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[Nilocy]

Y'know when you read a book your vocal chords actually mimic the words? I think its just what your brain expects you to say but says it for you... like your minds mouth/ear, just like how you can picture things with your minds eye.

[Cthulhu]

There is a case of a man who had a 3 inch pipe pierced his head, removing about a quarter of his brain, after a few years he recovered and went on to have a successful career, marriage and raise several kids.

Are you talking about Phineas Gage or someone else who had something jammed in their brain?  He had severe mood swings after that and died of a seizure.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

OK guys, nobody came up with the correct answer to the "10% of your brain" urban legend.

Snopes

Your brain has some conscious functions and some unconscious ones. You don't consciously digest or pump blood around, yet your brain controls those things. Parts of your brain fire up when you paint a picture, when you eat a ham sandvich, when you make love, when you crash your car. You use all of your brain, just not all at the same time. There are no "dead spaces" that go unused. There is no "psychic potential" just waiting to be unleashed should you discover how to use more of your brain.

[Nivim]

 I have a challenge for you people: attempt to construct a complex idea/thought without any amount of language or symbols. You'll find that it is extremely hard, but possible. It took me multiple tries spread over multiple days to get it right, and keep from messing up after a few seconds. You'll find that emotions are significantly easier to do this with, as you actually have to find a name for them, as opposed to find the thing for the name. So emotions don't count for success. You also might find that such thoughts aren't recorded to memory, and you have trouble staying aware of them. I theorize that this is says a lot about the importance of language centers in the brain, like the number of things routed through there.

[Armok]

Um, thats no challenge to that AT ALL, my brain did it while reading that post. For example: all of geometry. Plots for short films that exemplifies something. Entire workings of mechanical devices. etc. Depending on how you define "language or symbols" I can concive ANY idea by imagining a mechanism simulating it or a metaphor for it.

[Sean Mirrsen]

In regards to the 10% myth: While it's true that the vast majority of your brain is in use, you indeed only use a part of it for your conscious activities. If your brain was optimized to handle all "background processes" more efficiently, or if the "unconscious" circuits could multitask to divert "power" to conscious activity, your mental potential would definetly increase. In at least that, the myth is believeable.

[Jreengus]

How are emotions easier? Love is just a word "love" I can't think of it all without the word or else a symbol attached to said word, a heart for example.

[Hungry]

With regard to the brain useage, you use 100% of the brain you "have", if you have less to use you still use all of it.

To understand the brain you need to know how nervous tissue, what the brain is made of, acts to connect itself with other nervous tissue based on hormonal signals...the rest gets a bit foggy since science is still working on figuring it out. 

[Nivim]

 Odd response.
 To Armok: I define "symbols" as anything that symbolizes something else, it could be letters, numbers, lines, or any image from memory, as long as it's something more than just itself. The only thing you listed that would work is holding the entire working process of something in your mind (remember to remove; what it's made of, what sounds it makes, what it looks like...).
 On emotions, they are something you can just summon up (I feel them in my chest, I hear not everyone is like that) regardless of whether I've ever felt them before. There are many times where I have an inexplicable emotion that there aren't words in the (American) English language for. I wish I could give examples here, but I find it easy to think of emotions without any kind of symbolism (although occasionally a color appears...might not always be a real one).

[deadlycairn]

The thing is though, we've already covered the adaptive ability of the brain. For us, used to thinking of everything in terms of words, it's hard to do it any other way. For someone who never learnt any language? They'd find it second nature, and probably have a bit of trouble switching to our way of thinking. Language has a profound impact on the way we interpret the wrld.

[SolarShado]

The effect of language on brain development is still something the scientists are looking into AFAIK.

Here's some interesting info about reading that I learned from a book on speed-reading:
When most of us read, like the OP said, we hear the words in our heads. This is because we learned to read with phonics (to some extent), or learning the sounds that each letter represents. This uses the visual ,auditory, and language parts of the brain. When you learn to speed-read, you (according to the book I read) take the auditory part of your brain out of the equation, and pass information from the visual part of your brain straight to the language part, letting you process information more quickly. Supposedly you can even read 2 lines at once and still understand it. Obviously I haven't learned to speed-read myself.

[Cthulhu]

Tangentially related:

Babies with deaf parents who use sign language babble with their hands, making signs similar to sign language.

[Muz]

I always thought it was because you're trying to form it into a word before you output it from your mouth.

Thought (neurons) ->  Language part -> Speech or text encoding -> Output (vocal chords or fingers)

The language part is when you hear it in your head. If you skipped that, well, you have trouble typing neurons. You can skip it with enough practice though, like say if you played a typing game often enough and try fast enough, you won't read the words in your head.

[Croquantes]

A similar thing happens with Synesthesia, where impulses cross over from one of the aforementioned 'loops' (for example, the loop you use to hear) to another one (the loop ascociated with colour). The result is that specific sounds cause some synestehsist to see colours or shapes.

There's also a few drugs that induce synesthesia (among other things). I'm not going to name them, but they're fun.

[Googolplexed]

In regards to the 10% myth: While it's true that the vast majority of your brain is in use, you indeed only use a part of it for your conscious activities. If your brain was optimized to handle all "background processes" more efficiently, or if the "unconscious" circuits could multitask to divert "power" to conscious activity, your mental potential would definetly increase. In at least that, the myth is believeable.

Nope, the brain doesn't work like a computer, it has no overall speed.
Each set of neurons and synapses have a set task, and whilst this can change over time(Learning and memory) it could not just divert proccessing power to another task.
If you had more then 5-10% of neurons/synapses firing at once, the result would not be an increase of intellegence, it would be a siezure.

To programmers, what would happen if someone decided to make the program run faster, by multitasking every single function/routine to run simultaniously. Would it still work ? NO.

I'm no doctor, but I have worked with neural nets before,Some of the minor details may not be accurate, the the overall result is true