Nope, sorry. You don’t have a lot of extra brain power just waiting for you to access it.
You’ve likely heard this wild idea in one form or another: we humans only use 10 percent of our brain. Like a horror movie monster, the myth just won’t die. Various scientists and science journalists think they’ve killed it. But as soon as they start to relax, it comes roaring back. The fact is, this notion is not even close to true.It’s not clear how it got started.
Probably it was the specificity of that 10 percent number, whoever first tacked it on, that made the myth go viral, as we say today. “It's quite possible that Dale Carnegie's marketing genius made that idea stickier by attributing it directly to the brain and putting a number on it,” says Sandra Aamodt, neuroscientist and author of
Ultimately, the idea was gold to self-improvement gurus. “If the 10 percent myth had not existed, the self-improvement crusaders would have had to invent it,” neuroscientist Barry L. Beyerstein wrote in an article about this myth, published in the book“We think that people are excited by this pseudo fact because it's very optimistic,” says Aamodt.
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