True or False? 5 Popular Beliefs About the Brain, Fact-Checked
Popular science and public debate are full of half-truths and outright myths about the brain and how it works. Can you guess which of these common claims are true and which were debunked long ago? You’ll find the answers further down the page.
“We actually only use about 15 percent of our brain’s capacity”
“Albert Einstein had the heaviest human brain ever found”
“More than 70 percent of the brain is water”
“Neanderthal brains were smaller than ours on average”
“The brain isn’t fully developed until age 25”
Answers
“We actually only use about 15 percent of our brain’s capacity”
False. The idea that we use only a small part of our brain’s capacity is a common myth that has been passed on for generations. Barry Gordon, a brain researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, calls the claim “almost laughable” and explains that nearly every part of the brain is active almost all the time.
Further reading : Do People Only Use 10 Percent of Their Brains? (Scientific American)
“Albert Einstein had the heaviest human brain ever found”
False. People still argue about who had the largest human brain, but one thing is fairly certain: it wasn’t the German-born physicist Albert Einstein. It has sometimes been claimed that the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev had an exceptionally large brain weighing more than two kilograms, but whether it was the heaviest or largest has never been confirmed. Einstein’s brain was actually slightly lighter than average for men his age, at just 1.23 kilograms.
Further reading: Does Brain Size Matter? (Scientific American) The strange afterlife of Einstein's brain (BBC)
“More than 70 percent of the brain is water”
True. About 73 percent of the brain’s volume is water.
Further reading: The Water in You: Water and the Human Body (USGS)
“Neanderthal brains were smaller than ours on average”
False. Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) died out more than 30,000 years ago. Before that, they lived for about 350,000 years, mainly in parts of present-day Europe and the Middle East. There are many myths about Neanderthals, and nothing suggests their brains were smaller than ours. In fact, there are signs that their brains were the same size as ours, or even slightly larger.
Further reading: Who were the Neanderthals? (Natural History Museum)Neanderthal clues to brain evolution in humans (Nature)
“The brain isn’t fully developed until age 25”
True. Different parts of the brain develop at different stages as a person grows up, and most researchers agree that, on average, the brain isn’t fully developed until around age 25. The frontal lobe usually doesn’t finish developing until after the teenage years. In most people, the visual center (the primary visual cortex) is thought to keep maturing until well into middle age.
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