You may have recently seen (or more likely heard) the debonair voice of Morgan Freeman in a movie trailer for Lucy starring Scarlett Johansson. In the trailer, you hear him state the statistic that we, as humans, only use 10 % of our brain’s capacity. This seems a shocking statistic that makes you wonder… is this for real?
Well.
No matter how convincing that buttery voice may be, you can’t believe everything he says! The origins of this popular
myth is unknown, but it is thought to be traced back to the Einstein era. “Though an alluring idea, the “10 percent myth” is so wrong it is almost laughable”, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.
That is neither here nor there… What IS important is knowing how powerful our brain is and that we actually use most of our brain all the time! Our brain actually uses up 20% of our body’s energy, and in kids, it uses up 50% of their energy! John Henley from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota states that “Evidence would show over a day you use 100 percent of the brain.”
Without even thinking about it, at this very moment you are doing the following with your brain:
- Blinking (thanks your motor cortex)
- Breathing (thanks to your brainstem)
- Reading this blog (using your occipital lobe AKA eye sight AND your frontal lobe for thinking and reasoning)
- Moving the mouse around (using your cerebellum).
That’s just to name a few… Even the most mundane tasks (like sleeping) can stir up quite a lightning storm in the ol’ noggin’. So when you hear Mr. Freeman state that overly used myth about only using 10% of your brain (in his elegant way), don’t let that voice forget you know the truth! That’s not to say we can’t get swept up in the alluring cinematic idea of being a super-human, right?!
