To resolve the riddle of how much we use, we need to specify whether we are talking of the brain or mind. That's a morass for sure in the research literature. At the Nobel Conference at Gustavus College a few years back, Patricia Churchill, Oliver Sacks, Anthony Damasio and others were trying to share their view on what consciousness and mind might actually be. Personally, I like Tor Norretranders view in his book The User Illusion.
Here is my position. The conscious mind, which most of us operate from, represents a tiny fraction of the total operating potential of the body/brain/mind.
Our conscious mind, located mostly in the left temporal lobe, is primarily verbal and it works slowly. The portion of your brain mass devoted to carrying out conscious brain functions is approximately 2 percent. The rest of the brain mass of your cerebral cortex works 10,000 times faster than your conscious mind can. And your limbic system works 10,000 times faster than that. In otherwords, 98 percent of your offline brain functions, those functions other than conscious, work 10,000 to ten million times faster than your conscious mind.
It doesn't mean we don't use most or all of our brain. It means that consciously, we don't have much going...and we can bring a LOT more of our off-line resources into conscious use. That's what our work at Learning Strategies Corporation has been about.
