Statistics give means, so by saying that we use 10% of our brains, it is easier than saying that some of us use 9% and others use 11%. You are absolutely right, however, to question statistics. One of my favorites in my field (marketing) was the “pursestrings” study, which said that women control the majority of money in this country. It turns out that the person who originally wrote this stood outside a department store on ONE weekday in the 1950’s and counted the people going in. Since more of the people going in were women than men (keep in mind this was the 50’s, when most families had only a male wage-earner), he concluded that women controlled the money in the U.S. I also read a study a long time ago, reported in the paper as a serious study done by a professor at a major university, which found that women were better students than men. I use this in class to demonstrate the need to be skeptical of what you read. When I read further, it turned out that this man had gone through his own gradebooks, and had determined that he had given higher grades to women on average than he had to men (of course he couldn’t imagine that perhaps HE was biased, rather than the women being better!). He then backed this up with things like the fact that he found that in his own classes, the front rows were filled with women and the back rows with men, which he said showed a more serious attitude (I can then point out to my class that they aren’t seated that way in my own class, so why might they do this in his?). The numbers themselves may not be wrong, but you need to think about why they occur that way.

hmmm since i only have a dismal percentage of my brain that i use, i had a really difficult time trying to determine what your question was…the reason i only use a perfectly percentiled portion of my brains actual usefulness is i am saving the rest for a rainy day…….hopefully i do not get Alzheimer’s, cause it would be a tragedy to forget where i left the leftover usefulness of my intelligence……

One reason this myth has endured is that it has been adopted by psychics and other paranormal pushers to explain psychic powers.

Robert J. Samuelson termed it a “psycho-fact, [a] belief that, though not supported by hard evidence, is taken as real because its constant repetition changes the way we experience life.”

Yes.

Did you know that 77.34% of statistics are made up?