Why do we only use roughly 10% of our brains?

[socrato]

Believe it or not we as humans only use roughly around 10% of our brains. Could it be possible that as we evolve that we learn how to use more of our brains and become smarter or our IQ gets higher?
Just throwing this out there to see what everyone else thinks about this.

[Aedes]

Where does that commonly cited statistic come from? What is the denominator?

[socrato]

Originally Posted by Aedes

Where does that commonly cited statistic come from? What is the denominator?

The discover magazine. I'll have to find a reference for you online though. I supposes I didn't actually explain well enough. Just ignore the thread for now.

[Aedes]

The issue is that I'd imagine this statistic comes from looking at functional brain imaging, like PET scans. But it ignores the fact that very little of our brain actually is involved in active conscious thought at any given time. A full third of our brain is solely for processing of visual input. Our cerebellum is purely for balance. So I'm not sure that 90% represents brain that we can actually have conscious access to.

[Vasska]

This has been misinterpreted again and again, and somehow made it as a fact in the public domain. Just like the "fact" that you swallow 6 spiders a year in your sleep and others.

One stream leads back to the pioneering American psychologist, William James, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to his voluminous scholarly work, James was a prodigious author of popular articles offering advice to the general public. In these exhortatory works James was fond of stating that the average person rarely achieves but a small portion of his or her potential. I was never able to find an exact percentage mentioned, and James always talked in terms of one's undeveloped potential, apparently never relating this to a specific amount of gray matter engaged. A generation of "positive thinking" gurus that followed were not so careful, however, and gradually "10 percent of our capacity" morphed into "10 percent of our brain.

And the source article

[dominant_monad]

As far as i know the 10% of our brains thing is a myth.

[Vasska]

Originally Posted by dominant_monad

As far as i know the 10% of our brains thing is a myth.

It is, see my post above.

[dominant_monad]

did i say it wasn't?

[Vasska]

Originally Posted by dominant_monad

did i say it wasn't?

My bad, seemed like a question. Reference to the article was just proof of it.

[VideCorSpoon]

The question may be, "do people even use 10% of their brains?" LOL! But there seems to be some negative connotations if we use that assumption though. If we only use 10% of our brains, some may use more or less than others. Some become the "smarter" set and so on. It creates a very ugly normative framework. Strikes of cranium measuring to me.

Also, about the spiders crawling into your mouth at night, thats why I duct tape my mouth shut when I sleep. They all laughed at me, but I showed them a thing or two. It's all fun and games until BAM!!! Arachnophobia...a crappy B quality early nineties movie with the late John Goodman. Is he dead? No, but his career is.