I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
Nope. Not sure how old this myth is (1890s) but it’s ultimately due to misunderstanding about the function of parts of the brain. Subtle functions were missed and this made scientists believe that certain areas were not utilised! Back in those days, imaging machines (eg MRI) that can be used to look at brain activity weren’t around. When such machines became available, we saw that the entire human brain is active and functioning.
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There’s days when I think I’m only using 20% of my brain power, but Yashar is right, we use most of it to do the things we do every day!
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Things that use lots of energy are usually not wasted in the human body. If you didn’t use your brain, evolution would quickly take care of the unnecessary parts and they would vanish in future generations. Instead, our brains are getting bigger. Obviously, they are necessary and heavily used!
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Hi asimmon1 and convictions- the others have answered it nicely (and I agree with Hannah 20% is genenrous, 10% at max for me some days!)
Your brain is alive so is constantly active but the areas which are used for specific processes ie. thinking, controlling heart rate, emotion, motor coordination, vision, hearing, language processing, etc. may be more active/less active depending on what you are doing.
I’ve heard that a fifth (20%) of your glucose/sugar intake from a meal is used by the brain (and also a fifth just for your eyes- is that right Yashar?) but definitely not that only part of our brain is ever in use.
Hope that helps to answer your question!
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This is an interesting question because there are two answers.
It is true that we use all the parts of our brain at various times. We can see brain cells firing in all regions of the brain at all times. So the brain never really switches off.
However, the brain becomes more and less active depending on what you are doing. Scientists can measure the amount of energy the brain is using with a machine called a PET scanner. A PET scanner can measure glucose metabolism. Glucose is the sugar our brain cells use when they are active and metabolism is what we call the process of our brain cells working. So, using a PET scanner we can measure how much sugar is being used by our brain when we are doing something versus doing nothing. Scientists have shown that difficult mental activities like solving puzzles or studying use a lot of sugar.
Theoretically we could be using our brains a lot more all the time but we have a problem that we would use too much energy. So while it is true that we use our entire brain, we rarely use our brain’s full capacity.
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