The ten percent myth

Teacher: Why is it that if I were to stand on my head, blood will go to my head but if I were to stand upright, blood will not rush to my feet?

Little kid: Because your feet ain’t empty.

We like to make jokes about it – how the brain could be missing in some of those whom we think do not use their heads. Some, however, are a little more generous – they give you ten percent. They say, "Sure we can push it since we only use ten percent of our brains so imagine if we are able to use more of it." When I show skepticism to supernatural claims, particularly to those who claim they can use their own minds to control things other than the workings of their own bodies, they would tell me, "Most people make use of only ten percent of their brains but we can do so much more because we use more." I find that puzzling since if I can think of alternate logical explanations to what they claim to be "supernatural," and they cannot or would not, whose 90 percent is not being used?

For decades, the brain was such a mystery that it was likened to, paraphrasing Churchill when he described Russia, "an enigma wrapped in an ancient carpet, strapped with ship rope, placed in a box sealed by a 20-digit combination that you can only know if you slay a dragon tucked away in the mystical mountains of Shangri-la." Fortunately for us (and for dragons) we now have technologies like MRIs (takes photos of our brain), and fMRI (takes pictures of our brain in motion), Positron Emission Tomography (PET scans) that produce three-dimensional images of processes going on in your body and Electroencephalography EEGs (where the electrical activity in your brain is measured by the differences in the voltage in different parts of your brain), we can now see through our skulls, not to mention through that myth that we only use ten percent of our brains. The brain still is a mystery but we know enough about it to shun the ten percent myth. Also, I wish you luck on finding a self-respecting neurologist, psychiatrist or psychologist who will insist on this ten percent myth.

Ten percent does not make sense because we know from evidence that each brain activity requires different sets of connections in different parts of the brain. You do not really need all of them to light up for each and every thing you do and think of. For example, when we are in love, a part of the brain that feels reward and pleasure as much as those parts that light up when we experience fundamental physical yearnings like hunger and thirst, also light up. For teenagers, their emotion centers in their amygdalas are more active when they make decisions, more than their logical nodes. A recent study published in the journal Science last Aug. 4 also revealed that those who are easily influenced by how choices are presented or "framed" before them, show more activity in their emotional amygdalas as well. This does not mean that those who were able to make decisions rationally did not feel emotions but rather, they were able to keep them at bay. This is I guess what "clear thinking" really means – it is not an absence of emotions but being aware of them but not being overrun by them in making decisions. This is evidence that for some tasks, "using your brain" may really mean muting some parts of it.

The ten percent claim also does not fit with evidence they found January last year, in a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters, by Dante Chialvo of Northwestern University and his colleagues. While the ten percent assumes that everything has to connect with everything else in your brain for you to assume full powers, actual connections of the working brain revealed that it is not that simple. It is not a direct one-on-one connection with neurons in your brain that makes you assume the activities you do. In fact, the analogy they came up with was the Internet. They found that instead of long-ranging connections between parts of one’s brain, they found "hubs," where so many other nodes are connected. I guess the brain finds the most efficient way of processing information is posting in the equivalent of "yahoo groups" in your brain where many other nodes are already connected, and this speeds up the relay process. It is also like sending a message to that friend of yours whom you know, forwards each and every e-mail and text message to a set of friends like clockwork.

Last year in September, in the journal Science, Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues tried to peer into the human brain as it sleeps and they saw some clues on the difference between the brain that is awake and the brain that is asleep. They found that the brain does not stop its activity when it sleeps (and we know this, too, because we dream) but the connections between the "yahoo groups" in the brain temporarily break free from each other, as if taking a rest from all the chitchat, and then come back on again when we awaken. The scientists say this could also explain why we perform better when we have had a good sleep. If the ten percent claim were right, and we wanted to push our brains to the "max," then we will all be overworked zombies, posting nonsense in the "yahoo groups" in our brains even when we are awake.

The more meaningful output of our brain is the quality of our thoughts – our minds – which unfortunately cannot be measured in percentages or by brain scans. Except for some inconclusive evidence on his inferior parietal lobes, which are known to be active in spatial reasoning and intuitions in numbers, there is no evidence that Einstein has made more use of his brain in ways that can be expressed in percentages. Also, scientists found out that there are other un-Einsteinian things that seem to occur to people who have odd-sized parietal lobes, too. For all we know, those seeming anomalies in Einstein’s parietal lobes may account for his mistakes and his stubbornness later on to understand later quantum theories.

So the next time some nut tells you that he can literally move mountains because he uses a hundred percent of his brain, ask him if he glows in the dark. If he does not, with all that electrical activity, tell him he should.

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