That’s right, you’re a trespasser and a thief. A common, petty criminal. WHO STEALS FROM CHARITY.

That pile of stuff on my porch? Was not for you. It was not abandoned, it was not free for the taking. It belonged to a charity on its way to pick it up.

You, my dear, are someone who steals from the poor and the mentally ill.

I hope you’re proud of yourself. Enjoy the sweater and the jacket and everything else you took. Maybe wearing them will make my sense of human decency rub off on you.

Judging by the number of pirates, that is.

…

What?

The “you only use 10% of your brain” statistic showed up on Cracked.com’s most frequently quoted bullshit statistics list. Which is good, because the statistic is nonsense, but also bad, because their explanation of why it’s nonsense is…mostly nonsense. In their explanation, they basically accept the 10% statistic is true, they just say that contrary to popular belief, you can’t actually do any better.

No no no no no.

The 10% statistic is bogus. You, in fact, use almost all of your brain almost all of the time. Depending on what you’re doing, your brain might not be working very hard, but it will be working. If I perform an fMRI on you while you lie there and do nothing, your entire brain will still light up *. If I put you through a sensory deprivation protocol for long enough, you will actually start to hallucinate, because your brain craves input and activity.

Take, for example, the simple task of sipping from a glass. Your prefrontal cortex, probably in response to a “thirsty!” signal from the hypothalamus, decides that you want some water. It (in conjunction with the parietal cortex) plans the sequence of movements needed to pick up the class and drink from it and signals your motor cortex to execute the plan.

Meanwhile, your occipital cortex processes the scene in front of you and, with the help of the temporal cortex, recognizes a particular object as the glass you want to drink from. Your parietal cortex uses the input from visual cortex to triangulate the distance to the glass and calculate the trajectory of your arm and the shape of your hand so that you can pick it up.

After you make contact with the glass, the tactile feedback goes back into your parietal cortex so that you can grip the glass firmly. And then your parietal cortex and premotor/motor cortex work to monitor the proprioceptive feedback from your arm and make needed course corrections so you bring the glass to your lips rather than dumping the contents into your eye (infants are still training this particular neural circuit, which is why they often do whack food into their eyes).

That’s most of your brain right there. So you can sip from a glass.