The upcoming movie Lucy is rehashing the old pop!psych misunderstanding that we only use about 10 percent of our brains.
Though there’s no real need to explain why improved cerebral functioning wont somehow give you the ability to manipulate the world, it is kind of important to point out that if we only used 10 percent of our brains, we would only have that 10 percent.
When babies are born, they have scores more neurons than adults have. This is because as babies become children become young adults, neurons are pruned through a process called apoptosis.
The point of apoptosis is to get rid of neurons/neural paths that we don’t need so that the paths we DO need can be more effecient, make more connections, etc.
The body has a pretty neat way of figuring out which neurons we need and don’t need, and it’s active throughout your life. Every time an action potential fires off, in addition to releasing whatever neurotransmitter into the synaptic cleft, it releases a chemical signal that the cell is active. The more activity, the more chemical signal, the less likely the neuron is to be pruned.
It’s a pretty easy leap from there to realize that if we were only using 10 percent of our brains, which we are most certainly not, the other 90 percent would be long gone in order for there to be room to further specialize the useful part.




