm our performance. Instead, there is almost no area of the brain that can be damaged without the loss of our abilities. Even the slightest damage to small areas of the brain can have severe effects.
2. Scans of working brains have shown that no matter what one is doing, brains will always remain active.
3. The brain is enormously costly as compared to the rest of the body, in terms of consumption of oxygen and nutrients. It can consume up to 20% of the body’s energy.
4. In the single-unit recording technique(S.U.R.T.), researchers insert a tiny electrode into the brain to monitor the activity of every single cell. If 90% of cells were unused, then this technique would have definitely revealed that.

Just imagine, if the myth is true,

1. 100 billion neurons are handled by just 10% of brain.
2. 1 quadrillion connections are made to just 10% of brain.

One more thing, there is no such “Extra Potential of your brain” which you can tap into and become a super-human. You just have to use your brain, that too completely.

So, if next time someone says to you “You use only 10% of your brain”, slam these statistics on that person so that even he/she becomes capable of using 100% brain.