When I was a lowly graduate student—doing my PhD thesis on the brains of boas and pythons—I had the great fortune of having dinner with two Nobel prize winning brainscientists, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel.
Not wanting to waste the opportunity, I asked the great men: where did the idea that we only use 10% of our brains come from, and is it true?
They smiled, shook their heads, and said that they weren’t sure where the idea originated. But both agreed that the 10% theory was a myth. Nature, they observed, does not waste resources that way because there is a name for species that are inefficient: fossils.