Lucy

So. Finally got around to watching Lucy the other night.

I was warned about the "10% of your brain" silliness by the other neurowonks 'round the water cooler. Still, I went in under the impression it was a one-off quip or just something in the trailer. Nope. Accessing additional "cerebral capacity" is the organizing theme in Lucy. It's whole raison d'être. We're even shown a score card from time to time as Lucy's brain gets buff.

As many have pointed out, this is an old wife's tale science debunked quite some time ago. As Lucy writer/director Luc Besson has responded: NEEEERRDSSS! (paraphrasing). It's merely a fictional jumping off point. What if we only use 10% of our brain? What if there was a planet where apes evolved from men? What if JFK had been murdered by a cabal of New Orleans homosexuals? What if giant robots or space Nazis or Sam Rockwell clones are hidden on the moon? That sort of thing.

Fair dinkum. But unlike many films that get their science wrong, Lucy is pooping in LabKitty's wheelhouse, as the saying goes. (Do people still say that? Let's assume they do.) If only Mr. Besson had come to LabKitty, I could have supplied him a haute vulgarisation that would have been real actual brain science and would have worked even better for both his premise and his protagonist. For I am a trained neurobiologist (I have a diploma and everything!), so I can claim with some authority the real cinema sin of Lucy is that the plot is easily fixed.

But how? you are probably now gasping. What is this sorcery? Why does Hollywood continue to scorn the sleek and noble LabKitty? How much do you charge?

Fair questions, all. Read on.

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Let's begin with a brief recap.

Scarlett Johansson plays the eponymous heroine who gets a bag of designer drugs stitched into her gut which leaks and gives her superpowers. Choi Min-sik plays the wonderfully evil Mr. Jang, a Korean gangster who chases Lucy from Taipei to Paris looking to get his merchandise back. Amr Waked plays Pierre Del Rio, a hard-boiled French policeman who by his own admission has "seen some sh*t." And Morgan Freeman plays Dr. Samuel Norman, who spends much of the film lecturing to a crowd of enraptured Parisian academics about wrong science. It's all played fairly straight -- more La Femme Nikita than Fifth Element and Johansson turns in a nice performance as both terrified waif and otherworldly fembot. If nothing else, it all looks pretty enough. The special effects must have cost a fortune.

Everyone comfortable with the set up? Good. Let's get to work.

I assume Dr. Norman is a famous big shot scientist (6734 published pages, Lucy informs us, which by my calculation makes him more prolific than Paul Erdös). So we're allowed to hold his exposition to a higher standard than, say, the lunatic rantings of an American exchange student who has just ingested enough psychotrophics to kill a mule deer. Therein lies the problem. Dr. Norman's dialog doesn't pass close scrutiny, or any scrutiny at all. At best, it reads like biology Mad Libs. It's as if Besson is just tossing out some random fancy words to placate cinema goers so we can get to the ass kicking.

Here's how Dr. Norman's lecture begins:

If life starts approximately a billion years ago, we will have to wait 400,000 years to see the aberration of the first nerve cells. This is where life as we know it begins. Brains in formation of only a few milligrams... it's not possible to determine any sign of intelligence yet. It acts more as a reflex. One neuron you're alive; two neurons, you're moving. And with movement, interesting things begin to happen.

The stated chronology is roughly correct, but one neuron does not make you alive (plants have no neurons) and two neurons are neither necessary nor sufficient for movement. Some organisms have a single "command" neuron that generates movement (the Mauthner cell, for example, responsible for the tail flip response in goldfish). However, locomotion generally requires a great many more than two neurons. Each muscle is typically innervated by a substantial number of neurons (called a "motoneuron pool"). Also, while packing density varies widely by species and brain region, a brain in formation [sic] of only a few milligrams would probably contain closer to 10,000 neurons than it would one or two.

The lecture continues:

For primitive beings like us, life seems to have only one single purpose: gaining time. And it is going through time seems to be also the only real purpose of each of the cells in our bodies. To achieve that aim, the mass of the cells that makes up earthworms and human beings has only two solutions: be immortal or to reproduce. If its habitat is not sufficiently favorable or nurturing, the cell will choose immortality. In other words, self-sufficiency and self management. On the other hand, if the habitat is favorable, they will chose to reproduce.

Any scientist familiar with Darwin would know that the purpose of life -- in so much as it has one -- is to leave offspring. This correct answer gets half-buried here under some non sequitur madness. A cell cannot "choose immortality," although some organisms will form resistant structures such as spores when exposed to unfavorable environmental conditions. These are durable forms, but I have never seen them described as "immortal cells." Indeed, an immortal cell goes by a different name: cancer. That, too, is sometimes a response to unfavorable environmental conditions, but cancer is hardly self-management; it kills the host.

Next, Dr. Norman steers the proceedings around to the movie's central thesis:<

Let's imagine for a few moments what our life would be like if we could access let say 20% of our brain's capacity. This first stage would give us access to and control of our own body...

Interloper: Sir?

Yes?

Interloper: Has it been proved scientifically?

Ah, for the moment it's just hypothesis, I confess. But if you think about it, it's troubling to realize that the Greeks, the Egyptians and the Indians had notion of cells centuries before the invention of microscope. And what to say about Darwin, whom everybody took for a fool when he put forth his theory of evolution. It's up to us to push the rules and laws and go from evolution to revolution. < audience chuckles >

The implied subtext is that we puny humans currently control less than 20% of our brain. And yet, look at Dr. Norman standing there, waving about and speaking and blinking and breathing. Seems like he has control of his own body to me. (Also, not everyone took Darwin for a fool -- it was mostly the Christian establishment which evolution threatened.)

From here there's talk of controlling other peoples' bodies and matter itself with increasing cerebral capacity, a quip about cells passing down learning (they don't -- that's Lamarckian inheritance, which has been roundly discredited) and a review of the efficiencies of dolphins and the inefficiencies of humans. But it all serves a singular take-home message: we only use 10% of our brain. What would happen if we use 100% of our brain?, another interloper in the audience asks. Dr. Norman admits he does not know, which is not surprising given the lack of thought he appears to have put into the rest of his lecture. It almost feels like Morgan Freeman ad libbed the whole thing.

Besson uses Dr. Norman's lecture to sell the premise of his movie, and so it is Dr. Norman's lecture we must repair. You may be surprised to learn a fix is not difficult. It hinges upon the smug rejoinder proffered by every amateur neuroscientist on the Internet since Lucy opened: We only use 10% of our brain at one time. (As we shall see, this claim, too, is wrong, although the damn thing just refuses to die, no matter how many times I correct the rascals who keep posting it on Reddit.)

Rather than keeping you in suspense, I shall jump to the denouement. Picture Dr. Norman once again mounting the rostrum, but this time the screenwriter has done his homework:

If life starts approximately a billion years ago, we will have to wait 400,000 years to see the aberration of the first nerve cells. This is where life as we know it begins. The elaboration of networks of excitable cells is responsible for every behavior we observe, every behavior we ourselves are capable of. As the great neuroscientist Eric Kandel wrote, all behavior is a reflection of brain function, that what we commonly call "mind" is a range of functions carried out by the brain.We like to think humans are the pinnacle of that evolutionary process. Yet, our brains suffer the same constraint as even the most primitive nerve net: We are constrained by energy. No more than a few percent of our neurons can be active at any given moment. What behaviors -- what mind -- might be possible if we were to escape our invisible mental prison, this restriction of our computational concurrency?

Interloper: Sir?

Yes?

Interloper: Has it been proved scientifically?

Why yes it has, young man. In a study published in 2003, researchers at NYU quantified ATP consumption in the cerebral cortex using a combination of intracellular and MRI data. Their analysis indicated that less than 10% -- and probably more like 2% -- of our neurons can be concurrently active. The question now becomes whether a psychoactive substance exists that might remedy this energy inefficiency and unlock our hidden potential. Perhaps it might take the form of a vasointestinal peptide, which have a similar chemical structure to many neuromodulators used by the brain. Perhaps one such drug might be getting sewn into the abdominal cavity of a comely young exchange student in Taipei by Korean gangsters as we speak. Thus we have gone from evolution to devolution. < audience chuckles >

There ya go, Mr. Besson. You now have a plot that's grounded in reality. In addition, instead of going from 10% to 100% (a mere factor of 10), Lucy goes from 2% to 100% -- a whopping 50x increase. By the time the credits roll, she'll be nothing but pure plucky energy. (Footnote: I'm using "devolution" in the legal sense -- the transfer of property from one person to another. Too cerebral?)

And so we can imagine a different Lucy, a better Lucy, a more accurate Lucy. Yes, a film featuring a hot chick who is impervious to small arms fire but one that is otherwise not an affront to the precious fruit our science men and women have slaved centuries to harvest. A film that uses the dulcet tones of an award-winning thespian to entertain and educate. A film that reaches higher, runs faster, thinks harder. A rare combination of existentialism and explosions, epistemology and car chases, of questions that have vexed the sages and ScarJo in her underpants.

A film, we might say, that uses 100% of its brain.

You're welcome.

Dialog and still frame from Lucy copyright Universal Pictures and claimed here as fair use as these appear in an article or scholarly work reviewing the related material and does not in a reasonable person's mind constitute an infringement of the owner's rights to receive compensation for the copyrighted work.