It's a pity to disappoint the dreamers, but the human brain is used 100%, and there are no mechanisms sleeping for the time being that could endow us with superpowers.
And erase it into powder?
There are several varieties of the so-called psychic abilities: foresight (knowing what will happen before it happens), pyrokinesis (ignition by the power of thought, popularized by Stephen King's novel and the movie "Bringing Fire"), telepathy, or extrasensory perception (the ability to see things at a great distance) … One of the most curious is telekinesis (aka psychokinesis), that is, the ability to move things with the power of thought. Many people believe in such things (for example, about 15% of US residents, according to a 2005 survey), but science strongly doubts them.
The idea of telekinesis arose in time immemorial, and at the end of the 19th century, at the peak of interest in spiritualism and other extrasensory perception, it was considered by some to be a completely scientific phenomenon. As a matter of fact, during seances, when the spirits of dead people were allegedly invoked, telekinesis was just observed: things moved around dark rooms, seemingly without human participation. Sometimes even small tables were thrown into the air.
Many clever people were able to deceive in this way, including, oddly enough, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the outstanding detective and rationalist Sherlock Holmes. Of course, you understand that all these were clever tricks using a thin thread, and sometimes objects were moved simply by people in dark robes, hidden by the "mystical" half-darkness. The famous magician Harry Houdini has uncovered many cases of spiritualistic fraud and even wrote a book about it, Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (1920).
Gradually, the public stopped believing in telekinesis, and interest in it disappeared. But already in the 1930s and 1940s, this theme was revived by an employee of Duke University named JB Ryne, who began to study whether thought influences the outcome of future events. He started with dice, asking the volunteers to think hard about what number should come up. Although the results of the experiments turned out to be ambiguous, and the effect of the power of thought was minimal, the scientist believed that it was not without mysticism. Unfortunately for him, other researchers were unable to replicate the findings, and many errors were found in his methods.
A few decades later, in the 1970s, someone named Uri Geller gained world fame as a person with psychic superpowers, and millions of people traveled to the other side of the world to see with their own eyes how he winds up a clock and bends a spoon with his eyes. Geller argued that these are not tricks and not magic, but simply the hidden capabilities of a person that almost everyone can awaken in themselves. But skeptics noticed that all his amazing tricks were quietly reproduced by ordinary magicians. Finally, in 1976, several children, who allegedly also bent spoons with their minds, were tested at the University of Bath (UK). At first it seemed that the guys were not lying, and the scientists were ready to admit the existence of psychokinesis. However, hidden cameras showed that in fact this is again a hoax: the children bent spoons with their hands,when they thought no one saw them.
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And again interest in "the influence of consciousness on being" faded away only in order to be reborn after a while for the umpteenth time. In the mid-1980s, "PC parties" came into vogue: several people who believed in psychokinesis ("PC" here means exactly that, not "personal computer") got together and performed strange rituals, trying to "charge" the space around them emotionally and physically, so that the spoon bends on its own. Some have argued that it sometimes helped, but scientists suspect that in the midst of the general madness, someone just jumped on the spoon, and it really did bend.
In those same years, the phrase was popular that a person uses his brain by only 10%. Many believed that some incredible possibilities were actually sleeping in us. Unfortunately, it has long been clear that this is nothing more than a myth. In reality, the brain is working to its fullest. Positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging have clearly shown that there are no areas in our head that would be idle. In The 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology (2009), Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University (USA) wrote: “In the last century, a number of technologies, one more sophisticated than the other, have emerged that have made it possible to spy on brain traffic. Despite the most detailed brain mapping, no quiet areas have been identified waiting in the wings. Even the simplest tasks usually require almost the entire brain."
The story of telekinesis is a story of scam and fraud, both proven and suspected. No study of psychokinesis has yielded results that even remotely met the standards of scientific discovery. Moreover, the neurobiological or psychic mechanism by which a person could move or bend material objects by the power of thought is absolutely unknown. Yes, our brain produces electromagnetic waves, which theoretically can somehow affect the surrounding objects, but they leave the skull by only a few millimeters.
And if there really are people in the world who have psychokinesis, they will not show tricks and try to get to the scientists in the laboratory to prove something there. They will go to Las Vegas or Monte Carlo and throw as many points as they need on the dice, and then they will live happily ever after, driving sports cars and playing golf on their own fields, and we will never know anything about them.
Based on materials from LiveScience.