• Question: Why can we acess 10% of our brain

    Asked by im slow to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 20 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Lydia Bach

      Lydia Bach answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      Hey!

      That’s actually a myth and not true. Over the day we actually use a good 100% of our brain, mostly for body functioning rather than super creative and intelligent thinking.

      Although there are some myths and rumours around that very intelligent and gifted people like Einstein had different brains in terms of size and how they look like (regular or irregular). Einsteins brain was removed only 8 hours after his death and weight, photographed and dissected. (They are not sure if Einstein was ok with this to happen!). Some of the scientists back in the day thought his brain looked different, like had more brain cells in some areas compared to non genius brains and also better connections between the two brain halves. Some people don’t think that these differences are that obvious.

      Mind you, we still are not sure how brain cells work together and function and there is still a lot to learn about the brain and potential to unlock!

    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      I’m not sure how this myth got about in the first place, but it’s just not true. We use all of our brains most of the time. Believe me, if you were only using 10% of your brain, you wouldn’t enjoy it :p

      We’re not totally sure what makes one person cleverer than another at something, but we do know it’s got something to do with the way all the brain cells connect to each other. People who are very good at something will often have a lot more connections between cells in the part of the brain that’s associated with that activity. But that’s not always true, so we can’t say “it’s definitely the amount of connections between brain cells”. We probably need to look at how those areas of the brain connect with others as well.

      That’ll take a long time to figure out though: The average brain is a network of about 100 billion neurons, with 10-50 times as many cells providing structure and resources. The brain is the most complicated network we’ve ever discovered, the internet is tiny by comparison. 🙂

Comments