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{{trope|wppage=Ten_percent_of_brain_myth}}
[[File:jojobrain 6760.png|thumb|link=[[JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
{{quote|''"[This myth is] one of the hardiest weeds in the garden of psychology."''
|'''Donald McBurney''', neuropsychologist.}}
Situation where a character's miraculous abilities are not so much a product of "superpowers" as it being an ability humans in the series universe could have but are unable to access for some reason. That is, until they reach [[Brain Critical Mass]]. Very prevalent in [[Sci Fi]] as a common trope with mentalists and ESP'ers.
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For exceeding the limitations of the body to epic effect, see [[Charles Atlas Superpower]]. Also see [[Pineal Weirdness]], which tends to show up in similar places.
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Akira]]'' has Tetsuo and the Espers, who have crazy mental abilities due to this trope. It's implied that the rest of humanity has the same potential, but it goes unrealized.
* The ''Night Head Genesis'' anime states at the start that normal people leave ''70%'' of their brain unused. Once again, this explains psychic powers.
* ''[[Fist of the North Star]]'' does something similar with ''breathing''. The real secret to Kenshiro's [[Charles Atlas Superpower]] is harnessing the traditionally untapped 70% of his breathing. The Ripple in ''[[JoJo's Bizarre Adventure]]'' works that way, too.
* The Stone Mask-created [[Our Vampires Are Different|vampires]] in ''[[JoJo's Bizarre Adventure]]'' gain their power through the activation of unused parts of the brain via acupuncture. This awakens the human's evolutionary potential (with abilities like [[Wall Crawling]], liquid eye beams, superspeed/strength, regeneration, sucking blood through their fingers, and creating zombies) and it inverts the lifeforce energy in their bodies (making them undead-like beings weak to sunlight and [[Battle Aura|Ripple]], the amplified essence of life)
* Played straight in ''[[
* ''[[Mobile Suit Gundam]]'''s Universal Century:
** ''[[Chars Counterattack|Char's Counterattack]]'' (where it is mentioned) may use this explanation for why [[Psychic Powers|Newtypes]] exist—that people used only a part of their brains on Earth, and began to use the rest after moving into space. However, it was said to be "half" of the brain being used, not 10%. Also the conversation was between a couple of teenagers, so they may simply not know what they're talking about (they also take a fairly romantic interpretation of the idea/purpose of Newtypes, which Gundam [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism|goes back and forth on)]].
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** This is in turn based on the writings Timothy Leary, specifically the 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness which predicted that people's brains would develop in new ways in the future, becoming more enlightened to cope with the challenges of space travel.
* The foundation of superpowers in ''[[NEEDLESS]]''.
* In an episode of ''[[Katekyo Hitman Reborn]]'', Reborn gives Gokudera a unique brand of [[Training from Hell]] by making him eat ramen while withstanding I-pin's Gyoza-ken. Reborn's technical explanation is that, since the Gyoza-ken
* This is part of the premise for ''[[Psyren]]''. Like many others, this explains psychic powers, though they seem no less limited than any other set of superpowers in other series.
== Comic Books ==
* Deathstroke, a.k.a. Slade, from ''[[Teen Titans (Comic Book)|Teen Titans]]'', has this as one of his powers (though it's not stated outright in the series, only the comics). Later retconned in that he uses his brain in various ways that regular humans do not. Basically, his grey matter got re-routed and reprogrammed. Makes slightly more sense - at least in terms of comic book science.
* According to Todd Ingram in ''[[Scott Pilgrim]]'', ninety percent of your brain is filled up with curds and whey. Hence his [[It Runs on Nonsensoleum|telekinetic vegan power]]. Arguably an aversion, though, as Todd is shown to be the dimmest and least imaginative of the League of Evil Exes. While it is canon that veganism gives psychic powers in the Pilgrim universe, Todd's explanation comes off more like a thinly-veiled insult, and Kim in particular seems skeptical.
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== Film ==
* This is part of the plot of the 1986 film ''[[Flight of the Navigator]]'', where a young boy discovers an alien probe had experimented with using the unused ninety percent of his brain for [[Neuro Vault|data storage.]]
{{quote|'''Max:''' Back on Phaelon, we discovered that your inferior species uses only ten percent of your brain. So we filled it all the way up with star charts to see what would happen.
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== Literature ==
* [[Tortall Universe
▲* [[Tortall Universe|Daine]] makes a reference to this in Wolf-Speaker while sharing the mind of a wolf whose brain was changed by association to her magic: "Numair had said, in an anatomy lesson, that humans used little of their brains... For Brokefang the difference was that each nook and cranny of his skull was packed with ideas."
* The [[Douglas Adams]] book ''[[The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul]]'' plays with this: a character in a coma has a dream in which her mind is represented by an infinite collection of cabin trunks, of which ten percent contain past memories, and the remaining ninety percent contain [[Everything's Better with Penguins|penguins]].
* Subverted during the climax of [[Jim Butcher]]'s ''[[The Dresden Files|White Night]]''. Harry Dresden's mental passenger Lasciel temporarily over-clocks his brain in order to gain additional time to react to a threat. It is made clear that this is a very Bad Idea and will likely result in brain damage if done for an extended period of time.
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* The [[Doctor Who Expanded Universe]] novel ''The Gallifrey Chronicles'' comes ''very close'' to getting this right ... but doesn't.
{{quote|There was an old myth that humans only used ten percent of their brains. This was a simple misunderstanding. Give or take, there was activity in every part of the human brain. But the physical structures were capable of ten times the activity they performed. It wasn't that a human being had a brain like a house with nine tenths of the rooms sealed off, it was more like a road network wasn't carrying as much traffic as they were designed to carry.}}
* In ''[[
{{quote|It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to [[Brain Food|serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys]]. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.
Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by [[The Stoner|certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected]]. They’d say “Wow!” a lot. And no one would do much work. }}
* The protagonist of ''[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32272/32272-h/32272-h.htm Insidekick]'' by J. F. Bone develops psi powers (telepathy and teleportation), plus eidetic memory, after being invaded by a symbiote which activates a "large dormant portion" of his brain.
* In [[Stephen King]]'s ''Cell'', the people who are hit by the Pulse lose almost all of their higher level reasoning skills. After this, {{spoiler|they slowly regain higher level thought, but they use unusual parts of their brain to do it, resulting in them developing telepathy and eventually telekinesis}}. Granted, this is just a theory in-Universe, but the "we only use ten percent of our brains" myth gets thrown around a lot by some highly educated people.
* In ''Beneath The Dark Ice'', the protagonist's superhuman abilities are thought to have come from when he was shot in the head in a way that forced the brain to direct more blood to the areas of the brain with the most 'unknown functions'. How this accounts for super strength and endurance is not obvious.
* The Mule from ''[[Foundation]]'' could use an intellect [[Explosive Overclocking]] power on others (cause intuition and creativity to skyrocket, but has bad effects on the one it is used on). The way it is described, it seemed less about using new parts of the brain, and more about using all of it ''non-stop'' without any chance to rest for weeks on end, but he, himself, mentioned a normally low efficiency (20%) as an explanation. This, of course, could be attributed him having "education, that of the tramp worlds, and the backwash alleys of space."
* In Asimov's ''[[Pebble in the Sky]]'', the main character, who has inadvertently been pulled forward from our time to that of the novel, during the Galactic Empire period that leads up to the Foundation books, gets an experimental "Synapsifier" treatment in the hope it will help him learn the language. It does that and more ... he starts becoming telepathic, and strongly enough so that at one point he kills one of the bad guys that way, without even intending to.
* This is a big part of the plot of the ''[[My Teacher Is an Alien]]'' series. In the second installment, one boy, a school bully of below-average intelligence, has his brain "fried" to make him a genius and a telepath. In the third, the aliens remove the protagonist's brain temporarily to study it. The reason is that humans have the most powerful, yet under-used, brains in the galaxy, and the aliens are trying to figure out why we suppress our supposedly vast mental powers.
** {{spoiler|It's part of our unconscious [[Hive Mind]]. Turns out we used to use it all, but as humanity spread the sheer amount of psychic chatter overwhelmed the conscious mind, and so humans suppress it to stay sane}}.
* This is one of the major things that separate immortals like Daetrin from the Marra in ''[[The Madness Season]]''. When Daetrin transforms into a wolf, brain scans show him to have neural processes similar to those of a wolf. When Marra does the same thing, her entire brain is lit up, which the scientists exclaim would be impossible normally.
== Live
* Johnny's powers in the television version of ''[[The Dead Zone]]'' come from the fact that a normally unused part of his brain became active to compensate for a damaged section.
* Referred to in the [[Premiere]] of ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'' as an example of one way humanity might make a sudden evolutionary leap, but then mercifully dropped. Only to be brought back up in season three, in a speech by Sylar.
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* Disproven on ''[[MythBusters]]'', Tory's brain scans showed him using 15-30% of his brain, depending on what he was doing.
== Tabletop Games ==▼
* ''[[Trinity Universe (game)|Aberrant]]'' uses this as part of the [[Meta Origin]] for novas. Most humans have an underdeveloped, uncharted node in their brain that maps the background forces of the universe. When a nova Erupts, this node becomes active, allowing for limited manipulation of reality—a.k.a., superpowers.▼
== Video Games ==
* In ''[[Chaos;Head]]'', Norose muses that Gigalomaniacs use the remaining 90% of their brain unlike normal humans, and this is responsible for their abilities. And possibly even worse, it's also stated that 80% of the brain is used for processing visual data.
▲== Tabletop Games ==
▲* ''[[Trinity Universe (game)|Aberrant]]'' uses this as part of the [[Meta Origin]] for novas. Most humans have an underdeveloped, uncharted node in their brain that maps the background forces of the universe. When a nova Erupts, this node becomes active, allowing for limited manipulation of reality—a.k.a., superpowers.
== Web Comics ==
* ''[[Casey and Andy]]'' examines this, thanks to [http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=369 Anti-Stupid Science Man!]
* Parodied in ''[[Scary Go Round]]'', [http://scarygoround.com/?date=20030226 here].
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== Web Original ==
* ''[[Cracked.com]]'''s [http://www.cracked.com/article_16241_the-6-most-frequently-quoted-bullsh2At-statistics.html The 6 Most Frequently Quoted BS Statistics] compares this notion to becoming a better writer by using every key on your keyboard in every sentence.
** Which also happens to be the premise of ''The Daily Pangram''.
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'''Torqumada''': No, because that's a ridiculous urban myth.
'''Thande''': Shut up, I'm trying to [[Lies to Children|explain something]] to the unscientific Muggles here. }}
* Deconstructed with [[SCP Foundation|SCP]]-[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1475 1475], a scientific that after a non-reproducible procedure got the complete, 100% control of his brain and nervous system, [[Blessed with Suck|at the expenses of]] having lost his autonomic nervous control (read, the body ability to self-regulate the internal organs), meaning that now he has to stay awake all the time concentrated in keeping himself alive. The author of this one wrote it due to [[Pet Peeve Trope|their hatred for this trope]].
== Western Animation ==
* Parodied in ''[[The Simpsons]]'' when Bart becomes ultra-focused after taking medication for attention deficit disorder: "You know how most people use only ten percent of their brains? [[Trivially Obvious|I am now one of those people.]]"
* The ''[[Batman Beyond]]'' episode "Mind Games" has an [[Unreliable Expositor]] claim this to explain psychic powers.
== Real Life ==
* [[Truth in Television]] to an extent; humans can still function (though not to full capacity, obviously) if parts of their brains are removed. Most notably, the practice of lobotomizing criminals was considered a humane alternative to the death penalty for quite some time. Splitting the corpus callosum (the tissue connecting the two hemispheres of the brain) was a common cure for seizures in the 70s (and is still occasionally done in severe enough cases);<ref>Disconnecting the two sides of the brain prevent the seizure from spreading to both hemispheres and limits the severity of the episode.</ref> the side-effects only occur in very specific, usually engineered scenarios, and even then are much preferable to the seizures in the first place. Removing a damaged hemisphere can even result in a significant ''improvement'' in cognitive function.
** [
* One source of the myth itself (of many possible ones) is a series of experiments done on rodents in whch the poor creatures had large parts of their brains burned away but could still run a particular maze. However, all this proves is that memory is distributed in the brain rather than localized; the rodents still lost other functions. Besides, mice aren't men.
* Approximately 90% of cells in the brain are not actually neurons, but glial helper cells that keep the neurons alive and functioning. So only 10% of the cells are used directly; the other 90% are vital to keeping that 10% healthy and alive.
* The famous [[wikipedia:Phineas Gage|Phineas Gage]] had a railroad spike driven through his brain, causing massive damage to his frontal lobes. Besides being the logic center of your brain, the frontal lobe also controls your personality. He recovered and his memories and abilities were intact, but his friends said he was "no longer Gage" - he lost his moral compass and was much more irritable, profane, and dishonest. (To be fair, who ''wouldn't'' be incredibly irritable after having an iron spike driven through their head?)
* Dolphins and other cetaceans have adapted to function actively while 50% of their cerebrum is ''asleep''. This is good, since their breathing is entirely under conscious control, and total loss of consciousness thus equals suffocation.
** Some birds can also have half their brain asleep while the other half keeps watch for danger from one eye.
** Research has shown that humans sleeping in an unfamiliar place have one half of the brain sleeping more lightly than usual, while the other half is fully asleep. That's one reason to stay in bed longer on your next camping trip.
* As the ''savant'' phenomenon proves, people don't use their brains to their full efficiency. We have potential for far greater mathematical prowess that we normally demonstrate in practice. There have been even a few instances where people have received minor brain damage, and retained most of their faculties quite intact, but gained some ''savant'' like skills such as counting dates hundreds of years forward, although they were not as advanced as full savants. Of course, savantism generally has mental disorders attached and what they're talented at is extremely limited. Maybe it's best our brains are a 'jack of all trades' rather than focusing all its time [[Rain Man|counting cards]].
** These are not necessarily a "more efficient use of your brain", just a different one.
* There was a girl who had half her brain gone. The left hemisphere was just not there. So far she seems to be living a fairly normal life with a fairly normal, if quirky, degree of intellect.
** While half of the brain can be removed in a young child and they can still live a fairly normal life due to the other half compensating (due to the symmetrical design)
* May have originated when we only ''knew the function of'' (some small percentage) of the brain, and that got misreported as "We only ''use'' (some small percentage) of our brain." Areas having to do with other than motor control or sensations are now called "association areas", and they have a role in interpreting, integrating, and acting on sensory input in combination with stored memories. Higher brain functions, in other words. In the same way that your house has only a fraction of its rooms being actively used at any given time, only a fraction - a rather large one - of your brain is active at any given moment - but, as with the house, that doesn't mean the rest isn't useful. The history of this trope is fairly well outlined in the free first chapter of [http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047143499X.html this book]. Furthermore, Bill Nye (y'know, [[Bill Nye the Science Guy|the Science Guy]]) wrote a fairly accessible essay on the subject [
** It's been shown that the ability to interpret and integrate sensory input takes a large amount of processing power from the brain. Octopuses, with their eight arms, have to give up complete control of their arms just to use them all at once. And even then, they still can't form a mental image of whatever it is their arms might be holding.
** TL;DR: We do use all of our brain, it's just that most of it is for things like autonomic maintenance and high-def sensory processing rather than higher reasoning functions.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Hollywood Psych]]
[[Category:Did Not Do the Research]]
[[Category:Artistic License Biology]]
[[Category:Magic and Powers]]
▲[[Category:90% of Your Brain]]
[[Category:Tropes Examined by the Mythbusters]]
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