The Creature with no Brain!

A few years ago I saw the movie Lucy with Scarlett Johansen (I mean to say that she was in the movie. I did not go to the movie with her. We are not that close). Anyway the movie is a fun little romp. Bad things happen to Lucy, but she is able to overcome the villains and kick some glorious butt while she is doing it. Like I said, it is fun, and stylistically it is a beautiful film to watch. The problem is it is based on a premise that is a complete fallacy.

There is an experimental drug that Lucy is exposed to. This drug allows a person to access unused portions of their brain. Because, as we all know, we only use 10 percent of our brains right? Wrong. This is one of those myths that has been repeated so often that people think it is true. We do not know everything there is to know about the human brain. I am sure there are astounding discoveries yet to be made. But humans use all of their brains (with the possible exception of politicians). I should point out that Lucy is not the first film to use this same myth.

Where did this fallacy come from? Some have laid the blame on William James, a 19^th century psychologist who stated that we only use a fraction of the brain’s potential. But he didn’t say 10%, and even if he had, not using the full potential is not the same thing as not using it. A more likely candidate is a neurosurgeon named Wilder Graves Penfield who did experiments on the human brain in the 1940’s. He found that only about 10% of the brain could be determined to produce observable results. In other words these were things that controlled the physical functions of the body, produced movement, or kept your heart beating etc. So that got picked up in the popular culture as “we only use 10% of our brains!” Really? What about thinking? What about memory storage? What about all the other myriad of things that would not produce “observable results.” (Of course it is not Penfield’s fault that people took it the wrong way). More recent technology like PET scans show that we do indeed use all of our brain, just perhaps not all at the same time.

When Hollywood does this, it kind of ruins the movie for me. I mean, if I had tried to write Lucy as a novel, it would have been rejected out of hand. Science fiction book publishers will tolerate speculative things, but they have to at least be plausible. Writing something that is based on junk science will get you a rejection faster than chocolate disappearing from my office potluck. It would be nice if Hollywood science fiction took the same care about plausibility that published science fiction did. It seems disrespectful to the viewers to pass on misinformation. To be fair, there are some film makers who do pay attention to the scientific details and try to make their story accurate, plausible, and realistic.  They tend to have scientific advisers working on the show. But others are just in it for a buck, or just don’t think it is important.

I think the believability of Lucy might have been salvaged if they had used a different explanation about what the drug was doing to her, though they may have had to tone down her “powers” somewhat and then they wouldn’t have been able to use all those cool special effects. I like Luc Besson as a filmmaker. He makes stylish and beautiful movies. But in this case a little bit more effort, research, and imagination, could have made a film that was just as visually stunning and compelling, without making it scientifically dead in the water.

Hollywood tends to do better when making movies out of Science fiction novels, because the novels themselves had to be vetted by Sci-fi publishers. So I will hope that filmmakers do more of that, or if they do make a movie from an original script, they at least get some professional help to make the science right.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).

Star Liner