10% is NO Solution
Over at the Gleamings from the Golden Dawn blog, Morgan Eckstein talks about the myth that we use only 10% of our brains. Why is debunking this myth of value? First, it is falsely used to explain how things such as psychic abilities and magick can occur. Second, I would contend it’s irrelevant.
Morgan traces the source of the 10% myth back to early days of brain scans when we couldn’t really see deeply into the body of a living person.
Transaxial slice of a 56-year-old male patient taken with positron emission tomography (PET)
Checking with one of the best sources for investigating internet rumors, snopes.com, I discovered that this myth actually goes much further back, perhaps as far back as a century. The exact source isn’t clear.
One of the problems with the myth, according to snopes, is that it “presupposes an extreme localization of functions in the brain.” If 90% of the brain wasn’t doing anything, as the myth implies, why not remove it? Of course, this is a ridiculous thought. Although there are spots or areas in the brain that can be associated with certain things, the actual functioning is spread throughout the brain, allowing for other areas to take over when an area is damaged. This often requires training and rehabilitation, as in the case of Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords, the congresswoman from Arizona who was shot in the head and is now going through recovery. So it would seem that the full brain is necessary, right?
As Reported in The Lancet
The Lancet is England’s premier journal for medical professionals. It is highly respected around the world. In it, there was the report of a 44-year-old man in France, a civil servant and father of two children. He came in for medical help due to a weakness of his left leg. Of course, they had him give a medical history. He was just a normal person with one exception. He was born with hydrocephalus, commonly known as “water on the brain.” This is when there is too much fluid that usually protects the brain. As an infant, he had a shunt put into his head to drain the fluid. It was removed when he was in his teens.
So the doctors did a CAT scan and an MRI. The results were astounding. Some tiny chambers that usually hold cushioning cerebrospinal fluid had enlarged. See this photo:
The black spaces on the left are filled with fluid.
The photos on the right show a normal brain for comparison.
He was essential missing most of his brain. Although he wasn’t a genius by any standard, he was living a successful and happy life. How could this be? Unless…
Perhaps the Brain Isn’t What We Think?
Aristotle—philosopher, expert on numerous subjects, and whose writings have influenced Western civilization and philosophy—believed that the purpose of the brain was to cool the blood and wasn’t part of the thinking system. Certainly if you look at the brain, with all of its wrinkles and folds, it could be a type of heat sink. This is why I think the myth that we only use 10% of our brains is irrelevant: Is it possible that our actual thinking isn’t done in the brain at all? Rather, for higher functions such as thinking, what if the brain is just a conduit to where the mind exists? Perhaps the thinking mind is not the same as the brain.
It certainly appears that things such as the autonomic nervous system and much of our unconscious functioning (controlling breathing, heart beat, etc.) are found in the brain. But what if our minds are not the same as the brain? Perhaps the mind and brain are in the same locations (“coterminous”) but on different planes of existence. If that’s possible, perhaps they are not conterminous. If that’s true, then your mind could be much larger than your brain. The subtitle of my friend, Lon Milo DuQuette’s book, Low Magic ( It’s All In Your Head … You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is) makes perfect sense. It would explain why intelligence has little relationship to brain size.
If this is true, the key to increasing your intelligence and perhaps producing all sorts of phenomena would be learning how to truly access the mind through the conduit of the brain. Of course, there’s a name for that: magick!
THANK YOU!
I would like to give my extreme thanks to all of those who have had such nice things to say about my new “eShort” ebook, The Magical Life of Scott Cunningham. Scott was a good friend and this small book was very meaningful for me. It’s a quick read that brings you an understanding of Scott’s magical techniques and motivations. For more information, see my previous blog post. It’s available through your favorite online ebook retailer such as the Kindle Store (LINK), Kobo (LINK), Sony (LINK), and iTunes (available now through the store in iTunes).
The 10% idea was actually from a lab based rat experiment done by a psychologist. He would have a rat run a maze and cut out another portion of its brain (rat brains are tube shaped) working his way to the back of the skull one maze run at a time. At 10% the rat could no longer complete the maze. Of course, by 25% it barely functioned at all, and there were losses with each reduction.
Thought provoking as always,
I’ve long suspected the Brain functions as something of analogous to an RF receiver; here is one thought by way of example; in order to access ‘Higher Vibrations’ a craft person will
meditate; mediation lowers your brainwave Frequency; which seems counter intuitive at a glace; but if we reconsider this using the receiver analogy it makes perfect sense; we cannot receive subtle (low energy) signals if those signals are swamped by ‘local interference’ being produced by our receiver itself (and all receivers produce some noise).
But if we tune our receiver in such a way that its noise output is focused in the low frequency end of the spectrum, we create a space for higher frequency inputs to appear without interference.
Basically if we tune our inner TV so all the noise it produces appears on Channel 2; we might then find we receive Channel 12 more clearly. – and while this model may not be 100% accurate I
have found it useful.
A very dear friend of mine had a stroke early in the new year; at times she seems as bright as ever; at times she seems quite befuddled; and at others she remembers going places she physically could not have been; if the brain acts as a mind body interface, and her brain has been damaged; and unfortunately it has; then like an RC car with a damaged controller, her body will no longer do what her mind wants it to do, and because that interface is damaged her Mind is no longer firmly grounded in her body; leaving her confused as to what she has dreamed; and what is real; as in her dreams she is much recovered; I never tell her she only dreamed these events; and of course this begs the question of the nature of reality; as her mind has experianced these events; but her body of course was not present at the time.
Again it is possible the Receiver or Transceiver analogy is incorrect; but again it seems to make some sense of what I have Empirically observed; and for now it is my own working Hypothesis. I readily admit a strong bias against a purely Materialist model; a bias I suspect I share with most readers
here; and an opinion there is much more wisdom in the ancient vision, ‘In the beginning there was the word, and the word was god and the word was with god.’ than modern science even begins to suspect.
Blessings, BB.