Question: is it true that we only use 10% of our brain?

Ian van der Linde answered on 11 Jun 2011:

This is most definitely NOT true. It’s an urban myth, a bit like the theory that eating cheese before bedtime giving you nightmares!

All regions of our brain have a specific function, and we recruit those regions during activities that need the functions they provide.

What is true is that at ANY PARTICULAR TIME we might be using a relatively small fraction of our brains (for example, when we are asleep), but all parts of the brain are useful for something AT SOME TIME. For example, to play football, we need to recruit visual centres (for seeing the ball, pitch and other players), motor centres (for controlling our muscles), centres associated with memory (to remember tactics and techniques), face recognition centres (for recognising our team-mates), and many many more! However, we won’t be using the centres involved in our sense of smell very much!

Evolution doesn’t generate parts of the body that don’t do anything — if 90% of our brains didn’t ever do anything useful, then we wouldn’t have evolved big brains in the first place because they consume lots of resources (like calories!).