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Asked by anon-181157 on 22 Jun 2018.
Question: What would happen if people could use 100% of their brain?
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Jason Chu answered on 22 Jun 2018:
It’s an urban myth that we only use 10% of our brain!
In reality we use almost all of our brain, all the time. In all sorts of different ways.
Scientists are still studying lots about the brain – and learning more everyday!
But short answer, you and I are using basically 100% of our brain right now. It’s almost never completely dormant. It’s always thinking, memorising, storing information, and maintaining itself!
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Laura Hemming answered on 24 Jun 2018:
Jason’s right – the 10% thing is actually just a myth! Check out this article which explains a bit more about how the myth can be debunked:
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Lauren Burns answered on 26 Jun 2018:
As Jason and Laura have said, we do use all our brain. It is also worth mentioning that our brain isn’t 100% ‘doing stuff’ like thinking or remembering, but a lot of our brain is sending messages to itself and other parts of the body. For example, the corpus callosum is the wiring that connects the two hemispheres of the brain (i don’t know if you know about the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body and the right controls the left side), but if we didn’t have that wiring (such as split-brain patients) unusual things start happening. A slightly different way of thinking of it is if we had to consciously control 100% of our brain, we would be totally inefficient people, our reflexes wouldn’t work so we would damage ourselves severely, we wouldn’t be able to fall asleep because once we lost consciousness we would stop breathing. The brain does so, so much, it is totally fascinating and my favourite part of the body!
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