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Lucy Film Hinges on Brain Capacity Myth
By Kate Wong | July 25, 2014 | 2
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/07/25/lucy-film-hinges-on-brain-capacity-myth/#respond
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of
Scientific American.
Scarlett Johansson plays a woman who unlocks her brain power in the movie
Lucy. Image: Universal Pictures
On July 25, French film writer/director Luc Besson’s action thriller Lucy
opens in theaters nationwide. The premise is that the title character, played
by Scarlett Johansson, is exposed to a drug that unlocks her mind, giving her
superhuman powers of cognition. Themovie production notes
http://www.lucymovie.com/pdf/lucy_production_notes.pdf[PDF] elaborate:
“…It has long been hypothesized that human beings only use a small percentage
of our cerebral capacity at any given time. For centuries, speculative science
has postulated what would occur if mankind could actually evolve past that
limit. Indeed, what would happen to our consciousness and newfound abilities if
every region of the brain was concurrently active? If each one of the 86
billion densely packed neurons in a human brain fired at once, could that
person become, in fact, superhuman?”
The notion that we humans have massive reserves of gray matter just sitting
there waiting to be summoned into service has obvious appeal, but there is no
scientific evidence to support it. And what’s odd about Besson’s reliance on
this myth is that, according to the production notes, he allegedly set out to
make the storyline scientifically plausible:
“Although Besson believed that the idea of expanding one’s brain capacity made
for tremendous action-thriller material, he was particularly intent on
grounding—at least in part—Lucy in scientific fact.”
Apparently he missed or ignored the many scientists who would have surely
informed him that the idea that we use only a small portion of our brain (10
percent, the story usually goes) is wrong. As Barry L. Beyerstein of the Brain
Behavior Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver explained
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-really-use-only-10/ in a piece
for Scientific American:
“…the brain, like all our other organs, has been shaped by natural selection.
Brain tissue is metabolically expensive both to grow and to run, and it strains
credulity to think that evolution would have permitted squandering of resources
on a scale necessary to build and maintain such a massively underutilized
organ. Moreover, doubts are fueled by ample evidence from clinical neurology.
Losing far less than 90 percent of the brain to accident or disease has
catastrophic consequences. What is more, observing the effects of head injury
reveals that there does not seem to be any area of the brain that can be
destroyed by strokes, head trauma, or other manner, without leaving the patient
with some kind of functional deficit. Likewise, electrical stimulation of
points in the brain during neurosurgery has failed so far to uncover any
dormant areas where no percept, emotion or movement is elicited by applying
these tiny currents….”
Neither do we regularly use only a little bit of the brain at a time, as
science writer Robynne Boyd reported
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-people-only-use-10-percent-of-their-brains/
in a piece for Scientific American. She quoted neurologist Barry Gordon of the
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine:
“”It turns out though, that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that
[most of] the brain is active almost all the time,” Gordon adds. “Let’s put it
this way: the brain represents three percent of the body’s weight and uses 20
percent of the body’s energy.”
Yet just because we are already using our entire brain does not mean we can’t
enhance its powers. Exercise and diet can boost cognitive performance
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/six-ways-to-boost-brainpower/. And
some researchers think cognitive training can make people smarter
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-design-exercises-that-make-you-smarter/.
As for cognitive-enhancing drugs, the few that are available, such as Ritalin
and Provigil, are quite the opposite of the compound Lucy is exposed to in the
film. Rather than stimulating all of the brain’s neurons to sense everything in
one’s environment, these drugs work to help people zero in. The results are a
mixed bag, however, as my colleague Gary Stix has observed
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/07/are-we-as-smart-or-dumb-as-we-can-get/:
“Most of today’s cognitive enhancers improve our ability to focus—but most
benefits accrue to those with attention deficits. They allow the child with
ADHD to learn the multiplication tables, but for those with average attention
spans
