Philosophy Now Forum

"Where is the empirical data that we use less than 10% of our brains?" This concept has been around for over 20 years and bandied about in psychological, sociological and scientific circles. I dont buy this, I dont believe this to be accurate.

reasonemotion wrote:"Where is the empirical data that we use less than 10% of our brains?" This concept has been around for over 20 years and bandied about in psychological, sociological and scientific circles. I dont buy this, I dont believe this to be accurate.

No, we use 100% of our brain. It just looks like less than 10% based on not understanding "The Ouzo Prophecy" (http://church-of-ouzo.com/pdf/ouzo-prophecy.pdf).

It may be an estimate.
Some areas of the brain may be for singing only. If you never sing these areas are never used.
Some areas may be for maths only. If you stop doing mathes after graduating from the high school these areas are never used.

Experiments have been done with people after strokes. They were able to use new areas of their brains to perform the old functions, up to a point. Because some areas were dead after the stroke.

reasonemotion wrote:"Where is the empirical data that we use less than 10% of our brains?" This concept has been around for over 20 years and bandied about in psychological, sociological and scientific circles. I dont buy this, I dont believe this to be accurate.

It's a bullshit urban pseudo-science myth piece of crap.

Our conscious activity is maybe 10%, so that it relays bits of information across different function modules, so that over a day we will have used most of the brain depending on what we have been doing.
So we might go from face recognition to memory , then back to visual, audio, fear, happiness, hunger, etc...