How To Use 100% Of Your Brain Capacity

by | Apr 2, 2020 | Uncategorized

First off, you need to understand the two different parts of your brain that governs your everyday life.

The conscious brain is the critical brain that helps you connect dots, think logically and critically, get creative and get organized.

The subconscious brain on the other hand, communicates through impulses, emotions, feelings and images.

When we talk about information storage, we talk about a delicate three step process, where one missing step would result in the failure of proper information storage. Every single bit of information is initially received, then the information is encoded, leading to the last step which is the storage.

Now how does this process work?

Receiving:

The first step is when you receive the information. The reception can be governed by your different senses, or your analytical thinking. The information is then acquired or rejected based on our critical analysis and subconscious intuition.

Encoding:

Once the information is received and accepted, you will start encoding the information. In this phase, the information is stored in your short term memory. This memory system is limited, information will be stored for no longer than 15–30 seconds before you shift, and start thinking about something else. In today’s digital world, where we are bombarded by information stimulation on a continuous basis, our short term memory is becoming all the more limited.

If a few hours back, you were scrolling down on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter… Can you remember what you saw? Can you remember 1% of what you saw? The answer is most likely a big NO. It is simply because all of this information was not properly encoded as your short term memory shifted from one bit of information to the other without having the time to process it and encode it properly.

Storage:

Here comes the interesting part… How much information can the human brain store and process.

There’s an interesting state that a lot of people often experience, known as the state of flow. The state of flow is when your conscious brain is in coherence with your subconscious brain. On a conscious level, we can process up to 120 bits of information a second. However, on a subconscious level, we can process up to 11,000,000 bits of information a second.

Just imagine the difference between winning 120$, and 11,000,000$.

Now by default, if your conscious brain processes 120 bits of information a second, and your subconscious brain processes information at 11 million bits a second, we can see that the subconscious brain is a lot more powerful, and it is indeed.

You don’t have to consciously think about everything you’re saying when having a conversation. You don’t need to consciously think what the capital of your country is. If you learned how to swim or how to ride a bicycle, you can jump in the poo or hop on your bicycle, and you’ll be good to go… You don’t have to consciously remember how to do it.

Now let’s see how much information the human brain can actually store:

Whether you’re familiar with technology or not, you’ll be able to understand the following metaphor.

The average storage size of a picture on your computer would be 1 mb per average quality picture. Imagine you have a computer where you can store 100,000,000 pictures. To make it even more interesting, imagine you have 100,000,000 ideas in your head that you can access at any point, how amazing would that be?

In fact the storage capacity of our brain can reach an outstanding 100 Terabytes, in other words, 100,000,000 Megabytes.

But before you get all excited, you need to know that the majority of those memories are not consciously available, but if you work on the encoding process, and make sure that most of the information received are encoded and eventually stored, you would start to expand the accessible capacity of information stored in your brain.

There’s this experiment, where lab mice where conditioned in a certain way. A bell would ring, then the mice would get an electrical shock. I know, a lot of you right now are thinking that this is unethical, and I agree with you, the experiment is not very recent, but stay with me for just a minute here.

The shock experiment was conducted on the lab mice for a period of time until they gave birth to newborn mice. Those newborn mice were also exposed to the electrical shock experiment. Same thing happened again, they kept receiving electrical shocks after a bell rings until this second generation of lab mice gave birth to a third generation of lab mice. The third generation of mice had the same experiment conducted on them as well until they gave birth to the fourth generation of lab mice. Here’s where it gets interesting. The fourth generation of lab mice were not exposed to the electrical shock treatment. They never heard the bell, and they never get electrical shocks. However, when they heard the bell rings, they flinched. Let that sink in for a second. How is that even possible?

This experiment shed the light on a fascinating scientific concept called epigenetic memory.

A huge part of our memory is encoded in our genes throughout our lives. When we pass on those genes by the act of procreation, we pass on the epigenetic memory print that we have. You hold within you, the memory of all your previous ancestors, and you have access to it as well.

Dr. Joe Dispenza in his series, Rewired, gives a very interesting metaphor to help us understand our brains better. Imagine you have a computer, and this computer of course has certain specifications when it comes to memory space, functioning speed, and utility capacity.

If you were to download a professional video editing software on that computer, that surpasses its functioning capacity, what’s going to happen is that as soon as you open the software, it’s going to take a while for it to launch, and as you use it, it’s going to glitch, and run slowly, and you’ll have a very hard time working on it. Eventually, you end up closing the program, and deleting it, as you can’t operate on it using your current computer. Instead, you decide to download a basic software that your computer can actually handle, and you can finally edit your video, but it’s nowhere near as good as what you could’ve done if you were editing on the professional software.

The computer is the subconscious brain, and the creative video editing aspect, is your conscious brain. Just like your computer has a fixed capacity, your subconscious brain also has a capacity.

Now what created this capacity? Your thoughts, social influences, experiences, environment, beliefs…etc Are all factors that shaped the capacity of your subconscious brain.

Now if you have a goal, where you want to make 200,000$ in one year, the only thing standing between the goal setting process, and the goal achievement, is simply, your subconscious brain. If your computer is programmed to operate on a level where you can only make 50,000$ a year, it would be impossible to try and make 200,000$ a year. Your subconscious brain will create obstacles, doubt, negative thoughts, and detrimental behaviors to make sure that you don’t exceed that 50,000$. Why? Because your subconscious brain is your habit brain, and it is very hard to try and break a habit. Your subconscious brain will fight for its survival, whenever you set a goal that seems out of reach when it comes to your processing capacity, you will not be functioning properly.

This is exactly what h

appens when we set new year resolutions. Why is it, that more than 90% of the people who set new year resolutions would end up dropping them and quitting by January 14th? It’s because they were operating on a conscious level, and your conscious brain has a limited capacity. This is the first part of the answer. Yes, your conscious brain is indeed limited in its capacity, hence the myth that says we only use 10% of our brain capacity.

When you set a goal and try to achieve it, what happens is that for the first 2–3 days, you are excited and motivated to achieve it.

Even when you feel lazy, or tired, you gather the motivation you have and you keep working on achieving your goal. Nonetheless, your willpower is like a battery, and it gets drained. That’s why when people decide to go on a diet, they are way more likely to eat a large pizza at night in opposed to the healthy salad they had in the morning. It’s because when you wake up in the morning, your willpower’s battery is well charged, and ready to help you overcome temptation. But at night, when you used your willpower throughout the entire day, it gets drained, and your conscious brain can’t help you anymore.

This is where your subconscious brain would step in and throw you off the right track, into your old habits. However, if your subconscious brain was also wired based on a healthy diet, when your conscious brain fails to operate, your subconscious brain steps in, and takes care of the job.

You always use your brain’s capacity to its fullest, but what happens is, when there’s a contradiction between what you consciously want and what you subconsciously believe, then your brain capacity starts to become limited, as you are going through a fight with yourself.

If you want to use your brain’s capacity to its fullest, you need to make sure that your subconscious brain is working with you, not against you