Transcendence- Spoiler Corner

[Matterplay1]

I would like to think that any human using more than 10% of their brain would realize that, brain tissue being there is evolutionary advantage to be had in using every bit of tissue you've got, or otherwise having less.  This was my first thought when I was ~5 years old and someone told me we only use 10% of our brain.  "Well, why then do we have so much?"  I am utterly sure that any number of young bright people thought the same thing.

It was later that I learned how much energy the maintenance and operation of a brain requires relative to other tissues.  I may have been eight or nine at the time, and at that point I was dead _certain_ that the 10% thing was wrong.  It was too expensive to waste so much resources on the 'useless' 90%. When finally it was acknowledged publically to be wrong, I was 30 years old or thereabouts, and simply rolled my eyes.

This was a myth created by woo-meister Uri Geller. No neuroscientist ever believed something so moronic. As to its persistence, well, look at astrology; it was discredited a few centuries ago and it's still kicking along happily. Once a myth gets going it's very hard to stamp out.

As I heard it the 'only 10%' meme is quite a bit older than Geller. The current version of the Wikipedia article on it gives something like what I've heard from credible sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percen...brain_myth
I think there are two reasons why the myth is so persistent, aside from the latitude it gives to charlatans or the self-deluded. One of course is that it is hopeful and encouraging and the other is that there's a germ of truth in it. That is, just as you can get your muscles and nerves to work together and get some extraordinary improvements in results (martial arts being a good example) so too you can quite dramatically improve results with appropriate training of your neural circuits. That 'untapped potential' is just a matter of better coordination for a desired result (faster abstract problem solving, better emotional self-regulation, quicker verbal responses, or whatever). 

Going back to 'Frankenstein Syndrome', we have a version of that in OA, too:
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/480d41a65054c

More broadly, I think on sober second thought modern cultures have come to see that no tech is an unmixed blessing, even if it is, properly used, a blessing. Then of course, people being people, some of us have overreacted and assume now that every new technology is going to turn out to be all pain and no gain, just as in earlier generations people were unreasonably optimistic.