By: Matt Schenk
Chief Coordinator
East Central Wisconsin Paranormal Investigations
03/17/06

It's actually a myth that we only use 10% of our brain. We use all of our brain. Nobody knows for sure who started this myth, and there's no scientific data to support it. It could have been a misquote of Albert Einstein, a misinterpretation of the work of 19th-century physiologist Pierre Flourens who was a pioneer in mapping localized functions of the brain, or William James who in 1908 wrote: "We are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources." It could also have been the work of Karl Lashley in the 1920's and '30's that started it. Lashley removed large areas of the cerebral cortex in rats and found that they could route around their injuries to relearn specific tasks.

However, "brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow." (Radford) We may only use a part of our brain for doing easy tasks like smelling things and walking around, but for more complex activities and thought patterns we do use many parts of our brain to do them, way more than 10%. As a matter of fact humans have an unusually large part of their brain reserved for higher-level functions, and only 10% is used for easy things like eating and watching television. "With evolutionary advancement, the cerebrum of mammals has enlarged greatly but a progressively smaller proportion of it is concerned with strictly sensory or motor duties...Areas of maximal activity shift in the brain as we change tasks and vary attention and arousal but there are normally no dormant regions awaiting new assignments." (Beyerstein)

If we really only used 10% of our brain, then the effect of having a stroke would be minor or it would go unnoticed altogether, because a stroke only damages a relatively small part of the brain. Or, you could get a bullet to the brain and live, if you were lucky and the bullet passed through the 90% you don't use. Of course that doesn't happen, and it's ridiculous.

So why has the myth continued?

There are two reasons. The first reason for it is just that you hear it repeated everywhere, and then people tend to think it must be true. "It's like how people keep repeating, if you eat before you go swimming you'll get a stomach cramp, or if Coke can eat rust, imagine what it does to your stomach. If people repeat these things often enough, they become accepted common knowledge. But the fact is, eating before swimming doesn't cause stomach cramps. And Coke eats rust because of a chemical reaction with iron oxide, there is no iron oxide in the human stomach." (Jrakman) The popular 10% claim pops up all the time in ads. An advertisement for database software in 1999 had the caption, "They say you only use 10% of it."

The second reason that the myth has continued is because it has been adopted by some people who claim psychic powers, and they use the 10% myth to attempt to explain it: If we only use 10% of our brain, then knowing how to access the "unused" part of our brain should unleash untapped mental powers and allow us to perform at top efficiency. But again this is just not true. "The argument that psychic powers come from the unused majority of the brain is based on the logical fallacy of the argument from ignorance. In this fallacy, lack of proof for a position (or simply lack of information) is used to try to support a particular claim. Even if it were true that the vast majority of the human mind is unused (which it clearly is not), that fact in no way implies that any extra capacity could somehow give people paranormal powers." (Radford)

I actually believe in the possibility of ESP, psychokinesis, etc., etc., but the 10% claim wouldn't be how they would work, because we don't only use 10% of our brain. I believe the way they would work is by the ability people and animals already DO have to sense electromagnetic fields and to be affected by them, and hypothetically we could affect them back. (See my other article, "How electromagnetism can explain much of the paranormal", for more.) Everybody can already sense EMFs, it's either just more evolved in animals, or we rationalize it away. As I said in my other article, I believe everybody can already sense ghosts too because I believe ghosts and human consciousness are electromagnetic fields. Then for the people who actually claim to be able to see ghosts (the ones that aren't lying or crazy), the ghost consciousness may be broadcasting on a specific frequency that only certain people are tuned into, and then the pineal gland's complete map of the visual field of the eye interprets it as a person.

I've heard people say that you can train yourself to develop psychic powers. I believe you can train yourself to pay closer attention to your surrounding environment, but I don't think it's anything mystical or occult. "The way I visualize it in my head is like this -- listen to your favorite song, then focus only on a certain element -- say the drums, maybe you'll notice a few back beats that are new to you, then you listen again and focus on the guitar and you notice how it controls the mood of the song, then you hear the singer's breaths between words...then listen to the song again as a whole -- all of those elements come together to convey a feeling which you clearly received and enjoyed in the first place, but now you have broken down and identified the separate parts and have a deeper understanding of the song. How does that apply? Take a situation where you feel uneasy, instead of saying 'gosh, I just get a weird feeling in there', instead you could walk in and identify your initial feelings and work through your impressions -- what do I see with my eyes, what did I hear, what is my instinct telling me, what part is just my own fear etc. I am not an expert by any means but it's very useful to be able to discern and know the difference between feeling uneasy and really being unwelcome, for example...I don't think it can simply be called Instinct alone. If I shake hands with a man and instantly know that he is dangerous, that could be chalked up to instinct -- but if I shake his hand and know that his mother's name was Sheila and she died in a fire and that he carries her license in his wallet, I don't think that would simply be Instinct. I think it would be more of a case where I was picking up his frequency (or energy, or vibes or whatever else you want to call it)...and interpreting it." (Dalberg)

References:

Beyerstein, Barry. "The 10% Myth". http://www.tafkac.org/science/10_percent_of_brain.html. Accessed 02/17/06.

Dalberg, Barry. (Barry is a ghost hunter in southwestern Wisconsin, and a consultant for ECWPI.)

Jrakman, Jaeson. (Jaeson is a ghost hunter in Milwaukee, and a consultant for ECWPI.)