Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Gregory Hickok for The New York Times during which he discusses two myths that are old, another that is new. He explains why all of them need to be debunked. To read the complete article, check out others, and other articles and sign up for subscription information, please click here.

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[Here I the first of three myths Hickok rejects.]

In the early 19th century, a French neurophysiologist named Pierre Flourens conducted a series of innovative experiments. He successively removed larger and larger portions of brain tissue from a range of animals, including pigeons, chickens and frogs, and observed how their behavior was affected.

His findings were clear and reasonably consistent. “One can remove,” he wrote in 1824, “from the front, or the back, or the top or the side, a certain portion of the cerebral lobes, without destroying their function.” For mental faculties to work properly, it seemed, just a “small part of the lobe” sufficed.

Thus the foundation was laid for a popular myth: that we use only a small portion — 10
percent is the figure most often cited — of our brain. An early incarnation of the idea can be found in the work of another 19th-century scientist, Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, who in 1876 wrote of the powers of the human brain that “very few people develop very much, and perhaps nobody quite fully.”

But Flourens was wrong, in part because his methods for assessing mental capacity were crude and his animal subjects were poor models for human brain function. Today the neuroscience community uniformly rejects the notion, as it has for decades, that our brain’s potential is largely untapped.

The myth persists, however. The newly released movie Lucy, about a woman who acquires superhuman abilities by tapping the full potential of her brain, is only the latest and most prominent expression of this idea.

Myths about the brain typically arise in this fashion: An intriguing experimental result generates a plausible if speculative interpretation (a small part of the lobe seems sufficient) that is later overextended or distorted (we use only 10 percent of our brain). The caricature ultimately infiltrates pop culture and takes on a life of its own, quite independent from the facts that spawned it.

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So please, take heed. An ounce of myth prevention now may save a pound of neuroscientific nonsense later.

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Here’s a direct link to the complete article.

Gregory Hickok, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of the forthcoming book The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition, published by W.W. Norton & Company.