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The “You Only Use 10% Of Your Brain” Myth Isn’t True — But We Still Want to Believe It
We can believe we have untapped potential without believing neuromyths.
In the movie Limitless, the protagonist Eddie Morra, played by Bradley Cooper, is an average, struggling author in New York City. His life is falling apart. His girlfriend breaks up with him and his career is in shambles, and it seems like he’s just failing at everything.
And then his ex-brother-in-law, Vernon, gives him a pill: NZT-48.
“And you know how they say that we can only access 20% of our brain?… Well, what this does… it lets you access all of it,” Vernon says.
Well, you can probably guess the rest of the plot. The pill completely changes his life and allows Morra to finish his novel incredibly quickly. He starts winning poker games and invests in the stock market. He becomes a big star at Wall Street, and he wins over his ex-girlfriend again.
After that, the plot grows a lot more complicated (and I’ll avoid spoiling any more than I have), but at the time I watched it (14 years old), the premise of Limitless was incredibly appealing.
If we only use a small portion of our brain, and we can just take a pill to access the rest of it, we can do…
