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This is definitely sad news to those of us who desperately want to believe that somewhere within our craniums lies a vast untapped potential for improving memory, wit and mental agility, IQ, or maybe even psychic powers like telekinesis or teleportation.

The encouragement and hope that the 10 percent myth has fostered helps to explain its longevity. Believing that 90 percent of the brain may be comprised of unconquered intellectual terrain has motivated countless numbers of people to maximize the creativity, productivity, and efficiency in their lives. It even contributed to the financial success and popularity of several self-help books and self-improvement gadgets (1). Unfortunately, this false belief about our brain is probably one of the most deeply entrenched misconceptions in popular psychology.

The 10 percent myth probably stemmed from an initial misinterpretation of the writings of William James, one of the founders of American Psychology. James wrote that most of us only actualize a small portion of our intellectual potential, which many of us have also astutely observed through encounters with others claiming to be part of the human race. Popular authors later infused the phrase "10 percent" into the consciousness of the nation by taking liberties with James's writings, surmising that we only use about 10 percent of our brain's capacity (eg. Lowell Thomas, who wrote the foreword to Dale Carnegie's 1936 best-seller "How to Win Friends and Influence People"; 1).

From a purely functional standpoint, it is difficult to believe that evolutionary processes would have resulted in a magnificent interconnected structure that continually squandered valuable resources required to grow and maintain a massively underutilized organ working at only 90% capacity (2).

What about more tangible scientific evidence? Case studies and empirical research in clinical neurology and beyond provide overwhelming evidence that we are using all of the contents of our craniums on a daily basis. Early studies in the neurosciences partially seemed to support James' notion of unmaximized brain potential: The observation that not every part of the brain was as active as other parts furthered the belief that there were "silent" areas within the cerebral cortex. However, vast improvements in technology, coupled with an increased understanding of how the brain works, led neuroscientists to contradict these previous findings. We now we know that these areas are now called "association

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