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Why use only 10% of your brainpower?
Think of all the things you could do with the 90% of your untapped brainpower.
You still hear people make the claim every now and then that we leave a lot of our brainpower unused and only use 10% of what we actually could be using. Its origins go back almost a century.
In 1936, journalist Lowell Thomas wrote the preface to a best-selling self-help book, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, in which he attributed the 10% claim to one of the most revered psychologists of all time, American William James (1842–1910). James, however, only once said that he doubted that average persons achieve more than about 10% of their intellectual potential, which was a wild claim on James’ part about an undefined term.
The unfortunate popularity of the claim that we only use 10% of our brainpower received boosts from the ever uncertain scientists who claimed — especially in the early days of psychology — that they didn’t know what 90% of the brain actually did.
In more recent years, neuroscience has shown that neurons are the cells that seem to do most of the hard work of our brains and that they only make up about 10% of our brains. Not that the other cells — like the supporting glial cells — are sitting idly by, but the 10% is — again — a very…
