Where does the 10% myth come from?

No one knows exactly.  A nice summary of what we do know is provided in a recent WIRED piece here. William James was thought to play a role, based on a quote from Dale Carnegie's book, How to win friends and influence people, but this may have been a misquote.  Kolb and Wishaw's classic text, Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology suggests Flourens work in the early 1800s as a likely empirical foundation for the myth.  Flourens of course is famous for his empirical attack on phrenology.  His method involved ablation studies in a variety of animals--chickens, pigeons, frogs, dogs, rabbits--in which he successively removed larger and larger chunks of the cerebrum.  He reported in 1824 that “One can remove, from the front, or the back, or the top or the side, a certain portion of the cerebral lobes, without destroying their function. A small part of the lobe seems sufficient to exercise these functions.”  This led to his theory of the equipotentiality of the cerebrum, including the cortex, in contrast to the phrenological view, and provides a rational jumping off point for the 10% myth.  Kolb and Wishaw write, Perhaps the most commonly encountered Flourensian idea is in pedagogy, where it is expressed as the assertion that most people never use more than 10% of the brain. p. 9A series of lectures in London by Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard argued vehemently against the then-recent swell of empirical support for...
Source: Talking Brains - Category: Neurologists Authors: Source Type: blogs