Everyone has heard the saying that we only use 10% of our brains. Even the children’s planners in the last school that I have worked at in South Wales promoted this myth. The myth is known to originate from William James and Lowell Thomas. James had the idea that we only use a fraction of our faculties and that we have so much more to unlock, whilst it was Thomas who actually came up with the incorrect percentage in 1936. Nowadays, some people still believe this myth due to stories of individuals living with only a fraction of their brains.
This belief has been largely debunked through multiple case studies of brain injuries and through fMRI studies (see video below). Neurological studies consistently show that we use every part of our brains, and that unused brain cells and connections are deleted through the process of synaptic pruning to make space for new ones.
fMRI studies have found that specific parts of our brain regulates our breathing, temperature, balance (brain stem), language processing and production (mainly Left hemisphere- Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas) and planning (frontal areas), amongst oother things. From these evidence, we can see that we never ever use only 10% of our brains at any one time in our lives.
