The 10% fallacy

Hollywood is very fond of dragging out one of the oldest fallacies in biological research: the 10% brain thing. The oldest fallacy is, of course, that EACH drink you take kills 50,00 brain cells. That's just not true, they came up with that number by estimating the number of dead cells in chronic drinker's brains and dividing by the estimated number of drinks a chronic drinker has in a lifetime. Turns out that you can swill a LOT of alcohol before you deplete your B6 levels down enough to take brain damage. THEN that one drink starts killing off millions of brain cells.

A similar amount of scientific fortitude went into the 10% fallacy. Here's how it went. Take a rat or a mouse, run it through a maze and clock it's time. Then take out a small portion of the brain and run it again. Keep doing this until you get a noticeable drop in time. Repeat. Average the results. And they were: 90% of a rats brain needed to be removed to get a noticeable drop in time. Conclusion: we only use 10% of our brains.

Let's put this in different terms, we're gonna take parts off your car until we get a noticeable drop in SPEED. We'll start with the steering wheel, radio, gauges, body panels, interior, air filter, power steering, radiator, THEN engine... in that order. We only see a marginal drop in speed when the radiator goes. And in fact we see a small increase in speed as various parts come off. But if we stop before the engine, is it still a car?

The answer is NO. About 15 seconds after the 10% paper was released, someone else shook off the old idea that the brain wasn't just a big mass of smart jello, but a multi-layered mass of compartmentalized processes. We now know there's a visual center, a cognitive center, the reptilian brain, etc. Only about half of our brain mass is even used for "thinking", the rest goes to maintain the body, and support the senses. So, anyone who's ever jogged or took a walk, with their eyes open, listening to a walkman has, at some point, used at least 50% of their brain... without the "thinking" part.

But some of the new-ish technology out there (MRIs PET scans, etc) show, by tracking blood flow, that the average person uses approximately 100% of their brains, EVERY SINGLE DAY. See it turns out that different tasks use different part of your brain. Listening to music, uses part A of the "thinking" area, but singing uses part B (both use the sensory areas, too, and singing requires activity in the reptilian brain). Playing an instrument uses part C of the brain, dancing part D. So if you happen to be singing along with the music, playing air-guitar or dashboard-drum while shaking your booty, it turns our you're using about 80% of your brain all at once.

They've even gone so far as to develop technology that helps you to make use of all the various parts of your brain as much as possible and to coordinate the efforts to create interesting internal effects. If you've ever seen a "relaxation" machine with sunglasses and earphones that flash red lights at your closed eyes, that's the one. They're trying to make use of the brains natural pleasure response from activating as many parts as possible all at once. Primitive tribes did this by drumming and dancing around a fire. Modern tribes do it with glow sticks and speakers. Oh, and sitting there, reading all of this?
... about 20-30 percent, assuming the room is dead quiet and there's nothing but the screen to look at.

You may have heard that Einstein used 30% of His brain... That's an estimation based on his IQ (in excess of 200), using the 10% fallacy to illustrate the point. Einstein never took and IQ test, so we don't really know. Naturally, because we don't know, we have no idea how much of his brain he actually used. But I'm willing to bet that it's pretty close to 100%, just like everyone else.

On a more Platonic wave. Think about the rest of your body. Is there ANY part of your body where there's 10 times more of anything than what's needed? Even large amounts of stored fat are a survival remnant that help a lot of people in cold climates (I grew up in Michigan, so I still carry a lot of "Detroit"). But really, think .... hair? nope, keeps the sun off you while running. Nails? nope, good for digging and self defense. Sweat? nope keeps you cool. Appendix? Nope, recent studies show that important digestive bacteria grow there. Why on earth would we develop ... and maintain... a huge chunk of Very Expensive tissue that served no purpose at all? It's ridiculous...
It's asinine.

It's Hollywood...