I use 100% of my brain!
 

I am always hearing the myth that "the average person only uses about 11% of the brain." Usually this is in reference to the amazing potential available in utilizing the otherwise idle parts of the brain, which may unlock super-intelligence, psychic powers, etc. Similarly, highly intelligent folks are assumed to use more of their brains... "Steven Hawking must use, like, 20% of his brain!"

Well, it's just plain untrue. But a staggering majority of people believe this myth. Why is that, I wonder? What makes it so universally believable?

Oops, gotta go... 89% of my brain just shut down.

Maybe because people would like to think they have more brain power than they really experience? My roommate might subscribe to this, as he often appears to attempt to physically "jump start" his brain when he experiences a "tip of the tounge" problem. If he can't think of a word or mispronounces something more than one time, he hits himself in the head hard enough to create a good thunk. As time has gone on, I think this has caused his brain to function worse.

10% isn't half bad, though. If you can still sustain the functions required to live on that, you're doing good.

It is frequently used to justify claims of ESP. The desire to claim paranormal powers often overwhelms scientific evidence.

I ran across this a while back, and even put two articles about it on my website (here and here). It's just another one of those things that <i>everyone</i> believes, even though a teeny tiny amount of research would prove it completly wrong. Just odd. The ESP comment is dead-on. It's the same reason people are religious: they <b>want</b> to believe they are capable of more, so they give more credit to explanations that are in line with what they want to believe.

It reminds me of how everyone on the planet started insisting that I put mashed up rice cereal into my 4 week old daughter's formula to help her sleep better. Any cursory amount of research would show it to be faulty and potentially bad for them, and yet I cannot seem to meet a person in this region that doesn't believe it.

Why do people believe weird things?

People believe that kind of thing in order to have somehting to believe in. We've taken away all the great myths, so why not have some others?

In the case of everyone I've talked to who refused the pressure from relatives to add rice cereal to formula, their babies started sleeping through the night 1 week after they refused to do it. And the same was the case with me.

The truth is that it's just a coincidence. It's correlational logic to assume that because A happens and then B happens, that B is the cause of A.

How Superstition Works
 

Look under Superstition and behavioral psychology. The ability to learn from experience is an amazing attribute, but it has occasional hiccups.

The Wikipedia link sent me surfing around to cross references until I fould this totally wonderful site ...

http://www.sacred-texts.com/index.htm

El, you are going to DIG this majorly. :)

You've rationalized an explanation that's acceptable to you. That doesn't make it true.:haha:

No, I'm just following the edict that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And the proof just isn't there, unless you think correlational logic is good.

So wait: if you are using 100% of your brain, and you think of "one more thing", what happens?

:)

You think that much less about everything else, of course!

Well, it's not all in use at any given time. It's like the muscles in your body -- they're all used relatively frequently, but not necessarily all at once.

You forget something, of course; unless it's stored as longer-term memory. The idea that I've traditionally heard is that you can store seven pieces of information in your head simultaneously -- hence seven digit phone numbers.

I remember thinking about the ten-percent myth a year ago, trying-and-failing to convince people that it was not true. They often cited ESP as evidence that it was true. I believe that the myth came from a publication a hundred or so years ago which demonstrated what different parts of the brain did (possibly those pictures where they have the brain divided into different functions; now used to depict a large section of the brain devoted to CHOCOLATE or something). At that time, they thought that they knew what 10% of the brain did. The myth comes from misinterpretation of the research.

"People believe what they want to believe or are afraid to believe." -- Moyra Caldecott, in Guardians of the Tall Stones (I read and re-read this book continuously for about a month and a half when I was in the fifth grade.)

Some other popular myths that I know of: the idea that people have a innate (circadian?) clock which operates on a twenty-eight to thirty-six hour schedule. What was really odd was that, during the early years of high school, myself and ALL of my friends knew and believed this myth, and we had all known of it before we met each other. Two years later, one of them decided that he was going to live in his room during the summer, writes programs for his TI, and operate on a thirty-six hour schedule. Possibly because I had had a falling out with him that day over religious issues*, I thought "wait a minute! That doesn't make sense! We ought to have evolved to have a twenty-four hour schedule", and I tried to search for information on it. However, it seemed like Google had never even heard of the theory, until I managed to find an article about a study which had refuted the thirty-six hour schedule myth. The study which the myth was based on had had several people living in rooms with only artificial lighting. People could turn the lights on or off whenever they wished, and because our body's schedule is adjusted by a light sensor**, their schedules were mangled and became elongated. A more recent study had found that the body releases serotonin and melanonin at regular intervals, which causes us to make up and go to sleep on a shedule that corresponds exactly to the length of the Terran day.

Another myth is the idea that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure that can be seen from space ('by the naked eye'). This is not only wrong, it also originates from a fantastic-places story written by somebody in the 1930s who had never been to China. According to one of my cooler teachers, the only man-made structure which can be seen from space is New York's landfill in New Jersey.

There is also the "morphic resonance", collective-conciousness idea popular among New Age-y folks.

*He tried to convince me that biology supported Creationism: I happened to have been familiar with his example, and knew that it was not only fifty years old and long since refuted, but he had also horribly misinterpreted it [he had a habit of talking a lot***, and he was very convincing unless you knew more than he did, in which case he was usually wrong]).

*** To mock him, we had awarded him a shirt reading "Help! I'm talking and I can't shut up!"; which he actually liked and wore regularly for years.

** will not be posted here yet.