Use Your Brain

Human brain is one of the most complex instruments. From the metabolism point of view, brain is the most expensive organ to operate, because require a lot of energy. Human brain only take 2 % from the total body weight, but brain uses 20 % of blood supply, 20 % energy, and 20 % of human heat. One of the myth about human brain is that human only uses 10 % of brain capacity, and if human is able to use the other 90 % of the capacity, it is believed that human could win a Nobel price, Olympic gold medal, or even releasing human psychic force.

This myth has been around for more than a century, and has been continuously brought up by many people from many backgrounds. More than a decade ago, some motivational speaker without any hesitation claimed that if we attended their expensive courses, we will be able to work all of our brain capacity. One of the early popular references about the myth is Dale Carnegie's book in 1936, How to Win Friends and Influence People. He claimed that if we able to use our brain harder, we will able to fix our live. Without any neurology evidences, he claimed that most of people only uses 15 % of their brain. The book itself was selling well, and had helped in promoting the myth.

Dale Carnegie may had based his information in the wrong interpretation about Karl Lashley experiment in 1920's. At that time Lashley was trying to locate a specific item called as memory in the brain. He trained mouse to run through labyrinth and then measured how far they could do it while he took their brain skins incessantly. Lashley found that memory is not located in one place, but located in all brain skins, and maybe also in some other place. The fact is that the result of the experiment showed any skin parts removal caused memory problem.

Lashley experiment's had significant result and has been radically wrong interpreted. Lashley experiment's showed that mouse still able to memorize good enough until only 10 % of the brain left. There are two issues developed here. The first is that Lashley didn't mention that we only need 10 % of our brain. The second is that he didn't discarded 90 % of the brain from any mouse.

Different version of this myth is revived every decade. One version was originated from Albert Enstein-known as “mega-brain”-that stated “we only use 10 % of our brain”, or an anonymous scientist (the name itself never been mentioned) presumed to found that we only use 10 % of our brain. Another version is that 10 % from the brain capacity is the conscious part and the 90 % is the subconscious part (The reality is, there is no such departmentation).

The myth that we only use 10 % of the brain was eventually proven to be untrue with the use of scanning technology such as Tomografi Emition Positron and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging that can show the brain metabolism. In every human activity such as walking, talking, laughing, eating, and hearing, human only use small part of the brain. However, after 24 hour all brain parts are apparent in the scanning device. The fact is that if you use all of the brain in one time, you will have an epilepsy attack.