What percentage of a person's brain actually works? What percentage of our brain do we use? Man uses only 10 of his brain

The brain is the most complex organ of vertebrates and the human body in particular. Every second it processes a phenomenal amount of information, and until now scientists have not thoroughly studied some of its structural features and functions. It is responsible for the process of consciousness, thinking, speech, coordination of movements, sleep and wakefulness, emotional experiences, hormonal changes, breathing, numerous reflexes, etc.

Against the background of these facts, the statement that a person uses only 10 percent of his brain, and not 100 percent, looks plausible. This belief is firmly rooted in the minds of many, but experts say that it is not true and belongs to legend.

They give a number of reasons that this is just a myth - the human brain is 100% involved.

The roots of the myth

There is no exact data on where this legend originated, but assumptions have been made.

1. At the end of the 19th century, W. James and B. Sidis, studying the abilities of a child within the framework of the theory of accelerated development, came to the conclusion that the human brain may not be 100 percent developed and its potential is great. After which L. Thomas, in the preface to D. Carnegie’s book, mentioned this assumption and said that people use only 10 percent of their brains.
2. Some neuroscientists, based on research on the functioning of the cerebral cortex, answered the question “what percentage of the brain does a person use” - “at any given time - 10%”, which subsequently led to a truncated statement.

From that moment on, the legend became the basis for writing many fiction books and creating films. Some enterprising “psychologists” and “psychics” began to use it, creating trainings and courses that encourage them to unlock their potential.

The myth that the brain is developed or uses only 10 percent has proven to be tenacious due to its attractiveness - a person likes to believe that he can improve his brain, that he is capable of more and, perhaps, has supernatural abilities that “sleep” .

In fact

Numerous studies have been able to answer the question “what percentage of the human brain works.” They showed that when performing ordinary activities (light conversation, walking, listening to music) activation of absolutely all parts of the brain is required.

Other arguments in favor of what works 100%:

1. Moderate to severe traumatic brain injury always leads to impairment or loss of function. If the human brain were only 10 percent developed, then a person would not be able to notice any difference.
2. He could not grow to such a large size as he is now. If only one tenth was used, it would amount to no more than 140 grams - which is approximately the size of a sheep's brain.
3. It is an indisputable fact that 20 percent of the human body’s energy is spent on brain processes. This is a large amount, and it is unlikely that it would be allocated for the maintenance of a “sleeping” organ.
4. No one, even the most brilliant scientist, could have calculated the percentage of working neurons at the beginning of the twentieth century due to the lack of such technical means.

Some argue that the brain is only 10% developed by accelerating and improving thought processes. However, they are associated with various methods of education and training, but not with the activation of “sleeping” zones.

So, to the question “how many percent of the brain does a person use?”, there is only one correct answer - 100. Using only 10 percent is impossible - the body must function all the time to maintain its activity. The myth remains very ingrained in the minds of many, and some experts argue that considerable resources are spent on maintaining it: the film industry, TV programs and shows often use it as a lure.

Shoshina Vera Nikolaevna

Therapist, education: Northern Medical University. Work experience 10 years.

Articles written

There are many legends and pseudoscientific theories about how the most important organ of the human body, the brain, works. The most common statement is that according to research, it wastes no more than ten percent of its potential. Is this true? What percentage of the human brain actually works?

How does the human brain work?

The brain is the most complex organ of all living beings. Every moment he needs to process a huge amount of information and transmit signals to other systems of the body. Scientists have not yet been able to fully study its structure and functional features. In humans, the organ is responsible for such processes as: consciousness, speech functions, coordination, emotions, reflex functions.

The central nervous system of a normal person consists of the spinal cord and the brain. These organs include 2 types of cells: neurons (information carriers) and gliocytes (cells that act as a framework).

The entire human body is penetrated by a network of nerves that are a continuation of the central nervous system. Through neurons, information from the brain disperses throughout the body and comes back for processing. All nerve cells create a single information network with it.

The Myth of Using 10% of the Brain

There is no reliable data on where the “Ten Percent” theory came from; presumably it all happened like this:

1. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, two researchers, Sidis and James, studied the abilities of children, testing the theory of accelerated human development, and came to the conclusion that the human brain has enormous potential that is not fully used. Later, Thomas, another famous scientist, when writing the preface to Carnegie's work, recalled this theory and suggested that the human brain actually works at only ten percent of its potential.
2. A group of scientists, conducting research in neurobiology, studying the cortex of its hemispheres, concluded that at every second it is activated by ten percent. Later, to the question of what percentage of a person’s brain works, books and television programs began to give a truncated answer.

Thus, a common myth turned into reality. The legend that the average person uses only a tenth of their potential has gained great popularity. It is constantly discussed in fiction and cinema; many books and films have been created on its basis.

Unscrupulous psychotherapists and various kinds of psychics profit well from the existing myth, offering training programs, conducting expensive courses, where a person:

• they promise to train the brain until it achieves one hundred percent of its potential;

• guarantee that every smart child will become a genius using the proposed methods;
• propose to find and reveal hidden paranormal abilities that supposedly lie dormant in every person.

What really

But in reality, how much does the brain work and how can you check whether a person is using his full potential?

Reasoning for full use of the brain:

• You should not rely on the conclusions of scientists made at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, there was simply no technical ability to calculate the percentage of neurons involved in the work.

• Many years of experiments, tests and studies have shown that when performing a simple action (communication, reading, etc.) all parts of the organ are activated. Therefore, it works not at 10, but at 100 percent.
• Severe often leads to serious disruptions in the functioning of the body, loss of many functions. Using a tenth of brain activity, a person would not notice a difference; the organ could compensate for the injury and use the rest of its potential.
• Nature is economical, because about twenty percent of energy is spent on brain processes occurring in the human body. It is unlikely that so much energy would be spent on an organ that is partially used.
• The size of the brain also indicates that it uses a much larger percentage of the substance. All organs of the human body are directly proportional to their functions. A brain that used only a tenth of its potential would weigh as much as a sheep's.
• Acceleration of thought processes in the brain occurs if the correct training methods and hard work are used, and if non-working areas are activated with the help of expensive courses.

Mystical abilities

A person in a critical situation may simply feel that he has mystical abilities to solve the problem. There are cases when people, in moments of danger, lifted enormous weights, made the necessary decisions in short fractions of a second, and increased the speed of perception of information.

What happens in such cases: mobilization of the body and the release of adrenaline into the blood or awakening of the rest of the organ? It is reliably known that after experiencing an extreme situation, a person feels extremely tired, because the body has expended a large amount of energy on actions. Consequently, the point is not in the mystical abilities that lie dormant in the brain, but in the mobilization of the organ to solve an important task.

There is an opinion that we use only 10% of the human brain. This is probably why a person cannot figure out how to develop it 100%. The question is: why then is the brain structured this way and how can one still make it work at its best?

The Myth of the Brain

This is not true! The statement that the human brain works at 10% (5%, 3%) is an old, absolutely false and completely indestructible myth. Let's figure out where it came from.

In the middle of the last century, it was completely incomprehensible how a person thinks (now this is also incomprehensible, but on a different level). But some things were known - for example, that the brain is made of neurons and that neurons can generate electrical signals.

Some scientists then believed that if a neuron generates an impulse, then it is working, and if it does not generate, it means it is “lazy.” And then someone came up with the idea to check: how many neurons in the whole brain are “working”, and how many are “throwing their thumbs”?

There are several billion neurons in the brain, and it would be pure madness to measure the activity of each of them - it would take many years. So instead of studying all the neurons in a row, scientists examined only a small part, determined the percentage of them that were active, and assumed that this percentage was the same throughout the brain (this assumption is called extrapolation).

And it turned out that only an indecently small percentage of neurons “works,” that is, generates impulses, and the rest are “silent.” From this, a somewhat straightforward conclusion was drawn: silent neurons are slackers, and the brain works only at a small part of its capabilities.

This conclusion was absolutely wrong, but since at that time it was customary to “correct nature”, for example, to turn back rivers, irrigate deserts and drain seas, the idea that brain function could also be improved took root and began its victorious march through the newspapers. pages and magazine spreads. Even now, something similar is sometimes found in the yellow press.

How does the brain work?

Now let’s try to figure out how things really are.

The human brain is a complex, multi-level, highly organized structure. What is written below is a very simplified picture.

There are many areas in the brain. Some of them are called sensory - information about what we feel (well, say, a touch on the palm) is received there. Other areas are motor areas, they control our movements. Still others are cognitive, it is thanks to them that we can think. The fourth ones are responsible for our emotions. And so on.

Why don’t all the neurons in the brain fire at the same time? Yes, very simple. When we don't walk, the neurons that trigger the walking process are inactive. When we are silent, the neurons that control speech are silent. When we don’t hear anything, the neurons responsible for hearing are not excited. When we do not experience fear, the “fear neurons” do not work. In other words, if neurons are not needed at the moment, they are inactive. And that's great.

Because if this were not so... Let's imagine for a second that we can excite ALL of our neurons at the same time (our body simply cannot tolerate such abuse for more than a second).

We will immediately begin to suffer from hallucinations, because the sensory neurons will make us experience absolutely every possible sensation. At the same time, the motor neurons will launch all the movements that we are capable of. And cognitive neurons... Thinking is such a complex thing that there is hardly a single person on this planet who can say what will happen if all cognitive neurons are excited at the same time. But let's assume for simplicity that we then start thinking all possible thoughts at the same time. And we will also experience all possible emotions. And a lot more will happen that I won’t write about because there’s simply not enough space here.

Let us now look from the outside at this creature, suffering from hallucinations, twitching from convulsions, simultaneously feeling joy, horror and rage. It doesn't really look like a creature that has upgraded its brain to 100% efficiency!

Vice versa. Excessive brain activity is not beneficial, but only harmful. When we eat, we don’t need to run, when we sit at the computer, we don’t need to sing, and if, while solving a math problem, we think not only about it, but also about the birds outside the window, then this problem is unlikely to be solved. In order to think, it is not enough to THINK about something, you must also NOT THINK about everything else. It is important not only to excite the “necessary” neurons, but also to inhibit the “unnecessary” ones. A balance is required between excitation and inhibition. And breaking this balance can lead to very sad consequences.

For example, the severe disease epilepsy, in which a person suffers from convulsive seizures, occurs when excitation in the brain “outweighs” inhibition. Because of this, during a seizure, even those neurons that should be silent at that second are activated; they transmit excitation to the next neurons, and those to the next, and a continuous wave of excitation goes through the brain. When this wave reaches the motor neurons, they send signals to the muscles, they contract, and the person begins to have convulsions. It is impossible to say what the patient feels at the same time, since during the seizure the person loses memory.

How to make your brain work more efficiently

I hope you have already realized that trying to make the brain work better by stimulating all the neurons in a row is futile, and even dangerous. However, you can “train” your brain to work more efficiently. This, of course, is a topic for a huge book (and not even one), and not a small article. Therefore, I will tell you only about one method. We'll have to start from afar.

When a small child is born, the number of neurons in his brain is even greater than in an adult. But there are still almost no connections between these neurons, and therefore a newborn baby is not yet able to use his brain correctly - for example, he practically cannot see or hear. The neurons of his retina, even if they sense light, have not yet formed connections with other neurons to transmit information further to the cerebral cortex. That is, the eye sees light, but the brain is not able to understand it. Gradually, the necessary connections are formed, and in the end the child learns to distinguish, first just light, then the silhouettes of simple objects, colors, and so on. The more variety of things a child sees, the more connections his visual pathways form and the better the part of his brain associated with vision works.

But the most surprising thing is not this, but the fact that such connections can be formed almost exclusively in childhood. And therefore, if a child for some reason cannot see anything at an early age (say, he has a congenital cataract), then the necessary neural connections in his brain will never be formed, and the person will not learn to see. Even if this person undergoes cataract surgery as an adult, he will still remain blind. Quite cruel experiments were carried out on kittens whose eyes were sewn up in a newborn state. The kittens grew up without ever seeing anything; after that, their stitches were removed as adults. Their eyes were healthy, their eyes saw the light - but the animals remained blind. Having not learned to see in childhood, they were no longer able to do this as adults.

That is, there is some critical period during which the neural connections necessary for the development of vision are formed, and if the brain does not learn to see during this period, it will never learn to do so. The same applies to hearing, and, to a lesser extent, to other human abilities and skills - smell, touch and taste, the ability to speak and read, play musical instruments, navigate in nature, and so on. A striking example of this is the “Mowgli children”, who were lost in early childhood and were raised by wild animals. As adults, they are never able to master human speech, because they did not train this skill in their childhood. But they are able to navigate the forest in a way that no person raised in civilized conditions can.

And one more thing. You never know at what moment some skill acquired in childhood will take off. For example, a person who in childhood actively trained fine motor skills of his hands by doing drawing, modeling, and handicrafts will find it easier to become a surgeon who performs filigree, precise operations in which not a single wrong movement can be allowed.

In other words, if anything can make the brain work better, it is training, and training since childhood. The more the brain works, the better it works, and vice versa - the less it is loaded, the worse it will function. And the younger the brain, the more “flexible” and receptive it is. That is why schools teach little children, and not adult men and women. This is why children are able to adapt to new situations much faster than adults (for example, they master computer literacy or learn foreign languages). That is why you need to train your intellect from childhood. And if you do this, then nothing will stop you from making great discoveries. For example, about how the brain works.

Answered: Vera Bashmakova

Science

You may have seen in movies or heard that the human brain is only used by 10%. By the way, this statement is even attributed Albert Einstein, which pointed to the supposedly small activity of our brain. But in fact, this is not true (if Einstein had known that they were slandering him, he would probably have been very surprised).

Now, if this figure were 100%, then people would have superpowers. So we are assured by rumors that came from out of nowhere.

Why does this myth live for so long and continue to spread?

People's Misconceptions

Research results show that 65% of people surveyed believe this myth is true; and 5% think this number is increasing due to their belief in evolution.

Even the TV show MythBusters a few years ago wrongly corrected the myth of 10% of the brain being used by 35%.

Like most legends, the origins of this fiction are unclear, although there is some speculation. The origins come from a neuroscientist Sam Wang(Sam Van) of Princeton, author of "Welcome to Your Brain."

Perhaps it was William James(William James), who was considered one of the most influential thinkers in psychology at the beginning of the 20th century. He said: "People have untapped intellectual potential."

This quite reasonable statement was later revived in distorted form by the writer Lowell Thomas(Lowell Thomas) in 1936 in his preface to the book How to Win Friends and Influence People.

"Professor William James of Harvard said that the average person develops only 10 percent of his latent psychic ability," writes Thomas. It looks like he or someone else at one time just mentioned a number he liked.

Specifying 10% explicitly is false for several reasons.

What percentage does the human brain work at?

All the brain is active all the time. The brain is an organ. Its living neurons and cells, which in turn are supported by these neurons, Always cause activity. Have you ever heard that the spleen is only 10% used? Surely not.

This is how Joe Ice, a professor of neurology and psychology at New York University, explains how the human brain works. Let's say you are watching a video image in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner.

Some areas of the brain involved in hearing or visualization, for example, are now more active than other areas. Their activities will be depicted as colored spots.

These bundles of meaningful activity tend to occupy small parts of the brain, even less than 10%. Therefore, it may seem to an unaware person that the rest of the brain is idling.

However, Joe Ice argues that the brain, with small actions of certain functions, still works at 100%.

If you conditionally put your brain aside and pay attention to your soul, you can discover and realize how the soul (feelings and emotions) controls the brain (computer), manifesting actions in reality, and not vice versa.

Is it possible to determine why the brain of one of the twins works correctly, while the other has disorders in... the brain? What if this disorder is not in the brain, but in consciousness, which exhibits brain activity? But in order to understand this mechanism, one must recognize that the soul is a real reality that is closed to many minds that recognize facts only through physical eyes and ears.

How can you reprogram your brain? 3 main steps

I read a lot of similar articles on the Internet about how to get out of any stressful situation you just need to reprogram your brain, namely:

1. Change your thinking;
2. Think positively;
3. Rest;
4. Get distracted.
5. Force your brain to register pleasant moments in life more often, etc.

This all sounds right, but...

Many authors on their websites describe the brain as a tool, a computer that can easily be programmed to be positive. They just forget to tell you how to do it. What kind of place do you need to gather and decide to take such a step - to reprogram your brain.

Many books on psychology and psychotraining have been written that talk about the need to think “correctly,” but no one says where to get the strength to start thinking like that.

If a person is depressed, or mired in envy, or is stifled by hatred, or is tormented by jealousy... from what source will the strength and desire to reprogram the brain to be positive come from? How to shut up jealousy, which draws pictures of betrayal, or revenge, which builds thoughts about how to take more painful revenge?

After all, even the most intelligent and logical people are susceptible to negative feelings, emotions and thoughts and, despite the good structuring of their mind, logical thinking and intelligence, cannot cope with them. The authors provide no explanation for this.

Yes, these 5 points described above really make it possible to switch gears and take a break from the negative. Only this negativity does not disappear into nowhere, but waits for its moment. After all, childhood grievances and disappointments are remembered with pain even in old age, despite the passage of time (vacation, rest, adventures, positive moments, etc.).

When a person is tormented by “sick” thoughts, it is very difficult to think positively. You can play “I think positively” on the outside, but inside the cats are still scratching. And vice versa, if a person feels good at heart, then everything around him seems wonderful.

After all, if we could so easily reprogram our brains, as many authors claim, would we choose to suffer? Would we voluntarily suffer, tormented by thoughts of resentment and hatred, thoughts of treason and betrayal, illness and death? We would all voluntarily choose to think positively, because it is both pleasant and healthy. To change your thinking and program yourself to be positive, you need to “treat” your inner world (your soul).

3 main steps that will help you change your thinking and make your brain work positively:

1. Master basic meditation techniques. To begin with, it is enough to allocate 10 to 15 minutes for meditation. per day.
2. Use meditation to cleanse your astral body. What is the astral body, read in this article:
3. Remove harmful mental programs from your mental body. For more details, see here:

In modern knowledge, there is nothing except fiction on the topic of positivity. Because no “modern” or “ancient” methods, as they like to be called, make it possible to stop getting sick and understand yourself (your inner world) - only empty parting words about positive thinking.