The Power of the Human Brain
The Brain, Consciousness, and Ancient Wisdom
Anthony BrowderOct 08, 2025
There’s an accepted belief that the average person uses less than 10% of their brain.
I’ve never been comfortable with that. How can anyone accept the fact that they’re only using 10% of their capabilities? We need to understand how the brain was designed to function.
The human brain weighs just three pounds. It’s only 2% of the average person’s body weight. Scientists have been studying the brain for centuries, yet they have no real understanding of how it truly works.
They know a lot about the physicality of the brain, but they don’t understand all of its inner workings.
Here’s what they do know:
- The brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons.
- These neurons collectively form over 100 trillion synaptic connections.
- These synapses process information instantly
Neuroscientists once believed that the brain stopped making new neurons at a certain age.
They thought that if someone had a stroke and portions of their brain were damaged, those portions could never be restored. But now there’s new understanding. Neuroscientists now know that synaptic connections can reorganize themselves over time as needed. This regenerative process is called neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity enables the brain to adapt, learn, and recover from injuries. Neuroplasticity is not new – it’s just been newly discovered.
Consider these stats about brainpower:
A single DVD can hold 4.77 gigabytes of information, which equals approximately 2,000 high-definition photographs.
That’s a lot of data.
But how many DVDs would it take to store the estimated memory within the average human brain?
The answer is astounding.
If you stacked DVDs one on top of the other to equal the amount of memory that can be stored within the brain, that stack would be 254 miles high – the distance from Earth to the International Space Station.
That’s more than 330 million DVDs stacked end to end and they would contain enough space to store 660 billion high-definition photographs.
We store millions of gigabytes of data within the brain—images, memories, all the education we’ve acquired, skill sets, languages and much, much more.
All of this information is stored neatly and categorized within this tiny space inside our head. Modern technology requires warehouses to store equipment to hold this much information.
Contemporary scientists are baffled as to how an organ so small could possibly hold such vast quantities of information.
Beyond Materialism: Consciousness and the Brain
Traditional scientists believe that all phenomena, including consciousness, can be explained solely in terms of physical interactions.They believe consciousness is a byproduct of physical processes, the activity of neural networks along with chemical processes within the brain. But there’s a new breed of neuroscientists who believe that consciousness was not created by brain processes. They believe that consciousness exists outside of the body and beyond the brain, and that people with exceptional talents and abilities have the capacity to tap into unlimited reservoirs of knowledge within our universe.
I want to share a quote that I read over 40 years ago that has always stayed with me. It’s from John Anthony West’s book “The Serpent in the Sky”:
‘The brain is not an ‘evolved’ organ which, somehow, accidentally over the aeons
generated a faculty we call ‘consciousness’. Rather, it was developed in order to receive
and apprehend those aspects of universal consciousness necessary for man to perform his
foreordained task — just as the radio does not generate radio waves but receives the
waves already there. The nature of consciousness determines the structure of the brain;
the nature of sound determines the structure of the ear; the nature of light determines the
structure of the eye; the nature of the Neters determines the structure of man, the
microcosm, and not the other way round.’
In other words, our brain is a device designed to access information that exists beyond our physical being.
Insights from the Black In Neuro Conference
I had the pleasure of speaking with my friend Hunter Havelin Adams III about these topics on weekly radio show I host on WPFW.Hunter is one of the most gifted people I know and is truly qualified to discuss these matters. He had just returned from the Black In Neuro conference in Washington, DC.
Black In Neuro is a recently founded organization that emerged after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
After that tragedy, many people began to realize and accept that this society is hostile to our existence, and we need to find ways to come together and emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, as Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley said.
Hunter explained that we must come together around a shared social theory of life.
That’s what’s missing in all discussions about pyramids and temples of the Nile Valley. Our ancestors had a way of life, a social theory on how to organize and have pro-social connectedness that lasted over 3,000 years.
That social system was called Maat.
Understanding Maat
There’s no word in the English language to adequately describe Maat.Maat should be interpreted as a philosophy, a way to live politically and ethically, a moral ideal to maintain throughout life.
Consider this, the Ten Commandments of the Hebrew tradition, were derived from The Declarations of Innocence.
These were declarations that an individual said daily in preparation for the recitation of their final declarations on the day of judgement.
The Declarations of Innocence begin with the phrase, “I have not…”
It has been acknowledged by religious scholars that the Ten Commandments are “similar” to the Declarations of Innocence, one should take note that each Commandment begins with the phrase “thou shalt not.” That’s crucial because those who Declared their Innocence were socialized to understand that there were specific behaviours that would benefit society.
You didn’t have to be commanded not to do something, which would imply you didn’t know you shouldn’t steal, commit adultery, or murder.
Why is this important?
Because we’ve learned about Darwin theory of the “survival of the fittest,” but research shows that “survival of the friendliest” is of greater significance. The African concept of Ubuntu (A person is a person because they are people) validates a person’s relationship with their community – as expressed in the phrase “I am because we are, we are because I am.”
Different groups evolved different cultural perspectives depending on their environment. Most people of color (living in warmer southern environments) learned the value of cooperation over competition, while Whites (living in colder northern environments) live in conflict with nature and their neighbors.
When these two cultures clashed Africans (and other people of color) were at a profound disadvantage.
Our ancestors had ways to resolve conflicts with neighboring groups, but they had never encountered an adversary as cunning, deceptive, and callous as the invaders from the north.
Cultural Neuroscience: How Environment Shapes the Brain
Hunter introduced me to a field called cultural neuroscience.This field studies how culture influences how our brain functions, how we make decisions and how we perceive the world. Most neuroscientists don’t even know about this it because they get pigeonholed into very specific and narrow areas of study.
He gave practical examples:
Take two children raised in the rainforest of Cameroon. All they see is beautiful greenery. They hear a panoply of different sounds from insects, birds, elephants.
But take two children raised in Saudi Arabia—all they see is sun and sand. They don’t hear the same way. They don’t see the same way.
Consider children who grow up in Indonesia on islands where their homes are on stilts. They can learn to hold their breath for five minutes underwater. Their physiology adapts to their environment and the tasks they need to accomplish.
But if you take those children out of Indonesia and bring them to Saudi Arabia, they won’t know how to navigate in this strange environment. It would take months for their nervous systems to adapt.
Think about sisters walking in Ghana or Ethiopia with baskets on their heads, perfectly balanced. Their whole sense of balance has changed to be more fine-tuned. But a sister in Washington, DC couldn’t walk down the street with a basket on her head because her whole rhythmicity has shifted toward the environment she’s in.
That’s cultural neuroscience.
The Disturbing Reality of AI and Eugenics 2.0
One of the most disturbing presentations at the Black In Neuro conference came from Dr. Timnit Gebru, an Ethiopian woman who used to work at Google.
She was fired because she co-authored a paper on the ethics of Google’s Deep Mind project which uncovered a range of ethical concerns - that Google didn’t want to pursue.
At the Blacks In Neuro conference Dr Gebru discussed why she was fired by Google and said that the current drive to develop AI is rooted in the ideals of eugenics.
Ray Kurzweil, one of the inventors of the synthesizer, said years ago that we are entering the age of “spiritual machines” and approaching the singularity when there will be a merger between humans and machines. This philosophy is called transhumanism, and it’s coming within five years.
Dr. Gebru gave the history of the eugenics movement and showed how it has infiltrated all of these Silicon Valley technocrats.
She explained that terms like transhumanism and cosmosism are just covers for their eugenic ideology.
Dr Gebru showed that, just as eugenicists wanted to “improve the human stock”, transhumanism advocates want to create superintelligent machines or “posthuman” beings that transcend humanity.
Honoring Dr. Patricia Newton
Hunter and I also reflected on the life of his former business partner—Dr. Patricia Newton, who passed away September 28, 2020.
Dr. Newton was a transcultural forensic psychiatrist with decades of expertise in the field.
She was the psychiatrist who psychiatrists turned to when they needed mental health care.
Dr. Newton was a mental health cultural warrior like the late Dr. Bobby E. Wright, the clinical psychologist who warned us about “The Psychopathic Racial Personality” in 1974. The vast majority of American CEO’s are White, and studies show that 12% of CEOs are psychopaths. They care more about the bottom line—dollars and cents—than they care about human beings. They’re extreme narcissists with no feelings for anyone other than themselves and those they can use.
Dr. Newton was an intellectual powerhouse and an amazing woman.
She was an international meeting planner who organized conferences in Hong Kong and Romania. Right after Romania was bombed during a war, she went there and arranged meetings to help people deal with their trauma, because she was a specialist in trauma.
She came up with the concept of post-traumatic slavery disorder.
Another term for this is social epigenetic trauma—how specific changes in our DNA are affected by social events from previous generations.
Think about butterflies. Each generation knows they have to fly from Chicago to Mexico to mate, like clockwork. How do they know this when their entire exoskeleton was dissolved into mush in the chrysalis? Somehow the code of what they needed to do was still there.
Dr. Newton understood that behaviors and mental routines that so many of our people engage in are an inheritance.
But at the same time, the perpetrators have inherited and continually reproduce violent patterns. That’s why Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu mostly have shows about murders.
Dr. Newton drew from 5,000 clinical cases of people from all walks of life, all ethnicities and all professions.
She immersed herself in three different African healing traditions among the Yoruba, the Asante, and the Wolof. She was also a student of Kemetic medicine and particularly the netcher known as Sekhmet.
She embodied Sekhmet as a healing goddess and warrior goddess simultaneously.
Your Brain is More Powerful Than You’ve Been Taught
Consciousness exists beyond the physical.Our ancestors understood these things thousands of years ago.
And we need to reclaim that wisdom while navigating the dangers of this new technological age that threatens to reduce us to something less than human.
We must be still, go inward, process what’s happening in our minds and hearts.
We must take responsibility for the manifestation of positive thoughts and energy that we put into the universe.
That’s how we honor our ancestors like Dr. Patricia Newton and continue the work they started.
Thanks for reading
Anthony Browder
Founder of IKG
Ps.
Join Me for My Final Tours to Kemet
This is it—my last Egypt study tour after 39 years.On July 7th, 2026 and December 14th 2026, I am leading my final study tours to the land where it all began.
After conducting these transformative journeys since 1987, this will be my last opportunity to personally guide you through the temples, tombs, and sacred sites where our ancestors left their knowledge for us to reclaim.
Reserve your place here.
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