90% of Your Brain: Difference between revisions
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* 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), an adult who had half their brain removed in adulthood would not be able to function properly.
* 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.
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