The human brain is complex.

Along with performing millions of mundane acts, it composes concertos,

Adding to that mystery is the contention that humans "only" employ 10 percent of their brain. If only
regular folk could tap that other 90 percent, they too could become savants who remember π to the
twenty-thousandth decimal place or perhaps even have telekinetic powers.

Though an alluring idea, the "10 percent myth" is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry
Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Although there's no definitive culprit to pin
the blame on for starting this legend, the notion has been linked to the American psychologist and
author William James, who argued in The Energies of Men that "We are making use of only a small part
of our possible mental and physical resources." It's also been associated with Albert Einstein, who
supposedly used it to explain his cosmic towering intellect.

The myth's durability, Gordon says, stems from people's conceptions about their own brains: they see
their own shortcomings as evidence of the existence of untapped gray matter. This is a false assumption.
What is correct, however, is that at certain moments in anyone's life, such as when we are simply at rest
and thinking, we may be using only 10 percent of our brains.

"It turns out though, that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active
almost all the time," Gordon adds. "Let's put it this way: the brain represents three percent of the body's
weight and uses 20 percent of the body's energy."

The average human brain weighs about three pounds and comprises the hefty cerebrum, which is the
largest portion and performs all higher cognitive functions; the cerebellum, responsible for motor
functions, such as the coordination of movement and balance; and the brain stem, dedicated to
involuntary functions like breathing. The majority of the energy consumed by the brain powers the rapid
firing of millions of neurons communicating with each other. Scientists think it is such neuronal firing
and connecting that gives rise to all of the brain's higher functions. The rest of its energy is used for
controlling other activities—both unconscious activities, such as heart rate, and conscious ones, such as
driving a car.

Although it's true that at any given moment all of the brain's regions are not concurrently firing, brain
researchers using imaging technology have shown that, like the body's muscles, most are continually
active over a 24-hour period. "Evidence would show over a day you use 100 percent of the brain," says
John Henley, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Even in sleep, areas such as the frontal
cortex, which controls things like higher level thinking and self-awareness, or the somatosensory areas,
which help people sense their surroundings, are active, Henley explains.

Take the simple act of pouring coffee in the morning: In walking toward the coffeepot, reaching for it,
pouring the brew into the mug, even leaving extra room for cream, the occipital and parietal lobes,
motor sensory and sensory motor cortices, basal ganglia, cerebellum and frontal lobes all activate. A
lightning storm of neuronal activity occurs almost across the entire brain in the time span of a few
seconds.

"This isn't to say that if the brain were damaged that you wouldn't be able to perform daily duties,"
Henley continues. "There are people who have injured their brains or had parts of it removed who still
live fairly normal lives, but that is because the brain has a way of compensating and making sure that
what's left takes over the activity."

Being able to map the brain's various regions and functions is part and parcel of understanding the
possible side effects should a given region begin to fail. Experts know that neurons that perform similar
functions tend to cluster together. For example, neurons that control the thumb's movement are
arranged next to those that control the forefinger. Thus, when undertaking brain surgery,
neurosurgeons carefully avoid neural clusters related to vision, hearing and movement, enabling the
brain to retain as many of its functions as possible.

What's not understood is how clusters of neurons from the diverse regions of the brain collaborate to
form consciousness. So far, there's no evidence that there is one site for consciousness, which leads
experts to believe that it is truly a collective neural effort. Another mystery hidden within our crinkled
cortices is that out of all the brain's cells, only 10 percent are neurons; the other 90 percent are glial
cells, which encapsulate and support neurons, but whose function remains largely unknown. Ultimately,
it's not that we use 10 percent of our brains, merely that we only understand about 10 percent of how it
functions.

brain surgury and results

Strange but True: When Half a Brain Is Better than a Whole One

You might not want to do it, but removing half of your brain will not significantly impact who you are
 By Charles Choi on May 24, 2007

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COURTESY OF JOHNS HOPKINS CHILDREN'S CENTER

The operation known as hemispherectomy—where half the brain is removed—sounds too radical to
ever consider, much less perform. In the last century, however, surgeons have performed it hundreds of
times for disorders uncontrollable in any other way. Unbelievably, the surgery has no apparent effect on
personality or memory.

The first known hemispherectomy was performed on a dog in 1888 by German physiologist Friedrich
Goltz. In humans, neurosurgeon Walter Dandy pioneered the operation at Johns Hopkins University in
1923 on a brain tumor patient. (That man lived for more than three years before ultimately succumbing
to cancer.) The procedure is among the most drastic kinds of brain surgery—"You can't take more than
half. If you take the whole thing, you've got a problem," Johns Hopkins neurologist John Freeman quips.

One side effect Canadian neurosurgeon Kenneth McKenzie reported in 1938 after a hemispherectomy
on a 16-year-old girl who suffered a stroke was that her seizures stopped. Nowadays, the surgery is
performed on patients who suffer dozens of seizures every day that resist all medication, and which are
due to conditions that mostly afflict one hemisphere. "These disorders are often progressive and
damage the rest of the brain if not treated," University of California, Los Angeles, neurosurgeon Gary
Mathern says. Freeman concurs: "Hemispherectomy is something that one only does when the
alternatives are worse."
Anatomical hemispherectomies involve the removal of the entire hemisphere, whereas functional
hemispherectomies only take out parts of a hemisphere, as well as severing the corpus callosum, the
fiber bundle that connects the two halves of the brain. The evacuated cavity is left empty, filling with
cerebrospinal fluid in a day or so.

The strength of anatomical hemispherectomies, a specialty of Hopkins, lies in the fact that "leaving even
a little bit of brain behind can lead seizures to return," Freeman says. On the other hand, functional
hemispherectomies, which U.C.L.A. surgeons usually perform, lead to less blood loss. "Our patients are
usually under two years of age, so they have less blood to lose," Mathern says. Most Hopkins
hemispherectomy patients are five to 10 years old.

Neurosurgeons have performed the operation on children as young as three months old. Astonishingly,
memory and personality develop normally. A recent study found that 86 percent of the 111 children
who underwent hemispherectomy at Hopkins between 1975 and 2001 are either seizure-free or have
nondisabling seizures that do not require medication. The patients who still suffer seizures usually have
congenital defects or developmental abnormalities, where brain damage is often not confined to just
one hemisphere, Freeman explains.

Another study found that children that underwent hemispherectomies often improved academically
once their seizures stopped. "One was champion bowler of her class, one was chess champion of his
state, and others are in college doing very nicely," Freeman says.

Of course, the operation has its downside: "You can walk, run—some dance or skip—but you lose use of
the hand opposite of the hemisphere that was removed. You have little function in that arm and vision
on that side is lost," Freeman says.

Remarkably, few other impacts are seen. If the left side of the brain is taken out, "most people have
problems with their speech, but it used to be thought that if you took that side out after age two, you'd
never talk again, and we've proven that untrue," Freeman says. "The younger a person is when they
undergo hemispherectomy, the less disability you have in talking. Where on the right side of the brain
speech is transferred to and what it displaces is something nobody has really worked out."

Mathern and his colleagues have recently conducted the first functional magnetic resonance imaging
study into hemispherectomy patients, investigating how their brain changes with physical rehabilitation.
Probing how the remaining cerebral hemispheres of these patients acquire language, sensory, motor
and other functions "could shed a great deal of light on the brain's plasticity, or ability to change,"
Freeman notes. Still, having half a brain—and therefore only the use of one hand and half a field of
vision in each eye—is a condition most would prefer to avoid.