“Fun Facts Saturday”
My Brain Potential and School Grades
I learned in grade school that we only use 10% of our brain. I thought that if I buckled down, and worked extra hard, I could use 11% of my brain. Then, I would be smarter than everybody else.
My intense dedication to studying paid off. I did well in school. Obviously, I had reached 11% of my brain power.
Then I learned that the 10% brain-capacity idea was a complete myth. I was devastated. My good grades weren’t the result of increased brain power, after all. I wasn’t even smarter than anybody. My grades were just the product of hard work.
The 10% Myth
Experts agree that every region of the brain is used every day. Virtually every part of the brain is active all the time. This makes sense.
“This 10% notion seems firmly rooted in popular culture despite many efforts to debunk it …. [Researchers] found that this misconception is one of the most prevalent misconceptions among the public. More concerning is the finding that about 50% of … school teachers also endorse the 10% Myth.” (Stephen Chew)
“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….
“The myth’s durability stems from people’s conceptions about their own brains: they see their own shortcomings as evidence of the existence of untapped gray matter. This is a false assumption…
“It turns out that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that most of the brain is active almost all the time.” (Robynne Boyd)
“It ain’t so much the things that people don’t know that makes trouble in this world, as it is the things that people know that ain’t so.” — Mark Twain
*“Brain Barnacles” – A ship traveling through the seas picks up barnacles that slows it down and damages the hull. Likewise, as we sail through life, we pick up popular beliefs that are false. I call these, “Brain Barnacles.” Occasionally, we need to stop and scrape these “barnacles” off our brain.
(See: Robynne Boyd, “Do People Only Use 10 Percent of Their Brains?” Scientific American, Feb. 7, 2008; “Why Do We Only Use 10 Percent of the Brain?” Psychology Today, Mar. 28, 2018; “Myth: We Only Use 10% of Our Brain,” Stephen Chew, Association for Psychological Science, Aug 29, 2018; “Ten Percent of Brain Myth,” Wikipedia.)
Artists Portrayals of the Brain
(Website: londonedition.net)
The London Edition 