The Brain Clock “Times” featured a story entitled: “We only use 10% of our Brains anyway!”
The story, while dispelling the “we only use 10% of our brain” misconception, perpetuates an even more insidious one. The author traces the origin of the 10% myth back to William James who is reported to have said: “We make use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.” Evidently there was money to made spinning this idea into self-help products and over time it morphed into the “10% of our brains”. The author asserts that we use 100% of our brains and that to think otherwise is absurd. But the missed point was that James never mentioned “brains’. He said ‘make use of our mental and physical resources’. James was talking about how little of our capacity for learning we are using (learning with) not how much of our brain’s anatomy we are using. What about you? Do you think us humans are learning anywhere near what we are capable of? Are you?
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