10 Scientific Errors In Movies That Really Need To Stop

10. You Only Use 10% Of Your Brain

In fact Lucy is a pretty good place to start. It's not like Luc Besson is known for making painstakingly scientifically accurate movies - at least, we've seen no evidence of any part of The Fifth Element coming true - but this is pretty bad, even by his standards. The eponymous heroine is a young woman in Taiwan who gets roped into being a drug mule, accidentally absorbing the illicit substances in her body, which somehow gives her increasingly powerful and enhanced physical and mental capabilities, telepathy, telekinesis, mental time travel, and the ability to not feel pain. Morgan Freeman's scientist (because you believe anything Morgan Freeman says implicitly, right?) puts this down to her accessing more than "10% of her brain". It's a conceit that's cropped up in everything from Flight Of The Navigator to The Lawnmower Man, and it's a complete load of rubbish. The myth that humans only use 10% of our brains (or 3%, or 27%, or various other numbers) is an urban legend that's been perpetuated by quasi-intellectuals and pop culture since the late 1800s, and was a misreading of a Harvard study which suggested that people only meet a fraction of their full mental potential. Which is true, but you don't literally fail to use large swathes of your brain. That doesn't make any sense. And you can't learn to time travel by concentrating. We know from experience. Every time we accidentally wave at someone we don't actually know.