The movie Lucy has become a teaching moment in the last month or so for scientists and journalists to remind the world—time and again—that we don’t just use 10 percent of our brains. All of the three pounds of jelly underneath our hardened domes is there for a good reason. It’s not just a terabyte hard drive with a lot of unused space.
In all fairness, the brilliant filmmaker Luc Besson of Femme Nikita fame probably understood this and decided to build the plot around this idea anyway. No different really from George Lucas spinning a fantasy about space ships traveling faster than light. It might have been more instructive in these finger-wagging critiques to point out why shutting down some brain function might be the royal road to cognitive enhancement.
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