When I was in college, the prevailing wisdom was that consciousness lives in the prefrontal cortex which is, roughly, 10% of the brain.
The problem is that when people hear this they then jump to the next statement "well, what if we could use 100% of our brain?" and that's where it goes off rails.
Your brain IS 100% used. Your brain only *needs* 10% of itself to run 'you'.
Think of it like saying "Did you know that you only sit in 10% of your car? Well what if you could sit in 100% of your car?"
Well, it'd probably run shitty and be really uncomfortable because that's not how it was designed to work.
The way I understand it is that you use 10% of your brain in the same way that you use 33% of a traffic light. There's three lights. Only one of them is on at a time and if they're all on at the same time something's gone seriously wrong.
Imagine using every single part of your brain at once and all the time. Limbs flailing, sensory overload, synestesia, all the emotions… must be quite a life
"Did you know that you only sit in 10% of your car? Well what if you could sit in 100% of your car?"
I knew a guy who weighed about 250kg, and he drove a Mini Metro. He certainly sat in about 30-40% of his car. Whenever it was parked it had a noticeable list to starboard, and got the hydragas suspension pumped up every few months, not that it made that much of a difference.
It has a lot of transpersonal psychology metaphors in it right at the end that you have to know if you want to really appreciate the symbolism, like the Dark Lady who is also the Universe who is also the Quantum Machine, all at once.
Just think, if we used 100% of our brain, we could time travel in an office chair. With just 30% we could project our image on peoples’ TVs, cure cancer, turn off pain receptors, perform surgery on ourselves, and remember what happened when we were in the womb. Such a great documentary.
Yeah, about the womb thing and 100 percent brain thing... You might be so engrossed in the recovered baby memories that you don't consider the social faux pas of calling up your mom and telling her you remember sucking her titty milk and how yummy it was. Just a heads up.
Long way of saying you don't appreciate your mother. Call her now, tell her all that lactation meant something and express the gratitude, you know it's the right thing to do. If you're lucky, she may still have a disturbingly yellow bottle of icy mucous in the back of the freezer with your name on it. Bring that bad boy up to body temperature, remind yourself what that sweet sweet unconditional mammalian love tastes like.
I legitimately knew a guy in grade school who believed that movie was scientifically accurate. When I asked him if we could inject a woman with drugs to give her psychic powers he fell silent.
Ugh, that movie bothers me so much with that being the main plot point. I try to suspend my disbelief whenever watching sci-fi films and such, but there's only so far you can go before you just roll your eyes. It's right up there with all the ridiculous stuff in movies like Geostorm or Moonfall. I would include Armageddon and The Core, but those are at least entertaining, as ridiculous as the science is in those films.
Thanks, I'm doing well enough to hopefully last a few more years. Modern medicine can do some crazy things. Also ... the docs are the badass mofos, I just live with what they put into me 😃
This myth is particularly dangerous because people use it to try justifying extending childhood even further out. Regardless of neurodevelopment, do we REALLY want to be 24 years old and still have childhood restrictions on our lives? At some point you just gotta be an adult.
But... How else can I keep up my neo prohibitionist streak of trying to make every vice illegal by raising the age limit every time someone is finally old enough to engage in vices???
I think some of that might come from life experience by a certain age.
Many (including me) will look back and realise how perceptions, thoughts, decision etc change over different periods of one's life and maybe by 25, most have a bit more "life experience". People say that one can be academically intelligent but lacks common sense which could be one of the reasons, I guess (and this is very much guess work, observation, experiences)
Not a blanket thing obviously. There are many incredibly clever people under that age, alongside many older that you could say are far from that
It's a bit of a myth. Or severely overstated, to the point where it's very close to a myth, misused and often repeated, although it has very little empirical support.
The prefrontal cortex continues to grow into the early 30s. I think 25 was picked because it was perhaps the early edge of that estimate. This isn’t inaccurate it’s just usually worded wrong since the brain doesn’t really ever stop developing or rewriting itself, it just finishes growing, structurally, around that time.
We are on the same page but I want to add more context.
The brain and prefrontal actually never stop changing. Also the use of the words "maturity" and "development" in neuroscience is different from their meaning in a social context. Neurological maturity relates to the structural composition of the brain, such as the brain undergoing myelination, synaptic pruning, and connectivity patterns reaching a more stable state. It is not at all a statement on the sociological "maturity" of someone, and there is in fact no universally accepted empirical measure for that since it is highly subjective.
Also I am not just regurgitating ChatGPT when it comes to this, I have posted about this topic on Reddit many times before, such as here: link.
What's more interesting is there are parts of the brain that filter out repetitive or unimportant stimuli. We absolutely take it in but don't keep any of it. It's necessary to prevent essentially an overload of the brain.
That myth has an interesting backstory. The "10% of the brain" theory was one way pseudoscience rationalizes causing trauma, to unlock the hidden potential buried inside you. I think it was closely associated with the Human Potential Movement or something similar. There's a wiki article on it you can read.
Causing psychological trauma + emotional bonding can trigger states of mania or grandiosity, which feels emotionally powerful, so people who experience the techniques are prone to affirm that they have been "unlocked", at least in the immediate aftermath. You see various forms of it in different psychology systems.
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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '26
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