do humans reallt only use 10 percent of the brain?
374973
You use 100% of your brain but only about 10% at any given time. If you used 100% at any given time you would have a seizure because your brain cannot cope with so many neurons being fired all at once.
777281
Yes and no. When we are first born, the human brain is the biggest part of the body. We literally have personalities the second we get out of the womb. Technically, we only use about 5 percent of our total brain capacity, so we know where we are, but what is keeping us here is what is known as stimulus overload, where we have soaked so much up that we cant get any more. (That is why cramming for a test/ exam is bad for you) The other thing is that the blood cells can only transport so much O2 (oxygen), so if we could increase O2 absorption efficency, then we could open up more possibilities. Assuming of course we can overcome stimulus overload. And yes, for the first few years we are growing connections to neurons exponentially. But when we get to about 20, they stop growing and start going the other way. So if we can increase O2 absorption, maintain connections, and overcome stimulus overload, then we can start unlocking our mind. Further more, it has been postulated that the human mind can store about 200 terabytes of info! (1 terabyte equals one thousand gigabytes)
469364
We use all of our brains.  It is a myth that we do not.
696598
Actually, this is a misunderstood myth.\n\nIt sources from 2 misunderstandings.  First, we never use 100% of our brain at the same time (i.e. different activities stimulate different neurons at different times).  And, second, a good portion of our brain (perhaps 60-80%) are connections.  Think of it like an airport hub system, where the hubs allow people to connect to the more remote places where fewer people travel.\n\nAlso, just to back this up from a logic perspective, it really would make very little sense evolutionary wise that 90% of the brain would be wasted. And, in fact, through evolution, our brains have been getting larger, not smaller.\n\nFurthermore, when there are some people who are able to recover from serious brain injuries, it is more driven by new connections being formed, rather than new brain cells being created.\n\nHope that helps explain things.
272344
Everything but the brain.
568122
Okay.  This is a common misconception perpetrated by those wonderful PSAs with David Schwimmer and the likes.\n\nWhen scientists came out with research saying that you only use 20% of their brain, they meant that you only use 10-20% of your brain at any given time.\n\nSomehow, the media grabbed ahold of this and misinterpreted it to mean that you only use 20% of your brain in your lifetime.\n\nHere's how it actually works.  Throughout the course of a given day, you will use 100% of your brain.  Only about 15% or so is electrically active at any given point in time (for the average person).  Certain portions of your brain are active during certain activities, whether it be reading or riding a bike or anything else.\n\nThe magnificent thing about the brain is its efficiency.  If you do not use a set of neurons in the brain, they will disconnect from their neighboring neurons and sometimes die by apoptosis (mostly in development, but this occurs throughout life).  When a neuron pulls away from other neurons, more will extend to make new connections.  This way, the brain is constantly keeping otherwise unused portions used.\n\nSo to answer your question, you are already using 100% of your brain!  The real question here is: how do I use my brain's potential more effectively?\n\nWell, keep healthy, physically and mentally.  Exercise to keep your blood flowing to your brain, feeding it.  Drink water to help this process.  Do mentally stimulating activities: read books, write, paint, think of things!  Meditate!  Train your ability to focus on one thing at a time.  Train your ability to multitask.  Turn off the TV.  Go outside and enjoy nature.  Relax.  Help kids with their homework.  Study something.\n\n~The more you know\n\nlol
761779
It isn't true that we only use 10% our brains.  That is a very common myth that was started because of misinterpretation of scientific data.  The fact is that only 10% of our brains is made of up actual neurons that transmit signals, while the rest are glial cells that provide structural support and nutrition to the neurons and clear waste products and excess neurotransmitters.   However, these cells are all used most of the time.\nTo answer your actual question though, the brain is sort of designed to forget things for two reasons.  There is so much going on around us that we experience, if we paid attention to and remembered everything we would be overloaded by all this information pretty quickly.  Secondly, new connections need to be made all the time to incorporate new things that we learn, so in the midst of that some other connections are weakened or lost.  Sometimes things we mean to remember are lost in this process.  Of course, our brain doesn't always work how we would like it to, but like you said generally the things that are most important are the things that we remember, which is exactly how it should be.  Why store unnecessary information?
1170084
Yeah, hes saying we don't know half as much as we think we do. or in his case a millionth of 1%. Even if we are generally smarter then average, there is still so much that person doesn't know. Every person knows a lot about hteir lives, and other people around the globe know about their neck of the woods and so on. The limit to knowledge in the world is inmeasurable. I think I made that word up....but it sounds good.
202878
They aren't. Disregarding the disparaging comments I might make about fundamentalists and new-agers, every person uses 100% of their brains... just not all at the same time. If you don't believe me, just look at an image of the results of an MRI (see, for example, the link in my "sources" section)
475825
Bird < human. The cerebrum is related to higher level processing. Humans have more cognitive abilities than birds, hence more cerebrum
376079
We *can* use 100% of our brain. This is a very strange, but common misconception. All parts of our brain have various functions and all are used. \n\nThe likely source of this myth is the discovery long ago that only about 10% of our neurons are firing at a time. That does not mean only ten percent fire ever, but on average, that is how many fire at any given time.   On that line of thinking, if 100% of our neurons were to fire at once, we would be having a severe seizure.
446417
If you mean cellular respiration, then it would be about 70%.  The majority of the rest is used for neuronal transmission-specifically for maintanence of the ionic gradient.  If you are speaking of merely gross respiration (the movement of air in and out of your lungs) then it would be a very small percentage.
40047
Because we're also the only beings that use less than ten percent of our brains! Even the most intelligent human is a serious waste of potential.
507453
Yes.  The human mind is just an incredibly complex computer which can manufacture it's own connections.  All we need to do is get the software and hardware sides of our current technology up to the level of our brains and beyond...  Easier said than done, I know.
560804
who believes that "you only use 10%" crap anyway. science has proven we use all of our brain. If we didn't, evolution would have discarded the 90 percent it didn't need.
1020126
It is hard to compare. An interesting analysis of the human brain is to figure out how many possible ways it can wire itself. The math behind this is called factorial math. It is denote by n! 1! = 1, 2!=2, 3!=6, 4!=24, 5!=120, 6!=720, from there it starts going up rapidly 20!=2.4*10^18. This means that if you had a brain with 20 neurons it could be wired a total of 2.4*10^18 different ways. 20,000 neurons would have 1.8192 E 77337 possibilities. 20,000,000 neurons 2.1126 E 137334714 possibilities. 1 billion neurons 9.9045 E 8565705522 possibilities. We have somewhere in the range of 100 billion neurons and I have not found a calculator to calculate 100,000,000,000!, but it would be indeed a very large number. Certainly there is more possible ways to wire a human brain, in theory, than there are atoms in the observable Universe. Now how does that correlate to memory, I don't know. It does give an idea of just how complicated the human brain's wiring schematic might look,and how much different one brains wiring diagram might look than someone else.\n\n I personally think that the biological brain is not very efficient at remembering details. Humans do have some ability to remember and manipulate details as do some other animals, but all of us animals are bad at it, but computers are very good at it. It is very neurologically expensive, I think, to remember a specific detail. A brain is very good at seeing patterns and remembering relationships and generalities.
147724
The 10% myth is a myth, and has no scientific basis.  Please refer to the link.\n\nAs for your question, "brain storage" is not a quanitifiable notion because human brains are not digital.  You can easily count the digits in a digital computer storage device, but the simple truth is that the human brain does not resemble a digital storage device at all.  Besides that, I doubt that you could point at any person of any gender that maximized capacity, so capacity isn't even really an issue.  No one has learned so much that further learning bcomes impossible.  Computer discs fill up, but brains do not.