Consequently, she began searching through the scientific literature for an answer. “It’s one of those pieces of popular culture that just keeps going around.”Ī neuroscientist with a master’s degree from Case Western Reserve University and a doctorate from Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, Herculano-Houzel figured the first step to disproving the myth was to determine exactly how many neurons the brain actually contains. “Which is completely wrong! We use 100 percent of the brain, 100 percent of the time,” Herculano-Houzel says. The persistence of that myth proved so galling to Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Vanderbilt associate professor of psychology and biological sciences, that when she worked as a science educator at the Museu da Vida in Rio de Janeiro, she conducted a survey in 2002 and found that 60 percent of the college-educated public believed it.
That myth goes back at least as far as Dale Carnegie’s 1936 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and has cropped up as recently as the 2014 Scarlett Johansson movie Lucy. Take the canard that humans use only 10 percent of their brains, leaving vast reservoirs of gray matter untapped.
