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Comment by whiddershins | Hacker News Reader

For example, many people today believe that we only use 10% of our brain.

But it wouldn’t be fair to say that’s what our “culture” believes to be true.

It is true in the sense that we only use about 10%, at any given time, for some definitions of percent. People just fail to understand that the other 90% is just not useful, rather than unused potential.

Is it even usable at same time? There is some level of plasticity, but in general certain parts activate for certain tasks and you can't really make it use more parts at one time.

Your brain can definitely get bursts of more activity, it's not desirable though. They are called seizures.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/seizure/sympt...

That is news to me and interesting. Do you have a citation or link to share?

"people only use about 2% of the volume of their house at any given time"

scientists distinguished function of different regions in our brain, so human doesn't need to use all region is a more obvious idea now.

I can't recommend literature, a probably source is in medical textbook.

I thought bullshit too. After all, why would chemical reactions in the brain stop? But after a bit of thinking and Googling, I stumbled upon this

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/aug/energy-demands-limit-our...

Not saying that only X% of our brain is being used, but what it essentially says is that our brain is power-limited, and therefore, it has to be selective in which parts to "turn on". It makes a lot of sense, there are few things in life more important than energy and power management, and human brains already need lots of both.

We have a word for what happens when people "use 100% of their brain".

We call that an epileptic seizure. :)

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