They say you only use 10% of your brain, does that include the things you don’t register (like your heart beating), or

Question: They say you only use 10% of your brain, does that include the things you don't register (like your heart beating), or is it just for things like thinking and speaking, etc.?
- Keywords:
- Royal Society of Chemistry: Find out more about:
  
  brain
  
  speech
Asked by Science18 to Alex, Anaïs, Peter, Sarwat, Shreesha on 12 Mar 2015.
- Anaïs Pujol answered on 12 Mar 2015:
  
  That is totally wrong. This idea is false. Lots of people believe on that and it is wrong. Our brain represent 2% in mass of our body and it uses 20% of our energy, when for a mouse the brain will use only 5% of its energy and 10% for a monkey’s brain. Human brains contain much more neurons that any others species, this dense packing make us smart (86 billions of neurons). According to the energy the brain use, the 10% used theory is ridiculous. We also know more or less all the function of the part of the brain. Just sometimes we don’t use them all at the same time.
- Shreesha Bhat answered on 13 Mar 2015:
  
  ‘Whence Cometh the Myth that We Only Use 10% of Our Brains? in Mind Myths.’ Truly said by B.L. Beyerstein. The fact about using just 10 percent of the brain is just a plain myth. We can say that we use 100 percent of our brains!
  
  Lets say, If 90 percent of the brain is normally unused, then damage to these areas should not impair performance. Instead, there is almost no area of the brain that can be damaged without loss of abilities. Like in parkinsons disease, its just a small area of the brain which is damaged, yet its such a fatal disease.
  
  So forget about it, and if anyone says this to you next time, try to correct him/her, and just say ‘We use 100 percent of our brians’
- Peter Maskell answered on 13 Mar 2015:
  
  the 10% thing is a load of rubbish.

Question: They say you only use 10% of your brain, does that include the things you don't register (like your heart beating), or is it just for things like thinking and speaking, etc.?

Comments