Lucy Uses 100 Percent of Her Brain, But Is it Possible?(PCMagazine)

• BY SOPHIA STUART
• JULY 25, 2014 

Lucy makes a superhuman of Scarlett Johansson. But will technology advances ever help us better use our brains?

We upload our lives to the cloud, Google pours it into the Knowledge Graph to feed the algorithm, applies natural language parsing, and the Singularity, that moment when digital devices become more intelligent than humans, draws close.

But is the real story that machines and humans are meeting in the middle? Are we evolving to become plugged into the great digital cortex to become hybrid- humanoids? It's a subject that's fascinated Luc Besson, director of the new movieLucy, for over a decade, and his film is astonishing.

Besson spent time with world-renowned neurologist Yves Agid, who co-founded the Brain & Spine Institute (ICM) in Paris, to learn how cells communicate with each other and what cerebral capacity could be unleashed if the human brain's 86 billion densely packed neurons fired at once.

Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) starts off as just another flaky student hanging out in Taiwan, going to dodgy discos with men who wear cowboy hats and tinted sunglasses. Within minutes, the story turns into a thriller. She's forced to become a drug mule, something goes horribly wrong (of course), and then suddenly we're in the realm of sci-fi with stunning FX.

As her brain capacity increases, Lucy slips through the doors of perception and into the matrix, sees mobile telephony signals rendered in 3D, defies gravity, attains telepathy, telekinesis and control over mind, matter, and time travel. Sadly there's no Trinity transformation in her outfits.

Besson goes mystic as Lucy's brain expands. She feels trees "grow," senses peoples' thoughts, and accesses their memory banks. We move, briefly, into the Buddhist realm of meditating monks who control their metabolism and experience infinite space.

Then we're thrown into a genre-melding sci-fi/Korean-gangster flick. Korean drug lords are the new Italian mob. Strong, taciturn, swift to violent reaction, clad in expensive made-to-measure suits. Their leader, Min Sik Choi, makes a superb Godfather getting tattooed while listening to Mozart with the volume up high.

Apart from Morgan Freeman's scientific hypotheses about brains and neural circuitry, the movie is surprisingly low on gadgets, (but high on military-grade weaponry). Who knew French narcotics cops still carry flip phones? Or neuroscientists are so strapped for space that they have brainstorms in rooms dominated by server stacks? And best look away at the point when the culmination of the world's knowledge is apparently contained on a sparkly thumbdrive.

Is any of this possible? Right now, performance-enhancing drugs like anabolic steroids contain synthetic forms of testosterone to build strength and increase muscle mass. People with depression are treated with mood-altering chemical combinations that target NMDA receptors in the brain, increasing serotonin levels. Parkinson's disease can be managed with electrodes implanted in the brain to keep it firing smoothly. And a company called Neural Signals in Georgia does invasive brain-machine interfacing to allow "locked-in" paraplegics to control robotic arms.

Meanwhile, neuroscientist Michael Weisend Ph.D., uses trans-cranial direct current (TCDC) to effectively "shock" subjects with healthy brains to target preferred neural networks for specific tasks, thereby significantly enhancing motor skills. Partially funded by DARPA, studies showed increased accuracy in snipers hitting targets.

So if humans are becoming advanced through pharmaceuticals and modern electro-shock techniques, while digital devices achieve levels of sophistication in "understanding" through data-mining and natural language processing, are we not meeting in the middle?

The sticking point with scientists has always been how one defines consciousness. Ray Kurzweil, now Director of Engineering at Google, has always argued that machines and people are not so different.

"Some observers have argued that Watson (the supercomputer that won Jeopardy!in 2011) does not really 'understand' the Jeopardy queries...because it is just engaging in 'statistical analysis,' (but) the mathematical techniques that have evolved in the field of artificial intelligence are mathematically very similar to the methods that biology evolved in the form of the neocortex," Kurzweil said in How To Create A Mind. "If understanding language and other phenomena through statistical analysis does not count as true understanding, then humans have no understanding either."

As we watch Lucy systematically reach superhuman levels of intelligence, she becomes, in effect, a machine. Perhaps humans are just heading towards becoming another node on the network alongside our digital cousins. Or, more optimistically, enhanced Jedi beings with expansive brains and cool new superpowers.

Sophia Stuart is a British writer and digital strategist based in Los Angeles