All of you out there worried that you can't use 90 percent of your brain, relax. Scientists say the idea that we use just 10 percent of our brains is a myth.
"It's definitely 100 percent," said Dr. Larry Parsons, a cognitive scientist with the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF is an independent government agency established in 1950 to promote the progress of science.
"As far as we can tell, all of the brain's components are working all of the time. They're working in different states; even in sleep they're working. If there are cells that aren't working they're going to die. Each cell interacts with other cells in order to keep in existence."
The "Ten Percent Myth," initiated about century ago by misquotes and misinterpretations, has been propagated by media reports and popular cultural, said Parsons, director of the NSF's Behavior and Cognitive Sciences program.
"The most complicated device in the universe is the human brain," Parsons said.
"If you just look at the array of physical elements that interact with the complicated processing activity and networks and physical coordination of events in the brain, there is nothing even close," he said.
As a system it's so far beyond anything else in complexity that it's really quite staggering. We may kill ourselves before we understand it all. It's probably the most difficult and highest scientific prize."
Compared to where physical science is, the study of the human brain has yet to reach the "Dark Ages," Parsons said.
"We don't fully understand how function is organized in the brain," Parsons said.
"There do seem to be brain areas that are specifically, broadly speaking, related to things like vision and hearing and controlling your body's internal environment."
By age 10 or 12, the human brain stops growing in physical size, Parsons said. It is a living organ, continuously adding cells until death.
Some areas in the human brain apparently allow us to sense where the body is in space and organize us in space with respect to our bodies and the environment.
Much of the brain is active at the same time but in different ways, acting in a cooperative effort, Parsons said. A third of the brain in the back is devoted to vision. Other large chunks are related to motor control, speaking and reading language.
Higher, more cognitive functions occur in the front of the brain, things that really allow us to organize our activity, to anticipate what's going to happen in the world, Parsons said.
"Those things are critical and take up perhaps not as much of the brain because they're at a higher level," Parsons said.
"A lot of the hard work in the brain is done by the lower level systems, which, I think, do a lot of computing. Roughly speaking, that's how we talk about the cortex."
Areas below the cortex, including the cerebellum, are, evolutionarily speaking, older, Parsons said. The thalamus, a large structure in the middle of the brain, coordinates activity in various brain regions, and spinal and peripheral nervous systems with higher cortical functions.
Science doesn't have a clear sense of precisely how these various parts work, Parsons said. Some structures in the brain, like the cerebellum, gave humans an evolutionary competitive advantage over other species, he said.
"That extra support, gives you that extra advantage to do something a few milliseconds faster than the tiger, and that's why you're here and the other species isn't," Parsons said.
"The difference between us and the tiger is not so much that we can throw spears and they can't, it's that we have many, many different sort of problem-solving strategies and methods and things that we can do that they can't."
A century ago, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, scientists studied the brains of lab animals, Parsons said. Karl Lashley removed large portions of the cerebral cortex in rats and discovered that retrained animals functioned rather well.
"Their findings suggested that they could just keep carving away and the rats would just seem to be fine," Parsons said.
"Somehow, like many other urban myths, [the Ten Percent Myth] seems to have a life of its own. It must have started someplace, but no one has been able to do the scholarship to nail it down."
Dan O'Donoghue, director of the neuroanatomy lab portion of medical neuroscience for the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine, said the popular belief that bigger is better doesn't necessarily apply to the human brain.
"If you go around measuring everybody's heads, the people with the biggest heads don't necessarily have the highest intelligence," O'Donoghue said.
O'Donoghue defined intelligence as having the ability to adapt in a way that takes into consideration both cultural and environmental factors.
If an intelligent modern person were magically transported back in time around the Jurassic Era, they would be able to adapt and survive, O'Donoghue said. Conversely, the opposite would be true.
"I would assume that if you took an intelligent caveman and stuck him in the middle of the 20th century, within a few weeks he would be able to operate in a way consistent with the surroundings to which he had become adapted," O'Donoghue said.
"Adaptation for me is really a hallmark of intelligence. In pre-recorded history there had to be many intelligent people. Ice Age people had to be intelligent in order to interact with their environment, to learn cues to create a setting where they and their families had a decent chance for survival."
Just because they weren't mathematical whizzes didn't mean they weren't intelligent, O'Donoghue said. Intelligence isn't the main factor for succeeding under the rules of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, he said. More vital is being able to produce a sufficient number of offspring.
The human brain is probably the only brain in the animal kingdom that can project itself into the future and visualize things that don't presently exist such as buildings and sheet music, O'Donoghue said.
"I think there's kind of this human bigotry, if you will, that human brains are wholly different than other brains in terms of function," O'Donoghue said.
"In the final analysis, the human brain, as far as orders of magnitude different than other brains. But what makes them that way? We can't say."
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