“We only use 10% of our brain capacity”, a quote erroneously attributed to Albert Einstein, is actually a fallacy without any scientific basis , which is used by certain spiritualist doctrines such as Scientology to accommodate supposed psychic powers. still latent or to an excessive potential intelligence. A statement that, however, does not appear in the books of psychology or physiology of the brain, and that has been repeatedly denied by neuroscience during the last decades.
The human brain consumes 14 percent of the body’s total energy despite constituting only 3 percent of it. Although this figure may seem small, comparatively speaking, we are macrocephalic (we would be even more so were it not for the folded structure of the cerebral cortex). For this reason, we leave the womb before we are fully prepared to survive on our own; if we continue to develop inside it, our head would not pass through the cervix. Its size is costly for survival, since it can put the lives of the mother and the child at risk during childbirth. From an evolutionary point of view, it makes no sense to take such a risk and then waste 90 percent of its potential capacity.
It is likely that this myth arose from a misinterpretation of neurological research carried out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , such as those of Pierre Flourens or William James, who in their essay “The energies of men” (1907) He wrote: “We only take advantage of a small part of our mental and physical resources.” The same could happen with the work of the psychologist Karl Lashley in the 1930s; In his experiments with rats, he removed large areas of the cerebral cortex and found that they could still relearn specific tasks.
The confusion may also be due to the fact that neurons make up only 10 percent of brain cells ; the rest are glial cells that, despite being involved in learning, exercise the support function of the former.
