Lucy (2014) in the Sky with F***ING BRAIN DAMAGE!

This will be a short post (rant). I was flying to the UK in either December or February, when I was met by a promising movie, Lucy (2014) starring the great wooden cigar-store Indian actress Scarlett Johansson. I was a bit excited, as it promised to be Sci-fi, looked bad, and I’d heard nothing of it. Sadly, I couldn’t enjoy the biting cynicism of superiority that usually marks my watching poorly written Sci-fi. In fact, despite having Morgan Freeman playing Easy Reader a leading scientist on brain science, the movie crashed for me in the opening minutes. It was the premise, you see.

For Lucy, the entire movie revolved around the “FACT” that humans use only 10% of our brains. What would happen, it speculates, if we actually used 100%? What would that do to our dear, sweet mannequin Lucy?

Well, she’d not be as dumb as monkey shit, for one thing. Perhaps no one would be hired full time to scrape the drool from her face and change her diapers. Maybe she might not even die inside the freaking womb!

HUMANS USE 100% OF OUR BRAINS! That’s why your damned head is so big. If you only needed 10%, you’d have 10% of a head.

 

Inefficient Design

For fuck’s sake, people, if you’re gonna write a goddamned science fiction movie, open a bloody science book! I know, I know, we call it science fiction, so it shouldn’t have to exactly true. I get that, except Science Fiction means “fictionalized science.” It doesn’t mean “dumb as monkey balls.” If you want to write movies based on a complete lack of science knowledge, that would be called “Non-Science Fiction” (or maybe “Monkey Balls Fiction”).

I could get past Freeman doing bad movies for money. I happen to have a long-term relationship with money myself. Get yours, my brother! But damn, hearing him do these lines with a straight face was akin to seeing him play God in Bruce Almighty if he’d done so speaking in tongues while wearing Moose Antlers – nothing he said made any sense, so why even bother?

Not only is the concept of the 10% of brain bogus, no one with any scientific knowledge can even figure out what dumbass started the lie in the first place. Here’s a quote from Eric Chudler, Phd., on the faculty of the University of Washington:

“So next time you hear someone say that they only use 10% of their brain, you can set them straight. Tell them: ‘We use 100% of our brains.’”

See? Science isn’t hard.

Dr. Chudler sites these further sources in case his being way the hell more educated than you isn’t enough to bow your tiny brain into submission.

1. Ten Percent and Counting – BrainConnection.com
2. The Ten-Percent Myth from the Skeptical Inquirer
3. The Ten-Percent Myth
4. Do People Use 10 Percent of Their Brains? – Scientific American
5. Humans use 100 percent of their brains–despite the popular myth – Ask a Scientist
6. Higbee, K.L. and Clay, S.L., College students’ beliefs in the ten-percent myth, Journal of Psychology, 132:469-476, 1998.
7. B.L. Beyerstein, Whence Cometh the Myth that We Only Use 10% of Our Brains? in Mind Myths. Exploring Popular Assumptions about the Mind and Brain edited by S. Della Sala, Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, pages 3-24, 1999. This chapter is required reading for anyone who wants more information on the 10% myth.

If you’re going to write science fiction, do it the right way—avoid monkey balls. If you quote the 10% thing again, however, I will find you and scoop out 90% of your head pudding. Let’s see if you can still formulate a coherent sentence to tell the cops.

Oh, and another thing, WE DO NOT LOSE 90% of heat through our HEADS EITHER!! Heads are little things. You lose about 10% or less of heat (maybe a bit more if 90% of your brain has already been scooped out).

And Scarlett Johansson can’t act. Just saying.

Love, Bill.