Soon, others were reporting sightings, and excitement spread far and wide. As reported in an 1880 pamphlet, The Silver Lake Serpent, “People came on foot, by carriage, on horseback, and in fact, by any means of locomotion in their power, to see if even a glimpse of the monster could be obtained, and the hotels found they had 'struck a bonanza'” (p. 3). Several expeditions were launched-ranging from a whaleman with a harpoon to a vigilance society of men armed with guns to a company having a capital stock of one thousand dollars and bent on capturing the creature (Silver Lake Serpent 1880, 3-21).

This was all to no avail, and the excitement eventually died down. Then, reports a modern account: “Several years later [1857] a fire broke out in the Walker Hotel. Firemen rushed to the scene to put out the blaze. When they worked their way into the attic they came upon a strange sight. In the midst of the flames they saw a great green serpent made of canvas and coiled wire” (Legend 1984, 11). States another source: “The truth was then revealed by Mr. Walker himself” who “built that monster serpent with his friends to pick up the business at the Walker House Hotel” ("True” 1974).

Mr. Walker was Artemus B. Walker (1813-1889), and the scheme attributed to him and “a few of his intimate and trustworthy friends” is described in a local history by Frank D. Roberts in 1915:

The serpent was to be constructed of a body about 60 feet long, covered with a waterproof canvas supported on the inside by coiled wire. A trench was to be dug and gas pipe laid from the basement of a shanty situated on the west side of the lake, to the lake shore. A large pair of bellows such as were used in a blacksmith shop, secreted in the basement of the shanty connected to that end of the pipe, and a small light rubber hose from the lake end to the serpent. The body was to be painted a deep green color, with bright yellow spots added to give it a more hideous appearance. Eyes and mouth were to be colored a bright red. The plan of manipulating the serpent was simple. It was to be taken out and sunk in the lake, and then when everything was ready, the bellows were to be operated and air forced into the serpent, which naturally would cause it to rise to the surface. Weights were to be attached to different portions of the body to insure its sinking as the air was allowed to escape. Three ropes were to be attached to the forward portion of the body, one extending to the shore where the ice house now stands; one across the lake, and the other to the marsh at the north end; the serpent to be propelled in any direction by the aid of these ropes [Roberts 1915, 200-201].

Roberts adds that “Many nights were spent” in the construction of the creature, after which it was transported to the lake one night and sunk at a depth of some twenty feet. Then came Friday evening, July 13, 1855, and-you know the rest of the tale. Today, Perry’s city limits signs sport a sea monster, and the town annually hosts a lighthearted Silver Lake Serpent festival-most recently featuring hot-air balloons. (One of these was an inflated sea serpent in which I flew over the scenic lake and countryside. See Figures 1 and 2.)

The hoax story is a colorful yarn, but is it true? It has certainly been reported as factual even by writers inclined to promote mysterious monsters-providing a touch of skepticism that seemed to enhance those writers’ credibility. For example John Keel’s Strange Creatures from Time and Space (1970, 260-261) claims the case proves “that a sea serpent hoax is possible and was possible even in the year 1855.” Keel (260) also claims that “witnesses generally gave a very accurate description of what they had seen.” He is echoed by Roy P. Mackal whose Searching for Hidden Animals (1980, 209) specifically states that the Silver Lake creature was “described as . . . shiny, dark green with yellow spots, and having flaming red eyes and a mouth and huge fins.” Other sources follow suit, including the History of Northwestern New York, which states that watchers “beheld a long green body, covered with yellow spots . . . and a large mouth, the interior of which was bright red” (Douglass 1947, 562). Alas, these writers are merely assuming people saw what Roberts’s description of the fake serpent indicates they should have seen. In fact, not one of the original eyewitness reports mentions the yellow spots or the red mouth.

Figure 2. Balloon’s eye view of Silver Lake, Whoming County, New York, site of 1855 lake monster sightings. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

At least one source asserts that “The creators of this stupendous hoax soon afterward confessed” (Peace 1976), and monster hunter Mackal (1980, 209) names the “confessed” perpetrators as Walker and Wyoming Times editor Truman S. Gillett. However, one writer attributes the newspaper’s alleged involvement to “rumor” (Kimiecik 1988, 10), and a long-time local researcher, Clark Rice, insists that Walker was only suspected and that “No one ever admitted to helping him” (Fielding 1998).

Due to the many variations the story is appropriately described as a “legend,” “tale,” or even “the leading bit of folklore of Perry and Silver Lake” (Perry 1976, 145). States Rice: “It was a subject that was bantered around when you were growing up, and everyone had a different version” (Vogel 1995).

A Hoax?

Invariably the books and articles that give a source for the tale cite Frank D. Roberts’s previously quoted account. Writing in 1915, sixty years after the alleged hoax, Roberts gives no specific source or documentation, instead relying on a fuzzy, passive-voice grammatical construction to say, ” . . . to the late A. B. Walker is credited the plan of creating the Silver Lake sea serpent” (emphasis added) having supposedly been assisted by “a few of his intimate and trustworthy friends"-who, alas, remain unnamed. He adds, “It is said that the serpent was made in the old Chapin tannery” (emphasis added), further indication that Roberts is reporting rumor (Roberts 1915; 200, 202).

Figure 3. Author with bellows (probably a blacksmith’s) allegedly used to inflate a fake rubber serpent as part of an elaborate hoax.

The elaborateness of the literally monstrous 1855 mechanism raises further suspicion about the tale. Never mind the alleged laying of the “gas pipe,” when gas lines did not come to Perry until 1909 nor piped water until 1896 (Perry 1976, 119, 124), raising questions about the availability of the pipe. And never mind the “small light rubber hose” that reportedly extended from shore to serpent, when the availability of that seems equally doubtful in a mid-nineteenth-century village. There is a large old bellows, attributed to the hoax, that is displayed in the Pioneer Museum at Perry (see Figure 3), but its display card states only that it is “believed to have been used to inflate the Silver Lake sea serpent” (emphasis added).

Materials aside, the complexity of the alleged contraption as described by Roberts provokes skepticism. Although such a monster would not seem to preclude the laws of physics (Pickett 1998), the propulsion method Roberts describes raises serious questions. The three ropes that were reportedly attached to the serpent and extended to three lakeside sites would have greatly complicated the operation, not to mention multiplying the danger of detection.

Indeed, the Silver Lake contrivance would seem to have been a rather remarkable engineering feat-especially for a hotelier and some village friends. One suspects they would have sewed a lot of canvas and made many experiments before achieving a workable monster, yet Roberts (1915, 202) claims theirs worked on the first attempt. In fact, over the years attempts to replicate the elaborate monster have failed (Fielding 1998; Peace 1976).

Despite the claim that Walker created the serpent, 1855 newspaper accounts make clear that there was an earlier Indian tradition about a Silver Lake serpent and that, furthermore, such a monster had been “repeatedly seen during the past thirty years” (Silver Lake Serpent 1855). Certainly, not all of the 1855 sightings can be explained by the monster contraption Roberts described. According to his account it was installed near the northern end of the lake, where both the inlet and outlet are located. Yet on Thursday, August 16, farmer John Worden and others who were “on the west shore of the lake between two and three miles above the outlet” (emphasis added) reportedly sighted “the monster” about a quarter mile distant (Silver Lake serpent 1855). Surely no one imagines the fake monster being controlled from more than two miles away! Neither can the monster apparatus explain sightings of a distinct pair of creatures at the same time (Silver Lake Serpent 1880, 19-20).

In fact, the earliest version of the hoax tale appeared in the December 12, 1860, Wyoming County Mirror. “Everyone remembers,” stated the brief article, “that during the Silver Lake snake excitement, at Perry, the hotel there reaped a rich harvest of visitors. A correspondent of the Buffalo Commercial says that when about two years and a half ago, the hotel was partially burned, a certain man discovered the serpent in the hotel.” This “was made of India rubber,” and supposedly “corresponded minutely” with a Buffalo Republic description of the serpent. The man who discovered the rubber fake “has just got mad at the landlord and divulged the secret.” The newspaper story ended on a skeptical note: “We suppose this last game is just about as much of a 'sell' as the original snake.”

In sum, the historical evidence diminishes as we work backward to the alleged hoax, whereas, conversely, details of the story increase the further they are from the supposed event. Therefore it appears it was the story-rather than the serpent-that became inflated. If Walker and/or others did perpetrate a hoax, it is unlikely to have involved an elaborate contraption such as Roberts described.

There were hoaxes associated with the 1855 frenzy but they were largely played out in the newspapers of the day, which treated the whole affair as great sport. For example, in September the Chicago Times reported that two visitors had seen the monstrous serpent harpooned and towed to shore. The newspaper jocosely reported that at nightfall the creature uprooted the tree to which it was tethered and returned to the lake. It was recaptured the next day, said the Times, whereupon it “awoke, threw its head 60 feet into the air; lurid eyes glared like balls of flame and its tongue, like flashes of forked lightning, 10-12 feet long, vibrated between its open jaws” (Douglass 1955, 119).

Insinuations of hoaxing probably elicited an early statement by Wyoming Times editor Gillett. On August 8, 1855, he wrote: “We assert, without fear of contradiction, that there is not a log floating on the water of Silver Lake-that nothing has been placed there to create the serpent story . . . ” and that the paper had published what was related by truthful people (Silver Lake serpent 1855).

Tracking the Monster

Even if there was a hoax (either a fake serpent or a journalistic scheme), that does nothing to explain the earlier sightings. At this late date we can only round up the usual lake-monster suspects. As the perpetual saga at Scotland’s Loch Ness demonstrates, “monsters” may be created by floating trees and driftwood, leaping fish, swimming otters and deer, windslicks, and many other culprits-often seen under such illusion-fostering conditions as mirage effects and diminished visibility (Binns 1984). For example, some of the Silver Lake sightings, including the one that launched the 1855 frenzy, occurred at night when visibility would have been relatively poor and imaginations heightened.

Eyewitnesses typically insisted the object was a living creature, sometimes with its head above the water. A possible candidate is the otter, which “when swimming seems a very large creature” (Scott 1815). While treading water, an otter can raise its head and neck well above the surface and otherwise simulate a monstrous serpent, especially if swimming with one or two others in a line (Binns 1984, 186-91). The large North American otter (Lutra canadensis) inhabits “virtually the whole of the New World” (Chamin 1985, 6). On one of my visits to Silver Lake, I was startled while walking along a nature trail to glimpse a creature swimming in a nearby stream; it quickly vanished and I was puzzled as to its identity until I later learned that otters had recently been reintroduced there.

I subsequently talked with New York State wildlife experts about otters possibly being mistaken for mid-nineteenth-century “lake serpents.” Bruce Penrod, Senior Wildlife Biologist with the Department of Environmental Conservation, stated it was “very probable” that otters were in the Silver Lake area in 1855. And if the sightings were not hoaxes, he said, he would clearly prefer otters-or even muskrats, beavers, or swimming deer-over sea monsters as plausible explanations for such sightings.

His view was echoed by Jon Kopp, Senior Wildlife Technician with the department. Kopp had an illuminating story to tell. In 1994 he was involved in banding ducks and was sequestered in a blind on Lake Alice in Clinton County. It was dark, when suddenly he saw a huge snakelike creature making a sinuous, undulating movement, heading in his direction! As it came quite close he saw that the “serpent” was actually a group of six or seven otters swimming in single file, diving and resurfacing to create the serpentine effect. “After seeing this,” Kopp said, “I can understand how people can see a 'sea serpent'” (Kopp 1998).

I thought of otters especially when I studied two previously mentioned accounts of 1855 that described a pair of “serpents” estimated at twenty to forty feet in length. Possibly the witnesses in each case saw two or more otters, which, together with their wakes, gave the appearance of much longer creatures. All of the witnesses were observing from considerable distances-in one case through a spy glass (Silver Lake Serpent 1880, 19-20)-distances that could easily be overestimated, thus exaggerating the apparent size of the creature. Because otters are “great travelers,” with nomadic tendencies (Kopp 1998), it is possible that a group of them came into Silver Lake in the summer of 1855 and later moved on, thus initiating and then ending that particular rash of sightings.

The least likely explanation for the Silver Lake reports is that some exotic creature inhabited its waters. Whatever people did see, the situation was hyped in turn by the local newspaper and the antics of would-be monster hunters. People’s expectations were thus heightened and that led in turn to misperceptions. Even the overly credulous paranormalist Rupert T. Gould admitted that people expecting to see something could be misled by anything having a slight resemblance to it. Gould called this tendency “expectant attention” (Binns 1984, 77-78) and it is the basis of many paranormal claims-apparently including sightings of the Silver Lake Serpent, a case of the tale wagging the monster.

Acknowledgments

In addition to those mentioned in the text, I am grateful to Tom Pickett, Department of Physics, University of Southern Indiana; Tammy Miller, Perry Chamber of Commerce; Barbara Henry, Perry Public Library; Tim Binga and Ranjit Sandhu, Center for Inquiry; the staff of the Special Collections Department, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library; and the Inter-Library Loan Department, New York State Library.

References

• Binns, Ronald. 1984. The Loch Ness Mystery Solved. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• Chamin, Paul. 1985. The Natural History of Otters. New York: Facts on File.
• Douglass, Harry S. 1947. “Wyoming County,” in John Theodore Horton, et al., History of Northwestern New York. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co.
• —. 1955. The legend of the Serpent: 1855-1955, Historical Wyoming 8.4 (July): 115-21.
• Fielding, Todd. 1998. It came from Silver Lake, The Daily News (Batavia, N.Y.), July 25.
• History of Wyoming County, N. Y. 1880. New York: F. W. Beers & Co.
• Keel, John A. 1970. Strange Creatures from Time and Space. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 254-9.
• Kimiecik, Kathy. 1988. The strange case of the Silver Lake sea serpent, New York Folklore 9.2 (Summer): 10-11.
• Kopp, Jon. 1998. Interview by author, September 18.
• The Legend of the Silver Lake Sea Serpent. [1984.] Silver Lake, New York: Serpent Comics and Print Shop.
• Mackal, Roy P. 1980. Searching for Hidden Animals. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 209-10.
• Peace, Carolyn. 1976. The Silver Lake sea serpent, Buffalo Courier-Express, May 16.
• Penrod, Bruce. 1998. Interview by author, September 14.
• Perry, New York, As It Was and Is. 1976. Perry, N.Y.: Perry Bicentennial Committee.
• Pickett, Thomas J. 1998. Personal communication, September 18.
• Roberts, Frank D. 1915. History of the Town of Perry, New York. N.P. [Perry, N.Y.]: C. G. Clarke & Son, 184-203.
• Scott, Sir Walter. 1815. Letter quoted in Binns 1984, 186-7.
• The Silver Lake serpent. 1855. Wyoming Times, September 26 (citing earlier issues of July 18-September 19).
• The Silver Lake Serpent: A Full Account of the Monster as Seen in the Year 1855. 1880. Castile, N.Y.: Gaines and Terry.
• Silver Lake serpent revived for Jaycee festival, undated clipping ca. 1960s, vertical file, Perry Public Library.
• “The True and Unembellished Tale of the Great Serpent of Silver Lake,” 1974. Song, published in Legend 1984, 1.
• Vogel, Charity. 1995. Perry recalls fishy tale of sea serpent, The Buffalo News, July 22.

Dawkins quickly lays that particular complaint to rest by showing how Newton’s optics led to spectroscopy which led to measurement of emission and absorption line spectra and thereby to direct understanding of the nature and characteristics of stars-their size, luminosity, history, and future (“Barcodes of the Stars”)-and then to our wider understanding of the cosmos.

“Newton’s dissection of the rainbow into light of different wavelengths led onto Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism and thence to Einstein’s theory of special relativity,” notes Dawkins, adding: “If you think the rainbow has poetic mystery, you should try relativity.” All from a little “unweaving of the rainbow.” And nothing about it need diminish our astonishment and appreciation of the beauty of a rainbow arcing across the rain-darkened sky.

The positive message throughout is that the impulses to awe, reverence, and wonder that led the poet William Blake to mysticism (and lesser figures to paranormal superstition) are “precisely those that lead others of us to science. Our interpretation is different but what excites us is the same.” The scientist has the same wonder, the same sense of the profound, as the mystic, but with an additional impulse: let’s find out what we can about it. (Skeptical Inquirer readers got a teaser of some of the book’s arguments in Dawkins’s article “Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder,” March/April 1998.)

Dawkins argues that while poets might well seek inspiration from science, science should reach out to wider constituencies among poets, artists, and all others who share some of the same impulses.

He doesn't argue that scientists should attempt to write poetically, unless like Sagan or Loren Eiseley they have unique skills in that area. Simple clarity will do. Says Dawkins: “The poetry is in the science.”

Along the way, Dawkins examines superstition and gullibility, lamenting how people can find the “meaningless pap” of astrology appealing, in the face of the real universe as revealed by astronomy. He suggests that grouping people according to which of only 12 mythic signs they were born under is “a form of discriminatory labeling rather like the cultural stereotypes that many of us nowadays find objectionable.” He regrets that we are “in the grip of a near epidemic of paranormal propaganda on television.” He recalls Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, “that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and thoughtfully considers, “How are we to know when skepticism is justified, and when it is dogmatic, intolerant short-sightedness?” He refers to a “spectrum of improbabilities” and suggests ways to think about how to evaluate an amazing or miraculous story.

Abetted by the media, astrology, paranormalism, and alien visitations have an inside track on the public consciousness, Dawkins notes, but there may be paradoxical grounds for encouragement in the realization that at least some of this tendency exploits “our natural and laudable appetite for wonder.” This wonder, given proper access, can be fulfilled just as well by science and the real wonders of nature.

In one chapter, “Unweaving the Uncanny,” Dawkins shows how to “take the sting out of seemingly astonishing coincidence by quietly sitting down and calculating the likelihood that it would have happened anyway.” He invents a term he calls PETWHAC, for Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental, useful in evaluating how probable improbable-seeming events actually are, liberating us from a need to invoke occult forces. He offers a number of fresh examples, such as when his wife bought her mother an antique watch and she got it home and peeled off the label to find revealed her mother’s initials, “M.A.B.” “Uncanny?” Dawkins asks. He does the calculation based on frequencies of names in phone directories and finds that if everyone in Britain bought an antique engraved watch, 3,000 of them would find their mother’s initials on it.

Seeking to understand how we are so strongly impressed by coincidences, Dawkins turns to his Darwinian roots. Like all other creatures, humans must behave as intuitive statisticians. We need to steer between false positive and false negative errors according to which offer the greater penalty in a given situation. Furthermore, our willingness to be impressed by uncanny coincidence was influenced by the smaller population size of our ancestors and the relative sameness of their everyday experience, leading us to expect a very modest level of coincidence. Yet today we are immersed in a giant global media culture and our access to stories of all kind is multiplied many times compared with that of our small-village ancestors. This means, says Dawkins, that the number of opportunities for coincidence is greater for each one of us than it would have been for our ancestors, and consequently greater than our brains are calibrated to assess. Theoretically, we can learn to recalibrate ourselves, but that is “revealingly difficult even for sophisticated scientists and mathematicians.”

There is much else in Dawkins’s purview. He writes about DNA fingerprinting (a bit hard-going, I must admit). He offers chapters on not just good poetic science, where helpful analogies and metaphors stimulate the imagination, but also on the danger of “bad poetic science,” the power of poetic imagery to inspire bad science, even if it is good poetry. Included here are Teilhard de Chardin’s “euphoristic prose poetry” and also the notorious fondness of mystics for “energy” and “vibrations,” technical terms creating the illusion of scientific content where there is no content of any kind. Quantum uncertainty has provoked its share of bad poetic science too, as has the postmodernist movement in academia and even, surprisingly, Dawkins’s own field of evolutionary theory. Dawkins considers his own concept of the “selfish gene” good poetic science that aids understanding rather than impedes it but says it is susceptible to being misunderstood by bad poetic science.

Another chapter describes how there is a sense in which our DNA is a coded description of the worlds in which our ancestors survived. “And isn't it an arresting thought?” Dawkins asks. “We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.” In a related sense, the brain of an individual houses a parallel set of models of the animal’s own world.

The final chapters deal with the wonderful machinery of perception. One example is how the nerve cells economize by registering only changes from moment to moment and ignoring the more common stasis-all the boring stuff. Computers are poor at recognizing patterns such as faces, but humans, through evolution, have become superb at these and other pattern-recognition abilities. We usually create fairly accurate models of the world but can also create illusions and concoct hallucinations when something goes just slightly awry. “A brain that is good at simulating models in imagination is also, almost inevitably, in danger of self-delusion,” Dawkins warns. When we see visions of angels, saints, or gods, they seem real because they must; they are models put together by the normal simulation software in the brain using the same modeling techniques that it ordinarily uses when presenting its continuously updated edition of reality.

Dawkins is one of the treasured few scientists today writing in depth about science and scientific processes for intelligent general readers whose works are simultaneously scientifically rich and provocative, accessible (although there is never a sense of being watered down), and successful. He brings a discerning critical intelligence and an impassioned concern in the hope that we will find science worthy of our own awe. At the same time by learning about our own genetic and environmental heritage and the workings of our brains we can learn how to be aware of our own capacities for self-delusion.

The Myth and the Media

That tired Ten-Percent claim pops up all the time. Last year, national magazine ads for U.S. Satellite Broadcasting showed a drawing of a brain. Under it was the caption, “You only use 11 percent of its potential.” Well, they're a little closer than the ten-percent figure, but still off by about 89 percent. In July 1998, ABC television ran promotional spots for “The Secret Lives of Men,” one of their offerings for the fall season’s lineup. The spot featured a full-screen blurb that read, “Men only use ten percent of their brains.”

One reason this myth has endured is that it has been adopted by psychics and other paranormal pushers to explain psychic powers. On more than one occasion I've heard psychics tell their audiences, “We only use ten percent of our minds. If scientists don't know what we do with the other ninety percent, it must be used for psychic powers!” In Reason To Believe: A Practical Guide to Psychic Phenomena, author Michael Clark mentions a man named Craig Karges. Karges charges a lot of money for his “Intuitive Edge” program, designed to develop natural psychic abilities. Clark quotes Karges as saying: “We normally use only 10 to 20 percent of our minds. Think how different your life would be if you could utilize that other 80 to 90 percent known as the subconscious mind” (Clark 1997, 56).

This was also the reason that Caroline Myss gave for her alleged intuitive powers on a segment of “Eye to Eye with Bryant Gumbel,” which aired in July of 1998. Myss, who has written books on unleashing “intuitive powers,” said that everyone has intuitive gifts, and lamented that we use so little of the mind’s potential. To make matters worse, just the week before, on the very same program, correct information was presented about the myth. In a bumper spot between the program and commercials, a quick quiz flashed onscreen: What percentage of the brain is used? The multiple-choice answers ranged from 10 percent to 100 percent. The correct answer appeared, which I was glad to see. But if the producers knew that what one of their interviewees said is clearly and demonstrably inaccurate, why did they let it air? Does the right brain not know what the left brain is doing? Perhaps the Myss interview was a repeat, in which case the producers presumably checked her facts after it aired and felt some responsibility to correct the error in the following week’s broadcast. Or possibly the broadcasts aired in sequence and the producers simply did not care and broadcast Myss and her misinformation anyway.

Even Uri Geller, who has made a career out of trying to convince people he can bend metal with his mind, trots out this little gem. This claim appears in his book Uri Geller’s Mind-Power Book in the introduction: “Our minds are capable of remarkable, incredible feats, yet we don't use them to their full capacity. In fact, most of us only use about 10 per cent of our brains, if that. The other 90 per cent is full of untapped potential and undiscovered abilities, which means our minds are only operating in a very limited way instead of at full stretch. I believe that we once had full power over our minds. We had to, in order to survive, but as our world has become more sophisticated and complex we have forgotten many of the abilities we once had” (emphasis in original).

Evidence Against the Ten-Percent Myth

The argument that psychic powers come from the unused majority of the brain is based on the logical fallacy of the argument from ignorance. In this fallacy, lack of proof for a position (or simply lack of information) is used to try to support a particular claim. Even if it were true that the vast majority of the human mind is unused (which it clearly is not), that fact in no way implies that any extra capacity could somehow give people paranormal powers. This fallacy pops up all the time in paranormal claims, and is especially prevalent among UFO proponents. For example: Two people see a strange light in the sky. The first, a UFO believer, says, “See there! Can you explain that?” The skeptic replies that no, he can't. The UFO believer is gleeful. “Ha! You don't know what it is, so it must be aliens!” he says, arguing from ignorance.

What follows are two of the reasons that the Ten-Percent story is suspect. (For a much more thorough and detailed analysis of the subject, see Barry Beyerstein’s chapter in the new book Mind Myths: Exploring Everyday Mysteries of the Mind [1999].)

1. Brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow. Indeed, although certain minor functions may use only a small part of the brain at one time, any sufficiently complex set of activities or thought patterns will indeed use many parts of the brain. Just as people don't use all of their muscle groups at one time, they also don't use all of their brain at once. For any given activity, such as eating, watching television, making love, or reading Skeptical Inquirer, you may use a few specific parts of your brain. Over the course of a whole day, however, just about all of the brain is used at one time or another.
2. The myth presupposes an extreme localization of functions in the brain. If the “used” or “necessary” parts of the brain were scattered all around the organ, that would imply that much of the brain is in fact necessary. But the myth implies that the “used” part of the brain is a discrete area, and the “unused” part is like an appendix or tonsil, taking up space but essentially unnecessary. But if all those parts of the brain are unused, removal or damage to the “unused” part of the brain should be minor or unnoticed. Yet people who have suffered head trauma, a stroke, or other brain injury are frequently severely impaired. Have you ever heard a doctor say, “. . . But luckily when that bullet entered his skull, it only damaged the 90 percent of his brain he didn't use"? Of course not.

Variants of the Ten-Percent Myth

The myth is not simply a static, misunderstood factoid. It has several forms, and this adaptability gives it a shelf life longer than lacquered Spam. In the basic form, the myth claims that years ago a scientist discovered that we indeed did use only ten percent of our brains. Another variant is that only ten percent of the brain had been mapped, and this in turn became misunderstood as ten percent used. A third variant was described earlier by Craig Karges. This view is that the brain is somehow divided neatly into two parts: the conscious mind which is used ten to twenty percent of the time (presumably at capacity); and the subconscious mind, where the remaining eighty to ninety percent of the brain is unused. This description betrays a profound misunderstanding of brain function research.

Part of the reason for the long life of the myth is that if one variant can be proven incorrect, the person who held the belief can simply shift the reason for his belief to another basis, while the belief itself stays intact. So, for example, if a person is shown that PET scans depict activity throughout the entire brain, he can still claim that, well, the ninety percent figure really referred to the subconscious mind, and therefore the Ten-Percent figure is still basically correct.

Regardless of the exact version heard, the myth is spread and repeated, by both the well-meaning and the deliberately deceptive. The belief that remains, then, is what Robert J. Samuelson termed a “psycho-fact, [a] belief that, though not supported by hard evidence, is taken as real because its constant repetition changes the way we experience life.” People who don't know any better will repeat it over and over, until, like the admonition against swimming right after you eat, the claim is widely believed. ("Triumph of the Psycho-Fact,” Newsweek, May 9, 1994.)

The origins of the myth are not at all clear. Beyerstein, of the Brain Behaviour Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, has traced it back to at least the early part of the century. A recent column in New Scientist magazine also suggested various roots, including Albert Einstein and Dale Carnegie (Brain Drain 1999). It likely has a number of sources, principally misunderstood or misinterpreted legitimate scientific findings as well as self-help gurus.

The most powerful lure of the myth is probably the idea that we might develop psychic abilities, or at least gain a leg up on the competition by improving our memory or concentration. All this is available for the asking, the ads say, if we just tapped into our most incredible of organs, the brain.

It is past time to put this myth to rest, although if it has survived at least a century so far, it will surely live on into the new millennium. Perhaps the best way to combat this chestnut is to reply to the speaker, when the myth is mentioned, “Oh? What part don't you use?”

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Dr. Barry Beyerstein for providing research help and suggestions.

References

• Beyerstein, Barry. 1999. Whence cometh the myth that we only use ten percent of our brains? In Mind-myths: Exploring Everyday Mysteries of the Mind and Brain, edited by Sergio Della Sala. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
• Brain Drain. 1999.The Last Word (column). New Scientist 19/26 December 1998-2 January 1999.
• Clark, Michael. 1997. Reason to Believe. New York: Avon Books
• Geller, Uri, and Jane Struthers. 1996. Uri Geller’s Mind-power Book. London: Virgin Books.