90% of Your Brain: Difference between revisions
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* 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), an adult who had half their brain removed in adulthood
* 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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20080506104856/http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Features/Columns/?article=BNBrainCapacity here].
** 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.
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