Humans only use approximately 10% of their brain?

And they ignored factors that did not correlate with g.Not good science, at all.

Not science, at all.Edited by Pressie, : Erased the word "even" I inserted between the words "Not" and "science".

Larni.
My wife is way smaller than me. Her features are tiny. I guess that she has a smaller cranial capacity than me (with that cute little head of hers); but, boy, is she so much more intelligent than me!

The suggestion is that the female brain is able to develop more conncetions than the male brain or that the connections are more efficient.By that I mean using less tissue to get the job done: a bit like a road network that has the most efficient use of building materials to get you where you need to go.I've always suspected that men think in straight lines where as women can think around corners (maybe one of my less scientific ideas).

I don't know. Never studied any kind of brain (I'm a geologist after all, I study rocks). What you say might be true!From my point of view, with the fossils we've discovered, it seems like the average brain capacity of our ancestors to modern Homo Sapiens is just one of the indicators of our emergence. We also have to look at the rest of the body. I think we have to look at the proportions of brains to the rest of the body, too. That's what those pesty paleontologists have been doing for some time now. They've discovered this years ago. The creationists hate facts like this. They always want to be special.Then you also talk about brain connections. Never thought of that before this thread! Isn't it so much easier to say "Goddidit" and don't have to think about it?Edited by Pressie, : Added a paragraph

*Reving up a chainsaw* What 90% do you think i can cut out?Its a myth like god I think the mythbusters also tacled this one and even when we do nothing and think of nothing we use more then 10% of our brain.

I always took the 10% claim to be an off the cuff rhetorical remark of Einstein's that referred to undeveloped mental skills and was never literally about brain function. It's always been a bit bemusing to me that many people took it literally, as if Einstein's genius extended to brain physiology. Whether Einstein was repeating something from elsewhere that may have been more literal... I'm not aware of it but it's possible.

How did Einstein come into this?

Einstein has been attributed with saying most people only use 10% of their brain which was the context in which I first heard it. It may have been a misquote but the attribution persists and still crops up. I had the impression his remark, (real or media hyped) helped embed the idea in the public psyche.In any case I always took it to be a figure of speech, not assertion of physical fact.Edited by Ken Fabos, : No reason given.

total size is actually less important than surface area.If the brain were like a grape, size would be the only factor. Instead, though, the brain is like a raisin with ridges and valleys. The more wrinkles, the more surface area. A small but very wrinkly brain could easily have more surface area than a brain many times it's size.

You are right, of course.Brain mass is not an incredibly accurate measure within species.I seem to recall people with Autism tend to have more brain mass but it is arrayed in a less efficient manner (more roads to get to the destination and so forth).No idea whether that's true or my faulty memory, though.

He probably meant that we dont "train" our brains very well and that our capacity for learning understanding reasoning and so forth could be much grater if we actually use our brains once in a while If you compare the brain to a muscle if you dont use it it becomes weak if you use it like some train their muscles to become like Schwarzenegger your mental capacity could be 10 times grater.

According to howstuffworks.com, the origin of this myth dates to early experiments on brain function in the 19th century. Researchers simulated different parts of brains to see what happened, and noted that simulating certain parts would elicit a response from certain muscles. Experimenting this way, they figured out what about 10% of the brain was involved in.If this is true, then it appears that about 10% of the brain is involved in motor function directly, the rest it took us longer to figure out. They have a source for this little fact, but the link is broken, so I've no idea how reliable the information is.

Yeah, that's pretty similar to what I heard; that thinking uses around 10% but all the 'under the bonnet" work was not easily seen till modern times.

Wrong. Thats a myth. Humans use all of their brains.