10% of Our Minds...

I pose one question: How do you interpret the scientific posit that states "The average person uses 10% of our minds." Well the first response that I usually get is something of the sort "Wow we are such inefficient creatures. We only use 10% of our brain cells and the rest of the 90% either are dead or useless...so that's why Einstein was so smart...he must've used more than 15% of his brain..."

There is definitely a different explanation for this with an "engineering-ish" approach...Imagine your mind as a growing network of logic maps that connect various elements together. Now as a child, your mind grows at an exponential rate and after the age of 6, your brain stops growing. However, the mapping continues. This is how we continue to learn. More and more dendreons and axioms connecting multiple times tovarious cells that act like either cache (short-term memory) or RAM (long-term memory). Each cell acts as a bit of information and a cluster of cells equates to a thought. Each of these cells or bits takes a tiny amount of energy to store the information. Now your brain has a multitude of these clusters which equals a total power. Then you look at the dendreon and axiom mapping (hardwired decision logic). This low-loss, high-speed path connects various clusters together for learning or associative thinking, etc. For example, if I know the color blue defined cluster A and cluster B is the sky...then a mapping between these clusters creates the associative thinking for our thoughts of the sky being blue.

Anyway, so back to the discussion on 10% brain power. Every cell represents some measurement of "power" that exists in our brain. Imagine if you try to do like 20 things at once...you can't! Why? Well, because the amount of information that our brain can access at one time is only finite. Thus, the limit to the amount of power we can retrieve, on average, at any one given moment from our brain is 10%. This 10%, like for a computer, is probably for thermal reasons (fevers, etc) and/or capacity (bandwidth) and of course, a good portion of this 10% is allocated for keeping our automatic muscle, neuralogical immune system etc parts alive. However the important thing to note is that the only difference between Einstein and you is not the fact that he has more brain power than you but that his mapping algorithm is more efficient and thus takes less power to obtain the same solution! Therefore, not taking into account dead brain cells or cell count (head size), if you were to just work more efficiently and increase the effective productivity of how/what/why we learn in society, we could increase the ability of our minds to think and grasp ideas even if we are limited to 10% capacity.

This could definitely change the argument slightly for IQ tests (made so that most educational levels can understand) which demonstrates are ability to logically reason things out because now these mapping structures would definitely improve our reasoning. However, I do believe that nature does play some part like for instance if someone has more brain cells or more of a certain type of cell...or maybe the associative clustering is closer together so mapping of associative reasoning becomes easier.

But just think about it (not too hard or you might not be able to do anything else) the next time someone says that Einstein had more brain power than you and that's why he was so smart...it doesn't have to be like that at all...