We're All Einsteins

By Gregg Miller
July 27, 2010
Do you remember the pop science trivia factoids about Einstien’s brain that used to travel freely through social parlance? “His brain was so much bigger than the average human’s!” “It’s science, man, he used sixty percent more of his brain than the rest of us.” The real science, actually, has shown repeatedly that brain size has nothing to do with intelligence and that there are no “dead zones” in the brain that we just don’t use. Evolution probably wouldn’t build us with heaps of junk built into our most adaptive and most active human resource– that would be quite the luxury indeed. (Although on a side-note, there has been research showing how Einstein was smarter than the rest of us, if that’s really any surprise.)
What these misinformed statements speak to is how little we really know about the brain. What’s becoming more and more clear, though, is how impressive our three pound mass of gray matter really is. We do know that information is passed through and processed by cells in our brain called neurons. Estimates on the number of these specialized cells exceed the one hundred billion marker. And the number of connections between these neurons – the points where minuscule pulses of electricity somehow create our thoughts, feelings and emotions – number over a hundred trillion, a number so big that it is literally impossible to imagine. The processing power that this allows our brains is of incredibly impressive proportions. Neuroscientists have estimated that, in computer speak, our brains operate at 11 million bits per second (Dijksterhuix, 2004). Our highly perceptive sense of vision alone accounts for 10 of those 11 million.
The truly shocking part is how little of this sophisticated machine accounts for our awareness. Because our daily life — paying bills, following South Beach diets, watching the latest trendy TV show — is devoted to making plans and having different experiences, the intuitive assumption is that our human monopoly on consciousness represents the majority of the work our brain is doing from moment to moment. In fact, no more than fifty of those eleven million bits are devoted to our willful actions and thoughts. And that’s science’s optimistic estimation. While reading silently we process about 45 bits per second, and only 30 if we are reading aloud (Dijksterhuix, 2004). Simple arithmetic like basic multiplication dumbs us down to 12 bits per second. At our very best our conscious thought accounts for only .00045% of our brain’s activity. To illustrate the underwhelming proportion that represents, think about it this way: if your conscious and subconscious were in a race, by the time your consciousness had run one mile, your subconscious would have already run around the entire Earth.
This means two things. First, we’re all much smarter than we think and have a lot going on upstairs. Second, this minuscule role of conscious thought in the brains millisecond to millisecond activities means that we need to seriously devalue the premium we put on consciousness. For centuries our cultural forefathers have been emphasizing the incomparable supremacy of the mind of man. Only in the past twenty years, however, have we begun to discover that our subconscious could have equal if not greater significance in our lives. This line of research has gone far enough as to give consciousness more restricted evolutionary purpose, like a last line of resort when the body and subconscious brain don’t know how to proceed in complex circumstances (Morsella, 2005).
I’m not saying that conscious thought is useless. In fact, it’s possibly the single most impressive adaptation in the animal world. What I am saying is that conscious thought is extremely cumbersome and tiring for our beleaguered brains. We’re capable of doing pretty amazing things without thinking about them, whether something as carefree as driving home without thinking about which turns to make or the more troubling act of automatically discriminating against people different from ourselves (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). Whether we like it or not, the fact is that a huge amount of the human experience is happening external to what we’re actually thinking about. You know, like, 99.99955% of it.
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