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Asked by Chickenman3000 to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 17 Nov 2014.
Question: Is their a way that humans can use their brains full power?
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Clare Harding answered on 17 Nov 2014:
Humans do use all of their brains but not always all at once. I think that this confusion started with the difference between the gray matter and white matter. Gray matter contains all of the bodies of the neurons (like the flowers) while white matter is the axons (or stems). But both parts are essential for our brains to work. New studies using fMRI have shown that although in some specific tasks we only use small parts, in other complicated tasks, we use huge parts.
The biggest problems is not us using our brains, most people manage that! but in understanding how they work. There are more connections between the neurons in our brains than there are stars in the sky and so understanding how they all talk to each other would take more computing power than there currently is on the planet.
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Tora Smulders-Srinivasan answered on 17 Nov 2014:
I think the idea that humans don’t use all of their brains is a myth. But it is always good to ‘stretch’ your brain by learning new things! 🙂
Actually, in ageing, people who use their brains more as they grow older in solving problems & things like that don’t get things like dementia as much.
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Daniel Parsons answered on 17 Nov 2014:
Hi there,
This question relates to a long standing (now debunked theory) that humans only use 10% of their brain power – even Einstein though this to be true, but it is now known to be false.
The key lines of evidence for this is that – we know that if even very small areas of the brain is damaged in an accident then we loose function…if we were not using 90% of it then we should be unaffected by this most of the time, right? Additionally, brain scans show that nearly all parts of the brain are active – there is no part that is not doing something…..so we are actually using our brains at full(ish) power most of the time!
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