Hacker News Reader

There are people who use 100% of their brains, they're generally flopping around on the floor.

That's not true, for reasonable definition of "use".

There is grain of truth on the "we only use 10 % of our brains" saying, that we don't usually use our whole brain at once. It is possible, but not very comfortable, the closest you can get would be something like solving differential equations in you head and driving a car at the same time, while singing and thinking about you wife.

Nor is the original. The whole fallacy stems from a misunderstanding of "use". Only 10% of brain regions are active at any given time, so they're "unused". Of course, activating ("using?") them all at once is something medically known as a seizure.

The same is true of circuits. If you're a pipeline stage in a multiplier inside an ALU, you're only "used" when a multiply instruction passes by. If only 10% of instructions in a given program are multiplies, you're 90% idle. That doesn't mean that the multiplier is a useless circuit.

I always tell people "its like saying you only use 20% of the boat to float".

Sorry, I should've been clear that I don't actually believe the myth. Only that the movie Limitless is about it.

Limitless was also a work of fiction, so it's OK.