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 19th 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
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