How much of our brains do we actually use?
Image: Flickr user Liz Henry
I’ve heard that people only use ten percent of their brains. Is this true?
Some of our strongest emotions happen in the most ancient regions of our brain. Other parts of the brain are used for vision and problem solving. But is there a part of our brain that’s not used at all?
Well, who knows where that myth got started, but it is just a myth. The human brain is made up of about a hundred million nerve cells. Each of these nerve cells is a like a tiny battery. Charging and recharging these batteries uses up a lot of energy. As a result, the brain is an expensive organ – it consumes far more energy than you might expect based on its modest three pound weight. If all those nerve cells weren’t put to some use, they wouldn’t be kept over the long haul – say a few million years. From this evolutionary perspective there is probably not much waste – it’s safe to say that most of the brain is used.
But that doesn’t mean that we are using all of our brain all of the time. Studies that map brain activity show very precise localization of brain functions – that is, what parts of the brain are active when you sleep, when you listen to music, or when you’re doing a difficult math problem. It does seem that at any one time only a portion of the brain is in active use.
More resources on “body-mind”…