It’s perhaps this hope of harnessing extra brain power that has helped this myth perpetuate but there is no scientific fact it’s based on.

No one can say for sure where it came from or who said it but most believe it was a quote from an essay in 1908 by psychologist-philosopher William James who wrote: “we are only making use of a small part of our possible mental and physical resources”. It was then spun out of control and featured in the foreword to the book How to lose Friends and Alienate People.

Hollywood hasn’t helped either with movies like Phenomenon, Limitless and the recently released Lucy, in which Scarlett Johansson is able to take a drug that enables her to supercharge her brain power to learn new languages in seconds, become a martial arts expert and even perform telekinetic feats.

Watching these movies might make you forlorn at your pathetic brain management but don’t be, the scientific truth is we ARE using all of almost every nook and cranny of our brains.

“It turns out that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time,” Barry Gordon, neurologist of the John Hopkins School of Medicine, was quoted in American Scientific .

The brain might not be firing all at once at the same time because it uses different parts depending on the task. From speech to movement or even sleeping, they all require different areas to be active.

Not only have scientists been able to perform experiments using electrodes to stimulate the brain to confirm all-over activity, subjects have also been placed under scanners using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), brain function can actually be seen on-screen.

If you’re still not convinced and you think you’ve got nine tenths of your brain sitting there doing nothing then consider this further piece of scientific wisdom:

“Doubts are fuelled by ample evidence from clinical neurology. Losing far less than 90 per cent of the brain to accident or disease has catastrophic consequences. What is more, observing the effects of head injury reveals that there does not seem to be any area of the brain that can be destroyed by strokes, head trauma, or other manner, without leaving the patient with some kind of functional deficit,” says Barry L. Bayerstein of the Brain Behaviour Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

It would mean we could lop off a large chunk of our heads and still function perfectly. As we know, even a minimal amount of brain damage can result in complete loss of control or even death. In reality, if 90 per cent of our brain was inactive we’d be in a drooling state of vegetation.

But there’s no need to be deflated. We can, of course, learn new things and give the brain a bit of a stretch. By studying a new language, picking up a creative hobby, exercising, or even playing video games we can boost brain performance.

“If we put our minds to it we can learn new things, and there is increasing evidence in the area of neuroplasticity showing that this changes our brains. But we are not tapping into a new area of the brain. We create new connections between nerve cells or lose old connections that we no longer need,” wrote Claudia Hammond for theBBC .