Popular Myth: "We Only Use 10% Of Our Brain Capacity"

One of the most popular myth in science history is a statement that we only utilize 10% of our brain capacity. This myth makes most people to believe that there are 90% more capabilities that are still waited to be used. Just to mention a few, telepathy, super-human regeneration or even x-ray vision.

Even though this myth is often attributed to William James (the father of Americam psychology) and Albert Einstein, it's still unclear how this all begin. However, public were already aware of this myth in late 1930s. And just like many other pseudoscience, some authorative figures also helped the spread of this false information. During 1950s, this misleading informarion was widely (and wildly) used in many self improvement industries, even in some Dale Carnegie's works..!

10% brain capacity might be true if we're talking about Homer
Simpson who lives in The Simpson Universe

It could be very possible that this myth is triggered by misinterpretation on neurological studies conducted in 1930s. At that time, it was well-known that there are many researchers used electrical stimulation to figure out corelation between physical functions and brain cortex. When a certain area of animals' cortex is stimulated, a physical response will occur. This phenomenon also happens on human. However, there are wide area of brain cortex that don't induce physical/motoric reaction. At that time, researchers call those area as silent cortex, which possibly misinterpreted by the myth starter(s) as part of brain that are left unused or still not activated.

What Happen When Our Brain Gets Bigger?

Not only are the ‘laws of brain-size evolution’ consistent with massive modularity,but they also give the latter some independent support. Striedter (2004)reviews a wide range of comparative and evolutionary data, and is able to extract a number of robust generalizations about what happens to brains when their absolute size increases, within a certain lineage (see also Geary, 2005). One is that larger brains become significantly more modular in their organization. This is because, as the total number of neurons increases, the density of dendrite connectivity amongst neurons significantly decreases. (This is, no doubt, partly because of the energetic costs associated with building and maintaining neural connections—Aiello and Wheeler, 1995; and partly because of the constraints imposed by slow speeds of signal propagation within and between neurons.) The result is that neurons tend to maintain more of their local connections, while giving up a greater proportion of their long-distance ones, resulting in an architecture that appears significantly more modular.

Another (related) generalization described by Striedter (2004) is that an increase in the size in a given brain region tends to be accompanied by increases in functional differentiation amongst its sub-regions. And this generalization holds good, not only for local brain regions, but also for the brain as a whole.

In particular, the lateralization of brain functions increases as the overall size of the brain goes up, no doubt because of the costs of maintaining neural connections between the two hemispheres. What we should predict, then, as a result of the fourfold increase in brain size that occurred through the evolution of hominids, is that the brains (and presumably the minds) of humans became much more modular—containing many more functionally distinct processing systems—than the brains of our great-ape ancestors. Since I have previously argued the minds of apes and other non-human animals are already massively modular in organization, this is likely to mean that the transition to Homo sapiens will have seen the addition of many new mind / brain adaptations.

Should the resulting systems count as adaptations, however? Aren’t they rather side-effects of some general Bauplan governing increases in brain size? Initially, perhaps, some of them may have been. But exaptation is actually a form of adaptation. Where systems are shaped and maintained by natural selection they can count as adaptations, even if the processes through which they initially arose weren’t targeted on them in particular. (The penguin’s ‘wings’ are an adaptation for swimming, although they are exapted from limbs once designed for flight.) And such shaping and maintaining is likely to apply to most of the brain systems underlying the human mind, since cognition is just too important for survival and reproduction for it to be otherwise.

There is one other ‘law of brain evolution’ described by Striedter (2004) that is worth mentioning here. This is that as the size of one brain region increases relative to another, the extent of the neural projections from the larger to the smaller also increases. The result is that the relatively enlarged human neocortex has culminated in unusually extensive projections from the neocortex to the motor neurons in the medulla and spinal chord. This may give us a partial explanation of our species’ impressive abilities for fine-grained motor control, not only involving movements of the hands, but also the lips, tongue, and respiratory system necessary for the control of speech.

Migraine - All In Your Head

Pain from migraine headaches is typically
located on only one side of the head, behind the eye

The damage caused by headaches is eye-popping. About 45 million Americans suffer them regularly, and about half of the sufferers find the pain severe and sometimes disabling. The result: lost time from work, play, the day-to-day stuff of life. Count­ ing only the 30 million who suffer migraine headaches-one of the 150 described categories of headaches-American vic­ tims lose 157 million work days each year.

All In Your Head

Victims often describe the pain as throbbing or pound­ing. Other related symptoms include sensitivity to light, sound, and odor. Some expe­rience nausea, abdominal pain, or vomiting, and some sufferers report seeing auras or streaks of light shortly before the pain begins. Young victims may also complain of blurred vision, fever, dizziness, and upset stomach. A few children get migraines about once a month accompanied by vomiting; such headaches are sometimes referred to as abdominal migraines. About 5 percent of children younger than 15 report having had migraines, compared with 15 percent who experienced tension headaches.

IQ Test Doesn't Define Your Intelligence

During the last 50 years, there might be no scientific literatures that invites controversy as much as the book written by Charless Murray and Richard Hemstein in 1994. They write a book titled The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which point out that intelligence attaches to genetic properties of human, and it also determines one's social success.

Their proposed statement implies that our social roles and achievement is predetermined since the day we were born, which then leads us the a better understanding of the term 'intelligence' itself.

Studies of identical twins have shown that certain regions of the brain are highly inheritable,
affecting overall intelligence

What is Intelligence?

The controversy that emerged from Charless and Richard's is highly related with our definition of intelligence - which most of us relate this with IQ and social success. However, neuroscientists hardly accept that kind of understanding, especially when it comes to other parameters that determines one's success in society, such as motivation, persistence, and social skills - which can't be measured with IQ test. Even some of them argue that the score only indicates how well an individual accomplish an IQ test instead of indicating their intelligence level...!

So, when we talk about intelligence (in the context of its contribution towards social success) that should include various aspects, not limited to the function of education and memory that's measured by 'mere' IQ test. Personally, I believe that there's no accurate measurement for a universal intelligence rather than life itself, however, in terms of better definition of intelligence, I found that fluid intelligence, which indicates one's mental ability and efficient neural functioning, is the most appropriate one. Fluid intelligence affects many capabilities such as logical reasoning, memory, mathematical calculations and even linguistic processing.

Genetics & Other Contributing Factors

Neuroscientist found that fluid intelligence is mostly correlated with the size of our prefrontal cortex. But the size of prefrontal cortex doesn't solely related with biological properties (genetics). This phenomena has been shown in various experiment, where on of them involving twins who are separated at birth and raised separately in equivalent environments. In the end, genetics count only 72% in correlation with  intelligence.

This means that intelligence is not solely 'predetermined' as stated in Richard and Charless' work. Our brain grows, it has the ability to construct and rewire neural cells which enhance our mental function. Rather than blaming our genetics factor, we can keep on challenging our brain, learning new expertise for a better mental function.