GameBanshee Forums

I'm currently reading "The Solitaire Mystery" written by Jostein Gaarder (who also wrote "Sophie's World"). This part was so good I felt like sharing it with you:

"Then Dad said something so brilliant, I can remember it word for word.
'If our brain was simple enough for us to understand it, we would be so stupid we wouldn't be able to understand it after all.'
I sat thinking about this for quite a long time. In the end, I decided it said just about everything that could be said about the question.
'There are brains which are much simpler than ours' Dad continued. 'For example, we understand how an earthworm's brain functions - at least most of it. Yet the earthworm doesn't understand it itself, its brain is too simple.'
'Maybe there's a God who understand us,' I piped up.
Dad jumped in his seat. I think he was rather impressed that I would come up with such an intelligent idea.
'That might be true, yes,' he said. 'But then he would be so hideously complicated, he would hardly understand himself.'"

Ah but who said god functioned with a brain?
Also i read somewhere we only use like 1% of our actual brain, so what does the rest do?
Could some please clarify if 1% is the correct figure as well?

1% is not correct.
It's a bit low don't you think.

I heard the same thing but I can't recall the right percentage.
Somewhere around 50% or so I think.

Whoa i think 50% is to high.
I will do a search and see what i find.
Or we can wait forFable, HLD or CE to enlighten us

edit: http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/4-20-01askeds.html

So we use 100% of our brain?

10% - read all about the myth here.

@Astafas: I remember learning something about the duality of the brain in philosophy classes. I expect Jostein Gaarder is also referring to Descartes' "Ghost in the Machine"-theory and the dilemma the empirists where faced with (Locke, Berkly, Hume) when they believed the mind might be deceiving us in its impression of the world "outside of the one we perceive".

@Asty: I've have thought the same at times, the problem is imo that humans can communicate and store information. ie, while no single person can perhaps understand his own brain, we cant for sure know what we as a culture can understand or not.

First of all, I am flattered that our friend CM thinks that I might know the answer to this question (I don't specifically, so I'll tell you what I do know).

The number you hear circulated is between 9% and 12% of the brain is used. As our friend Eerhardt says, you actually 100% of the brain; you can see this through CT, PET or EEG scans and other tests that measure brain activity.



If you look at a scan (the above is a Positron Emission Tomography or PET image) you see that there is activity all over the brain, so clearly more than 9-12% is in use. If you were to take a scan of someone's brain while they were engaged in different activities, such as taking a test, driving a car, having sex or playing a sport (not all at the same time), you will see that different areas of the brain are operating in response to different stimuli.

I think what the 9-12% number represents is the portion of your brain that you use on a conscious basis or through voluntary activity. For instance, your hypothalamus regulates all of the involuntary functions of your body (heart rate, blood pressure, sweat glands, etc.) and you generally do not have control of how it operates. The brain is a funny organ and we don't know fully how it works. You might wait for C Elegans to make an appearance; I think this is right up her alley and is pretty close to her research concentration.

We will understand the human brain, eventually. It is still a very long way to go, but if our species don't go extinct in the near future, we will understand our brain, just as we will understand weather systems, deep sea environment, the universe, how life began or earth and other areas where our present knowledge is limited.

Regarding the "We only use 1/10/50/whatever% of our brain capacity" - all of this is totally unfunded and has never had any scientific support whatsoever. On the contrary, it is still an enigma how something so obviously erranous could gain such widespread popularity in media and among people in general.

Eerhardt and HLD are correct, and the site Eerhardt linked to, provides good information about the subject.

I have heard the idea before and I am not sure why it is so often put forward. Now CE is very optimistic that we will understand all aspects of how our brain works (or at least she will ) but it is of course not a necessary truth that this will happen.

Clearly our intellects are limited so perhaps we are so limited we can’t understand the brain - it is a possibility. It is also possible that in order to comprehend our present brain you need an even more complex brain whom then in turn would be to simple to comprehend it self. But all this is pure conjecture. There are no arguments for the idea of course since the only convincing arguments would involve a lot of facts about the brain we don't have.

It ok to but the idea forward as a possibility but the way some people put it you would think that it is just self evident. It should of course also be noted that the idea have nothing to do with philosophy since it is merely a guess about a state of affairs in the world which must be left to science to figure out.

Originally posted by Tom
Now CE is very optimistic that we will understand all aspects of how our brain works (or at least she will ) but it is of course not a necessary truth that this will happen.

Rather pessimistic I am sure we all realize that a full understanding of the human brain, also means a lot of possibilities to manipulate it's functions.

It is of course not impossible that understanding of such complex systems will never be within the scope of human ability, but I seriously doubt it. Especially since we humans constantly develop better and better devices to increase our intellectual capacity by building machines that can help us with information storage and calculations of diffent kinds.