Talking about the brain in terms of what percentage of it you use is silly. But I think there’s an important grain of truth in the idea of vast, untapped intell

Talking about the brain in terms of what percentage of it you use is silly. But I think there’s an important grain of truth in the idea of vast, untapped intellectual potential in many people. A better statement may be something like “many people only realise a small proportion of their potential intellect”, which I strongly believe. I just think it’s little to do with the brain and mostly to do with emotional associations and implicit limiting beliefs. Anecdotally I have seen countless examples of people being able to do impressive feats of mathematical thinking, but only as long as they don’t realise it’s ‘maths’. And as soon as they realise, it often stops working; the deeply learned negative associations sadly seem to quickly overpower any fleeting buzz of “oh I can do this after all”. I think untold damage is done in schools, instilling into kids associations of maths (or other subjects) as a thing that must be learned (for a grade, or to get a teacher/parent off their back) instead of as a useful tool they can turn to when they want to solve a problem they have.