Hilarious...

[Jumble Jumble]

They say we only use 10% of our brain

Yeah but they can speak for themselves. It's quite clearly untrue. When was the last time you heard about someone who got shot in the head, but luckily the bullet went into the 90% of his brain he didn't use?

The uses of the various areas of the brain are reasonably well understood, even if it's not know how they work. There are no gaping areas totalling 90% that are marked as "unused" or "unknown".

You'll often find that people making the 10% claim are coincidentally offering to take money for you in exchange for some way of accessing that other 90%.

 

[TonyFlyingSquirrel]

It's unfortunate that some people are too lazy in their communication and therefore rely so heavily on profanity.

With the wealth of adjectives available in the English language, there's really no use for profanity.

If you cannot find an adjective to accurately describe the emotion you wish to convey, perhaps you should re-evaluate your current emotion.

 

[Super Turbo Deluxe Custom]

The % use thing refers to potential or efficiency, not mass.  Incandescent light bulbs and  internal combustion engines aren't efficient, but you use all of it.

 

[animal control]

The % use thing refers to potential or efficiency, not mass.  Incandescent light bulbs and  internal combustion engines aren't efficient, but you use all of it.

Yep.

http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percent.asp

 

[Jumble Jumble]

What are the units of brain potential, and how is it measured?

 

[Cagey]

What are the units of brain potential, and how is it measured?

Interesting question. I'm curious about the answer as well. Can I probe my head and find out what kind of slack space is available? I might get seriously bonked on the noggin again as it's fairly easy for me to fall down, and I'd like to think I could recover from it.

 

[Dan025]

[i know what you are talking about with the "emotionally retarded" thing. it can be frustrating. sometimes (but bit always) it's not "scars" some people are just born that way. sometimes i think people look for too much meaning in things. sometimes there aren't scars that shaped a person to be a certain way, some people are just not like others.

True, there are people who are just A******* or PEBFH. I wasn't trying to make everyone out to be a victim of circumstance.  Just saying that not everyone who comes across that way means to, or realizes the intensity of what they're doing.  In this case we have a clue that something has happened.

I have seen quite a few , some close to me, from Autism Spectrum Disorders where they really don't have a clue about this whole emotion thing, to abuse, to people who were  just never taught that this emotion thing needs to be controlled or at least filtered for different contexts.  This scares me about dementia more than memory loss, the idea that someone I love, or even myself, becomes cranky and spiteful to those taking care of them.

So cut people some slack. Its ok to avoid them if you have no social obligation, no point in getting worked up over something you don't need to put yourself through.

believe me i cut people a lot of slack. i didn't intend to call people a*******.

i'm one of those people that has been suspected of an autistic spectrum disorder. but most of my family has a level of emotional immaturity, i'm pretty benign compared to my family. maybe that's why i find myself attracted to women that have issues... some of which have been much worse than my family members.. but really i think it's more that women with issues are the only ones that interact with me, probably because i "look depressed" to 95% of the population (which is incorrect 95% of the time) and the ones with problems try to empathize because they think they can relate, but they usually later start to distance themselves from me, acting burdened by me or even ashamed when all i want is to socialize and have a good time which i don't do very often in my daily life.....

 

[Cagey]

You may be too intelligent for your own good if you haven't been trained to handle it. You can easily end up insecure, outcast, confused, overworked, unhappy and ultimately angry and frustrated.

You need to learn the ways of the beer.

 

[Jumble Jumble]

The title of this thread is becoming less and less appropriate...

 

[Dan025]

What are the units of brain potential, and how is it measured?

yeah i was going to go into a series of nagging questions to point out how ridiculous "brain efficiency" sounded to me in a really obnoxious way, but decided against it.

but like i already tried to explain it's not about potential. it's tasks. we don't multi task in a true sense and different parts of the brain have different purposes. it's not that we don't use them or that they are inefficient, it's that we don't use them at the same time.

if you compare it to a computer processor there are some good parallels. in a cpu there isn't really one processor even if it is a "single core" there is a series of specialized unit for different types of tasks such as floating point operations (like scientific notation for computers in a sense) integer operations, video decoding, general computing and a vast array of other things. until recently these operations used different units within the chip but they couldn't be used at once. the part of the chip that handles task could only pass one thread at a time. they came out with multi-core chips but this was just redundant chips, they could run different operations but it had twice the internal componants, at this point you could run a thread that was largely floating point at the same time you decoded video but it was discreet cores inside the chip, like the equivilent to haveing two chips, you still couldn't use different components on the same core. now intel has something called "hyper threading" which allows each core to run parallel operations, the 4 core cpu looks like 8 cores to the kernel as each core can handle 2 threads simultaneously as long as they are different types of operations, it's a limited set of circumstances that it works.

back to the brain topic, just like the floating point unit and video decoder don't work at the same time because they will handle different threads, or maybe different parts of the same thread which must be processed beginning to end (one thread can't be broken and processed in parallel, it just doesn't work that way) our brain also can not do much simultaneously. if it could it might get weird inside our heads, think about having different simultaneous conscious thoughts.... might seem like there are actually several people in there talking at once. it's not that there is some measure of efficiency for doing one task, it's that you are limited to that task while you are doing it. the 10% number is just a general number, it may go higher and lower depending on what you are doing, 10% really doesn't mean anything. 

i guess in a way you can call what you can do simultaneously a measure of efficiency in an indirect way. but it's not really applicable to much. if the brain could truly multi task, you might be able to get some amount more work done but your brain would still be idle much of the time because most situations wouldn't demand it.

 

[Dan025]

You may be too intelligent for your own good if you haven't been trained to handle it. You can easily end up insecure, outcast, confused, overworked, unhappy and ultimately angry and frustrated.

You need to learn the ways of the beer.

if that was directed at me well i guess. my level of intelligence is hard to measure, my iq doesn't test as high as the people around me think it would. and i do enjoy beer. i may not be a genius on paper but i do think too much. i think this thread proves that.

 

[Cagey]

There's a difference between multi-tasking and multi-processing. Human brains can multi-task easily enough through time-slicing, just like early operating systems did and still do. However, multi-processing is alien to us while modern CPU packaging and OSs do it regularly. It's not as scalable as we'd like, but then most problems aren't, either. That's what's frustrating Intel, AMD, et al.

Reading "The Mythical Man-Month" is instructive. I can't remember if it was in there or somewhere else, but a hypothetical example exists that says if it takes 6 guys 3 months to build a house, then it should only take 12 guys 1.5 months, or 24 guys 3 weeks. Of course, that can't happen, for obvious reasons. Some things have to happen before other things can. Most problems are that way, so multi-processing doesn't work as well as we'd like.

 

[Dan025]

thank you cagey. i guess making the distinction between multi tasking and multi processing is what my post lacked. i guess i was calling it multi-tasking and task switching, but i like your way better and it is more correct. for some reason the term multi-processing didn't come to mind even though i've come across it before....

 

[Jumble Jumble]

Women often like to tell me they can multi-task better than men. What they mean is, they can do one thing not very well, and talk incessantly, at the same time.

 

[Cagey]

Hehe! Yeah. Speaking of women, another famous example of how multi-processing doesn't always work is pregnancy. If it takes one woman 9 months to gestate, why can't 9 women do it in a month, or 90 in 3 days?

Not to pick on women; it's just an obvious example of how some problems don't lend themselves well to parallel processing. In fact, most problems don't. That's why we're not seeing the performance gains from multi-core systems that one might expect.