"Though an alluring idea, the "10 percent myth" is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Although there's no definitive culprit to pin the blame on for starting this legend, the notion has been linked to the American psychologist and author William James, who argued in The Energies of Men that "We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources." It's also been associated with to Albert Einstein, who supposedly used it to explain his cosmic towering intellect. The myth's durability, Gordon says, stems from people's conceptions about their own brains: they see their own shortcomings as evidence of the existence of untapped gray matter. This is a false assumption. " http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=people-only-use-10-percent-of-brain
Apparently, people with half sized brain can be normal: http://www.cpsimoes.net/index.php?o...in-anomaly&catid=35:noutras-linguas&Itemid=59 The brains of modern people are roughly 1371 cc (male), and 1216 cc (female). "20. One report of normal intelligence exists in a brain smaller than Homo erectus. According to Burt Wilder (1911), Daniel Lyon was a nonretarded white watchman who worked for 20 years at the end of the nineteenth century in New York at the Pennsylvania Railway Terminal. He could read, write, and according to legal representatives of the company that employed him 'there was nothing defective or peculiar about him, either mentally or physically'. He was of average weight 65.8 kg though of below average high 1.55 m. After he died aged 46 in 1907 from bronchitis his brain was removed and subject to a professional autopsy with 'accurate scales'. This found it weighed just 680 grams (624 cc assuming a specific gravity of 1.09 for fresh brain)." Small brained people can be smart too: "the brain of the Noble Prize winning novelist Anatole France (1844-1924) weighted 1017 grams (933 cc) at post mortuum..." And half of your brain can be removed, no problem: "a male who started to become paralysed on the right side at five months, having seizures at three years and at five and half years of age had his left hemisphere removed. In spite of this, he went to a normal school, learned to play the baritone horn and even became a member of his high school band. At 26, he was working as an 'industrial executive (traffic controller)' having completed 'his senior year at a prominent Midwestern university with a dual major in sociology and business adminstration'. His full IQ at that time was 116 (WAIS verbal IQ, 126; performance IQ, 102)."
your brain is like a motor that produces chemicals to send psuedo electric current through it so the left and right can send and receive signals to each other and all parts of the body and senses,it's not the size ,it's the amount of chemical synapses produced up there, the activity..dementia is a slowing of the activity
My link has nothing to do with size. It's addressing the oft-repeated myth that we only use 10% of our brains. It's an old wive's tale. Kind of like the oft-repeated myth that Emergency Rooms are way busier on nights of the full moon. Or that lemmings commit mass-suicide.....the list goes on
I read somewhere that the myth came from some brain experiments on rats. A scientist was able to cut out up to 90% of the rat's brain without killing it. It definitely did not function like a normal rat. Essentially, we can survive with only 10% of our brain. People eventually warped the findings into the "we only use 10% of our brain" theory.