Skip to main content

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 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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Second Wind

  You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running.   In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, wh...
1 comment
Read more

The Outsider

  I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up...
1 comment
Read more

A Child of the . . .

  What was it like to grow up as a child in the 90s? How about the 1940’s? Thinking about a child growing up in each different decade, conjures up images in my mind. But that is all they are: images. I was a child in the 1960’s. I can tell you what it felt like to be growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but what it felt like to me is not what the history books remember. History will tell you the 60’s was about the Viet Nam War, civil rights, and the space race. The 70’s was Disco and Watergate. I remember being aware of all of those things, but to me this era was about finding time to play with my friends, something I probably share with a child of any decade. It was about navigating the social intricacies of school.   It was about the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Moody Blues, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane. It was Bullwinkle, the Wonderful World of Color, and Ed Sullivan. There are things that a kid pays attention to that the grown-ups don’t. Then there are things the adults ...
Post a Comment
Read more