Hi, my name is Ricardo, I am a University student and I recently became highly amused with the NLP community, so I decided to join.
I have always wonder if its possible for humans to actually use more than 10% of our brain, since I heard we only use that amount of our capabilities, and through search and stuff I found info about the NLP, and well, here I am.

Cheers :3

Welcome aboard, Ricardo!

That 10% figure has been bandied about since I was a child, and that's a very long time indeed. More recently it was believed that 90% of our DNA was useless. That turned out not to be the case, as you might imagine. Why would we have evolved an organ whose main job for millions of years - until us "modern" humans showed up - was to lie fallow? Or is it more likely, perhaps, that at the time that 90% figure was put forward, scientists studying the brain didn't know what 90% of it was being used for.

I'm glad you found the forum, and I hope you enjoy learning more about NLP and your amazing potential to make life more fun every day. That's what I use MY brain for!

BMcKenna wrote:

Welcome aboard, Ricardo!

That 10% figure has been bandied about since I was a child, and that's a very long time indeed. More recently it was believed that 90% of our DNA was useless. That turned out not to be the case, as you might imagine. Why would we have evolved an organ whose main job for millions of years - until us "modern" humans showed up - was to lie fallow? Or is it more likely, perhaps, that at the time that 90% figure was put forward, scientists studying the brain didn't know what 90% of it was being used for.

I'm glad you found the forum, and I hope you enjoy learning more about NLP and your amazing potential to make life more fun every day. That's what I use MY brain for!

I suspect the bit of folk lore about us only using 10% of the mind comes more or less from Freud's 'iceberg' principle - that our *conscious faculties* only account for about 10% of the total activity of the mind (mind, not brain).

D

9Steps wrote:

I suspect the bit of folk lore about us only using 10% of the mind comes more or less from Freud's 'iceberg' principle - that our *conscious faculties* only account for about 10% of the total activity of the mind (mind, not brain).

D

Yes, that could certainly be the source of it. William James also famously said "We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental resources", and I'm sure the idea has been around before either of them. Somehow it got to be one of those "everyone knows" items.