100% Brain Power

10% or 100%

The Brain, such a fascinating organ, in it lies the power of memory, the ability to perceive and many more. Society and the scientific world has always had the notion that mankind does not use 100% of his brain capacity as demonstrated in science fiction movies like "Lucy", but a question can be asked what is really meant by 100% capacity??

There are many ways in which this can be explained, the first being that not every part of the brain is being utilized, that is to mean there are some parts of the brain that are not being used for its function the same way that certain parts of DNA (I.e. junk DNA) do not have a function or the better way to say this is that there are certain parts of DNA for which no function has been discovered yet. Is that what it means when "they" say humans don't use 100% of the brain capacity??

The second explanation would be that when the brain is performing one of its function not all of its capacity is used. This is the most widely accepted notion of our initial statement, using methods like Electroencephalography and Electrocorticography Neural oscillations (brainwaves) can be studied, brain waves are simply rhythmic or repetitive patterns of neural activity in the central nervous system. Neural tissue can generate oscillatory activity in many ways, driven either by mechanisms within individual neurons or by interactions between neurons. In experiments or diagnostic procedures, the brain waves are measured while an individual whose brain is being monitored can be told to do a task like tell a story, the purpose of the task is to stimulate brain function. As the individual is performing the task only certain parts of the brain "light up" or show activity, hence the origin of the myth that humans only use 10% of brain function.

The last understanding is that there is some hidden capacity that the brain has that humans do not utilize. This capacity has not fully been understood yet that is why it is not easy to unlock it. You cannot unlock a key if you don’t have a key, so the problem is not unlocking the door but the problem is finding the key.

Personal thoughts

1. The first understanding has a few problems because while some parts of the Brain haven't fully been understood, I haven't come across any literature yet that identifies any part of the brain as junk or lacking a function. Some surgeries have been performed where a part of the brain is removed "hemispherectomy” as in the case of Elena del Peral. But it must be understood that the brain has the capability of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire networks and reorganize cellular or neural function to take place somewhere else. The body is amazing and has the ability to adapt so just because the body can still live without one arm doesn’t mean that the arm is useless.

Elena del Peral

Shortly after her birth in 1992, Elena’s parents started to notice that she was favoring her right side. By the time she was a toddler, she was solely using her left arm to shimmy along the floor, with her right arm tucked in to her chest. Within 18 months she began to suffer severe seizures, and at age two she had a massive tonic-clonic episode while vacationing in the Adirondack Mountains. Desperate to determine what was causing these intractable seizures and the hemiparesis, her parents, Sonya and Casiano, jockeyed from specialist to specialist throughout the northeast.It turns out that Elena had suffered a left-sided congenital stroke in utero, which was sparking electric storms in her brain that spread from the diseased area across the corpus callosum—the great communicator between the two cerebral hemispheres—to the healthy right side of her brain. For the next four years, she took every epileptic medication in the book. They dulled her senses but didn’t stop the seizures.At age six, del Peral underwent a battery of tests including MRIs, EEGs, and CAT scans. A team including neurologists and neurosurgeons pored over the results. They said her condition fit the criteria for a rare surgery that seemed radical but had yielded promising results in the past for people like her. It was called a hemispherectomy: “hemisphere,” half the brain; “-ectomy,” surgically removing it. In short, they wanted to remove half of Elena’s brain.Dr. Howard Weiner, a pediatric neurosurgeon and professor of neurological surgery and pediatrics at the NYU Langone Medical Center and NYU School of Medicine, has been performing these types of surgeries on children for decades—including on Elena. He explained to mental_floss­ that when it comes to cases like hers, the normal part of the brain is impaired when it is bombarded by overly active impulses sent over from the damaged side. These children can suffer cognitive developmental impairment, partial paralysis, behavioral issues, social isolation, and a laundry list of other problems. Once that transmission is cut, the unharmed hemisphere can start functioning without all of that charged disruption.Soon after, Weiner performed a left-sided hemispherectomy on Elena, removing the left half of her brain. Recovery after a hemispherectomy is very positive. With aggressive occupational therapy and physical therapy, children can usually lead normal, productive lives. Elena recalls to mental_floss, “Things suddenly got easy. I became smart. I made friends. I became social. I just need a little extra help.

2. The second understanding is easy to dismiss because only logic can be applied. The brain has designated parts for specific functions and it comes to reason that if only one function is being performed by the brain then only a small part will light up or show activity. Of course there are certain parts of the brain that are always active (e.g breathing centers) and sometimes the brain shows more activities than others e.g. if an individual is performing a stress test and when an individual is sleeping. So the brain doesn't need to show activity everywhere because not all the brain is needed for particular tasks.

3. The third thought or understanding I agree with. There are certain cases that show exceptional brain capability. Now let’s take a look at a few cases which show extraordinary brain capability

Case A. Stephen Wiltshire

Stephen Wiltshire was born in London, England, in 1974 to Caribbean parents, his father, Colvin, was a native of Barbados, and his mother, Geneva, is a native of St. Lucia. He grew up in Little Venice, Maida Vale, London. Wiltshire was mute when young. At the age of three, he was diagnosed with autism. He is known for his ability to draw a landscape from memory after seeing it just once. In May 2005 Wiltshire produced his longest ever panoramic memory drawing of Tokyo on a 32.8-foot-long (10.0 m) canvas within seven days following a helicopter ride over the city.

Case B. Laurence Kim Peek

Peek was born in Salt Lake City, Utah with macrocephaly, damage to the cerebellum, and agenesis of the corpus callosum, a condition in which the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain is missing; in Peek's case, secondary connectors such as the anterior commissure were also missing. There is speculation that his neurons made unusual connections due to the absence of a corpus callosum, resulting in an increased memory capacity. According to Peek's father, Fran (Francis) Peek, Kim was able to memorize things from the age of 16–20 months. He read books, memorized them, and then placed them upside down on the shelf to show that he had finished reading them, a practice he maintained all his life. He could speed through a book in about an hour and remember almost everything he had read, memorizing vast amounts of information in subjects ranging from history and literature, geography and numbers to sports, music and dates. Peek read by scanning the left page with his left eye, then the right page with his right eye. According to an article in The Times newspaper, he could accurately recall the contents of at least 12,000 books. Peek lived in Murray, Utah, and spent a considerable amount of his time reading at the Salt Lake City Library and demonstrating his capabilities at schools, with great help from his father.

Case C. Alonzo Clemons

Clemons suffered a severe brain injury as a child that left him with a developmental disability (with an IQ in the 40-50 range), but able to create very accurate animal sculptures out of clay. Clemons can create a sculpture of almost any animal, even if he has seen only a glimpse of it. He is also able to create a realistic and anatomically accurate three-dimensional rendering of an animal after only looking at a two-dimensional image for mere moments. He is most well-known for his life-size renderings of a horse, but most of his works are smaller, and accomplished in less than an hour.

Case D. Shakuntala Devi

Shakuntala Devi was born in Bangalore, Karnataka to an orthodox Kannada Brahmin family. Her father rebelled against becoming a temple priest and instead joined a circus where he worked as a trapeze artist, lion tamer, tightrope walker, and magician. He discovered his daughter's ability to memorize numbers while teaching her a card trick when she was about three years old. Her father left the circus and took her on road shows that displayed her ability at calculation. She did this without any formal education. At the age of six, she demonstrated her arithmetic abilities at the University of Mysore. In 1977, at Southern Methodist University, she gave the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds. Her answer—546,372,891—was confirmed by calculations done at the US Bureau of Standards by the UNIVAC 1101 computer, for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation. On 18 June 1980, she demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers—7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779—picked at random by the Computer Department of Imperial College London. She correctly answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds. This event was recorded in the 1982 Guinness Book of Records. Writer Steven Smith said, "the result is so far superior to anything previously reported that it can only be described as unbelievable.

Most of these individuals with these exceptional capabilities have been diagnosed with one brain condition or the other, so are these capabilities mare anomalies of nature or maybe nature is trying to tell us something about the vast capability of the brain?... these individuals are freaks they are not normal, but wait… what is normal?? Normal is a relative term, so we shouldn’t be asking the question to say what is wrong with these individuals. The better question would be what is wrong with “us”, why aren’t we able to do what they can do, we are the abnormal ones because every capability that we do not have disadvantages us. Imagine if every individual on earth had the memory of Kim, the eyes of Stephen or the brain of Devi, what kind of society would we live in if we all could exercise such brain power.

Do humans use 100% of their brain capacity ?? far from it, the extremes of nature tell us a different story. We should define what is meant by using 100% of our capability of course. The human brain is amazing and has a designer, a perfect Designer even though humanity has over the past 100s of years been battered by disease and infirmities that seem to lower the capabilities of mankind, nature reminds us of what we are capable of or meant to be capable of. The brain is faster than the fastest computer, has a memory capacity that is limitless and in it are a lot of mysteries that need to be unrevealed.