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This podcast covers the fascinating world of psychological science through discussing the research behind popular myths related to psychology, such as the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. Hosted by Dr. Karla Lassonde and Dr. Emily Stark, psychology professors, we discuss misconceptions about psychology and how they have been researched by psychological scientists.
Okay, Karla, don't you wish you could increase your brain power? Almost every day. Constantly. And we see this in movies. If you saw Lucy with Scarlett Johansson in 2014, or if you remember the movie Limitless with Bradley Cooper in 2011, both of those asked this interesting question like, what if there was this new magic drug that could unlock our unused brain potential?
Emily:And then we could possibly become capable of all of these amazing things.
Karla:It's a good idea.
Emily:I mean, it really just sounds lovely, doesn't it? But these films, they're all based around this misconception. And that's what I want to talk about today. The idea that we only use 10% of our brain.
Karla:Bring it.
Emily:So this is one of the most widely believed misconceptions about psychology. And even a study of elementary and high school teachers show that almost half of the teachers surveyed agreed with this myth that we only use 10% of our brains.
Karla:Yeah, mean, they're in a learning environment. You could see them being very interested in, I wish I could do better, right from the teacher's perspective and from the high schoolers perspective.
Emily:Yeah, in some ways as a teacher, is maybe what I'm trying to do is how do we unlock this learning ability? But let's dig into this myth a little bit more. Where did it come from? How do we even know how much of our brains we are even using?
Karla:Who knows?
Emily:My name is Emily Stark, and I'm a social psychologist.
Karla:My name is Karla Lassonde, and I'm a cognitive psychologist. And this is Brains versus Debunking Psychological Misconceptions.
Emily:All right. So first first question is, where did this myth that we only use 10% of our brains even come from? And when I was looking into this, this idea is actually a little difficult to track down. Like, who sent So this some people connect this to a misinterpretation of something that William James said. And William James wrote in 1907, this is the quote, We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
Emily:So he was talking about those, how sometimes we don't feel like we are fully mentally or physically engaged or energized and that this is because we're acting out of habit. William James wrote a bunch about habit and how we can just kind of go with the flow and we're not really thinking about what we're doing.
Karla:Yeah. And I mean, my understanding, if I've got this right, Emily, William James is one of those early American psychologists that we hear about and we teach in our intro psych classes, a behaviorist. And so he would be introducing the field of psychology in a lot of ways in the early time of psychology in The United States.
Emily:Yes. And he was really influential because of how much he wrote about psychology. He really focused on this idea that we want to know like why we do things. Why do we think certain things? Why do we act in certain ways?
Emily:So he had these incredibly broad interests and he was a really engaging writer and lecturer. So that meant people were reading what he wrote. I mean, his textbooks are still even really accessible today. Yeah. If anyone needs some light reading.
Karla:Well, and, you know, for the audience's perspective, we didn't know a lot about the brain the turn of the 1900s, and James didn't either. But, you know, thinking of him being an intellectual, trying to produce that information for the masses, I'm sure he would touch on what is the brain capable of? It makes a lot of sense.
Emily:Exactly. So that could be one place. People thought he was saying, Oh, we should be thinking more or, I don't know, being more thoughtful. Other people, though, have looked at Albert Einstein as a source of the myth, which I also think is interesting. It's when we connect perhaps to this idea of having brain power or being So very this is a supposed quote from Albert Einstein.
Emily:He is said to have explained to a reporter that the secret to his genius was that he used the full capacity of his brain rather than the mere 10% that the rest of us use.
Karla:Wow, I didn't know that Einstein had such an ego, but I would believe it.
Emily:I mean, it's just you can both imagine reporters saying, like, seems like a silly question. However, and so, I mean, he is supposedly saying 10%. But people have tried to track that down to find, okay, let's find the interview. Let's verify this quote. And no one has found evidence that he said this or anything like it.
Emily:Yeah. So maybe this was a fully made up
Karla:The connection with media, as we've said before on this show, it has a huge role in the interpretation of psychology. And so it make a big understanding that we're going to talk about the brain and we're going to talk about these intellectual smart people that we know as a starting point for this myth.
Emily:Yeah, exactly. And with that, regardless of if Einstein actually said that or not, we start to see this idea of that specific number of 10% So pop up more and if we look at the 1929 World Almanac, and the World Almanac, this is just a general book of facts.
Karla:For our all listeners to understand. Kind of like in the days of the encyclopedia.
Emily:Yes, exactly. Yep. And this is a quote from this. It says, There is no limit to what the human brain can accomplish. Scientists and psychologists tell us we use only about 10% of our brain power.
Karla:Wow.
Emily:So these ideas get out there without necessarily being clearly fact checked. If we thought that this was an issue just today, absolutely not. This has always been a concern. But people kept piling on this idea. So we see in 1936, So now we have writer Lowell Thomas writes a foreword to the very popular self help book by Dale Carnegie.
Emily:This is the book How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Karla:Wow, I didn't realize that came in 1936. It seems like something we would talk about now in Exactly, the influencer
Emily:yes. This self help and influencer culture is also not new to us. So in this forward, Lowell Thomas writes this sentence: Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average man develops only 10% of his latent mental ability. So we're going back to William James, who did indeed work at Harvard but did not say this. So this 10% idea is out there and circulating in these extremely popular, like an almanac and this
Karla:Right, incredibly popular self help because the almanac, like the encyclopedia, it's as close as we can get to these are facts. Are facts from the field of science and psychology, as the quote before talked about. And also, for our audience, the latent mental ability. Latent is this notion that if we have 10% that we're using, then the other 90% is sleeping. It's dormant, right?
Emily:Yeah, exactly. So latent ability is this idea of untapped potential. And really that's where this myth is coming from. Like, is exciting to think that there is so much about our brains that we don't understand. So that means there's unlocked potential just waiting inside all of us.
Emily:And we'd hope that. I mean, we hope that we can improve our abilities and develop maybe our knowledge and our skills over our lives. So this is also a fully understandable wish that people might have. Yes. Another place where you hear this come up is when people talk about extrasensory perception, the idea of being able to read minds or tell the future and that these are people who are using more of their brains.
Emily:So if we unlock, now we've unlocked these extra powers.
Karla:Yeah, the notion of going beyond our five senses suggests that we are all capable of seeing and hearing and believing things that we just don't do with our current capacity.
Emily:Yeah, I want to be really clear. There is no evidence for any type of mind reading or extrasensory perception abilities. So it's not there. There are not people out there able to do this. So those are things they sound fun.
Emily:Are not actually Clever.
Karla:We can call it clever perhaps, but not actually a thing. There's no scientific evidence.
Emily:Not evidence that we have some secret brain potential.
Karla:Okay, perfect.
Emily:So getting back to the media, I mentioned the 2014 movie Lucy in the opening. So here's a quick clip from that movie. We're listening to Professor Norman Speech, who's played by Morgan Freeman, and you'll hear him talk about cerebral capacity.
TheLifeEdge.com clip:Animal life on earth goes back millions of years, Yet, most species only use three to 5% of its cerebral capacity. But it isn't until we reached human beings at the top of the animal chain that we finally see a species use more of its
Emily:cerebral capacity.
TheLifeEdge.com clip:10% may not seem like much, but it's a lot if you look at all we've done with it.
Emily:Okay. So we're hearing Morgan Freeman talk about how humans are using more of of their brain capacity than animals. And then the movie's going on to explore what would happen if some type of drug unlocked even more brain potential.
Karla:So much could happen.
Emily:So many possibilities. So media like this, again, are supporting this idea that there's, that we only use a small amount of our brain. And as I mentioned previously, again, this is important to note, this is one of the most prevalent myths about our brain. I mentioned some surveys. A study conducted in 2002 surveyed over 2,000 people, which is a big number.
Emily:Yeah. And fifty nine percent of those people believed we only use 10% of our brains. And these are all people with college degrees. So these are people who have probably been exposed to information perhaps about the brain or about learning and those types of ideas. This is embedded
Karla:in Yeah. And the we have talked about doing some of this research at our own university. And this was one of those misconceptions that I've dug into our student body in particular, and we see a high belief in this as well. I'd have to go look at the data again, but it was well above sixty percent. And those are our students.
Karla:Again, not saying that college students are necessarily special, but to what you said, they have understood or attempted to understand the brain and learning more usually than the average person.
Emily:Yes. All right. So how can we determine how much of our brain do we actually use? Well, with the growing capability of fMRI, which stands for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, And many people might be familiar with an MRI. So an fMRI adds in the functional piece and you are being asked to think about different things or identify different pictures in an MRI scanner, we can see areas of your brain are showing more activity.
Emily:So this allows us to watch the brain in action to see how different parts of the brain respond to different tasks. Tasks.
Karla:Yeah. And to get a little geeky with it, the imaging, what you're looking at, you know, there's this phrase that I hear a lot, like your brain is lighting up.
Emily:Yes. I do sometimes even use that phrase, even though I know that's not what's actually happening.
Karla:Well, but we need some sort of analogy. And when we think of this neural processing, there's electrical energy at stake. And so lighting up is a term that I've used, but just to be clear, your brain is not lighting up, but where you see this idea of lights on, lights off is coming from blood flow to the areas of the brain that are being used during that functional piece of the MRI.
Emily:Yes. So we get tons of pictures of the brain and generally the areas that are more active are shown in brighter colors. And so we can even see the level of activity. And studies, that's not the only way that we can measure brain activity. FMRI though is often used, especially when we want to see where in the brain something is happening.
Emily:And these studies show even when we are asleep, all parts of the brain are showing some amount of activity. So there's no part that we never use. There's not a part of our brain that is, say, fully untapped or never active.
Karla:Right. And again, even when we are sleeping. Yes. My son reminded me the other day that you're always using your brain, mom. Are we?
Karla:Yes. Yes. But I think he must have been learning a little bit more about sleep. And contrary to maybe if we think about sleep, we think of down kind of being dysregulated. And so there's other things that go on in the brain that we aren't even conscious of, let's say.
Emily:Cool. Yeah. Also though, it's important to note these fMRI studies show during different tasks, different parts of the brain are more active than others. So I want to be clear. It's not as if we're constantly using 100% of our brains at the same rate.
Emily:However, this is very different than this myth that says we only use 10% of our brain. So our brain operates on a principle called localization, which means that different regions of our brain are involved in different tasks. And what your son might also be learning about the brain are like the different lobes. Like, Okay, we know the occipital lobe is involved in vision. Other parts of the brain are more active in touch or other physical sensations.
Emily:Motor control. Yep, yep, exactly. So this is where research into the brain began, and it's ongoing. Researchers were still working on identifying the functions of different regions of our brain.
Karla:Yeah. And Emily, where I first learned about this myth was when we looked at animal studies. And for the audience, we talked about localization of function. Before you looked at human brains, the way the pattern of research tends to go is, you look in animal models. So there's this animal modeling where we were able to see, Okay, the mouse is running the maze.
Karla:They're choosing to go down this door. They're eating this snack. And the scientists were able to show us that these parts of the brain are resonating when this action or this particular perceived thought process is going on. And where I started teaching my students in cognition that there was this jump the tracks between now we go from animal models, we can talk about humans. But this was kind of a way to make sense of what animals were doing, but it turned poorly.
Karla:It turned into this artificial idea that, oh, look at animals, they're only using a certain part of our brain. So too is true of humans as the human studies start taking effect as well.
Emily:True, because some of that early animal research was not necessarily done with fMRI. It was done with some of the things I teach my students are like direct stimulation of the brain through using really small electrodes. And then you see how that animal responds or does it change their behavior. So there would be instances where researchers were trying to activate parts of the brain and not seeing anything happen. And so, yeah, that would make sense, where then you generalize that up to humans and say, well, there are these parts that we don't know what they do or we can't tell if they're doing anything.
Karla:And that's fine because we really don't know everything that we need to know about the brain. We can acknowledge that.
Emily:Yes, absolutely.
Karla:But not being able to see a direct correlation or that one of the parts of the brain is or isn't firing does not mean that it's a capacity issue. It's more of a functional issue.
Emily:Yes. And it's also related to technology. As our technology to study our brain becomes more advanced, we are definitely better able at identifying what might be a smaller change in activity or a smaller region, but we can see like, oh, that part is being used.
Karla:Yeah, I can imagine in the future, fMRI is a pretty good device for measuring function, brain function, but we're going to get even better. I always tell my students, our children, our children's children, they'll laugh at us because of what we know or don't know about the brain. Suggesting that we're all talking about junk science, but acknowledging that this is a field that has much more to be understood.
Emily:Yes, it's very dynamic. There's a couple other ways we can look at this idea of how much of our brain do we use or what does our brain do. And research has also long looked at people who have dealt with some type of brain trauma. So people who have experienced strokes or traumatic brain injuries. And when we study those people, we see that damage to the brain, there's an effect.
Emily:Sometimes it's very large, sometimes it is smaller, but we see an impact on their cognition or behaviors. So if there were parts of the brain that we weren't using, then there could potentially be people who have suffered these types of injuries and don't show any type of behavioral or cognitive consequences. But that's not what we see. Studies of brain injury show that damage to any part of the brain produces some type of effect, which it shows the extent like, yes, we are using our whole brains.
Karla:Yeah. I mean, as a memory researcher, we often talk about the concussion, what happens And as a typically, you're looking at what kind of memory has become impaired. And that malability, I think, we can think of there's a little bit of a myth of plasticity, that while the brain is capable of changing and recovering, especially in young children, that the plasticity does not mean you're taking this dormant part of your brain and making up for the area that was concussed. It's much more technical than that, but something to think about where we hear about the trauma these days is pretty common when we all talk about that sort of thing.
Emily:That is such a cool idea, because I remember growing up learning that if you damaged a brain neuron, it's gone forever. And that has been a newer finding in research. You use the word plasticity and it basically refers to that our brain can adapt to some types of injuries or can take on new abilities as needed. So there's maybe more potential for healing just But adaptability again, like you said, that's not because we're tapping into these unused sectors. Great.
Emily:One last point here. Like, this doesn't it wouldn't make evolutionary sense if we only use 10% of our brains. Our brain consumes an immense amount of energy. So we would not have evolved these complex brains if parts of it were inactive. Like, it just doesn't make sense from that perspective.
Emily:Why would our brain be needing all of this glucose other to be able to be active if it wasn't being used.
Karla:Right, because we know as humans evolved, our brains got bigger. They're not going to get bigger just to be sloshing around.
Emily:Exactly, right? Yes.
Karla:Nice.
Emily:So I think, or at least I hope, that people are getting a better understanding of the brain. So here's a clip from a website where they're very accurately and clearly dispelling this 10% myth.
TheLifeEdge.com clip:I don't know exactly where that originated from the whole 10% of our brain. That's not true. You do fMRIs, and you might only see 10% of the brain light up right now, but if you give a brain another task, more of it's gonna kick in. And I think why people bought into that so
TheLifeEdge.com clip:much is because they're like, wow,
TheLifeEdge.com clip:there's so much potential for us. We can become 10 times smarter, do 10 times more. The thing is that the brain isn't just this linear computing program where in order to double what we do, we need to double the space. We don't need bigger brains. We just need more efficient brains.
Emily:So we heard them share how fMRI technology allows us to see that different areas of the brain are contributing to different tasks. And they're also touching on this belief that, oh, that the main driver of this misconception is that we can somehow improve our brain functioning. So hopefully over time, maybe with more, I don't know, exposure to these new technologies, people will gain more accurate ideas and understanding about the real potential of our brains.
Karla:Yeah. And this is almost a topic for another episode, Emily. But brain training is a very targeted idea that we And have within also, there's science that has tried to look at improving brain function. However, the media can really spoil this by saying, here are the supplements, here are the magic pills, here are the foods, and then sometimes here are the computer based There's some gamification of trying to improve your brain function. And so to be continued as what the extent of training is able to do for brain function, but kind of bringing us back to this idea of we wish for improvement.
Karla:We wish to be better than we may be on any given day.
Emily:Yeah, which again, that makes sense. And it's good to be motivated to improve our learning and our knowledge. But we know that the idea that we only use 10% of our brain, that is a myth. That's not how our brains work. We don't have all this untapped potential just waiting to be unlocked.
Emily:So our brains are very complex. We are using way more than 10% of our brains. We are constantly activating different parts of our brain, both when we are awake and when we are asleep. Our brains are constantly active, and we are using 100 of it, even when it doesn't feel like it. Absolutely.
Emily:You heard it here on Brains versus Beliefs. You can learn more about this podcast on our website called communicatingpsychologicalscience.com. You'll find references and a link to the episode. Feel free to contact us on our website with any comments or ideas for future episodes and follow Brains versus Beliefs wherever you find podcasts.