That Thing Called "Potential"

There’s a popular belief that we use only 10% of our brain capacity. This belief, as the authors of The Invisible Gorilla point out, has become the “staple of advertisements, self-help books, and comedy routines”.

 

The authors tear into this belief. First, there’s no known way to measure the brain’s “capacity”. Conversely, we don’t have any techniques to measure what fraction is actually used by any individual. Second, it’s a fact that if parts of the brain tissues don’t show any activity for extended periods of time, then they die. Till date, we haven’t found or seen any way in which such dead tissues ever getting revived. How then, if that 90% hasn’t been used all your life, would you even resuscitate it? Lastly, the brain consumes a huge amount of the energy we produce/consume, and it needs a lot of oxygen. If most of that brain is non-functional, then evolution would have chipped away at its size by now. After all, wastefulness aside, the size of our human brains causes our skulls to be so disproportionally huge, in turn making it hard for the baby to pass through the birth canal. Surely, evolution would not allow such useless (even worse, dangerous to baby and mother) lumps to continue to exist for so long.

 

Why then is this belief so appealing? Because it gives hope:

“If we use only 10 percent of our brain, there must be another 90 percent waiting to be put to work, if we can just figure out how.”

And while hope can often be a very positive thing, it can also be misplaced in which case it results in what the authors call the “illusion of potential”.