Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
213,510
edits
My Skull Runneth Over: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
| (4 intermediate revisions by 3 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
[[File:HEADASPLODbutfigurativelyd 122.jpg|link=Shintaro Kago|
{{quote|''The wizard who reads a thousand books is powerful. The wizard who memorizes a thousand books is insane.''
|flavor text on the ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' card "Battle of Wits"}}
So you're walking along, minding your own business, playing with your iPod in a neutron storm next to a nuclear plant during the equinox, and suddenly some [[Applied Phlebotinum]] grants you a magnificent gift: an entire library's worth of information is [[Neuro Vault|downloaded directly into your head]], along with all the [[Super Intelligence|intellect]], [[Exposition Beam|memories]] and wisdom needed to use it. You become an instant genius at everything from knitting to astrophysics, and you can suddenly [[Techno Babble]] your way out of any problem!
Line 26 ⟶ 27:
* At the end of ''[[Divergence Eve]]'' {{spoiler|1=LeBlanc gets all of the information about the entire universe (and the alternative one) downloaded to his brain. Then his head explodes}}.
▲== Card Games ==
* Several cards in ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' provide extra draws (and thus, potentially knowledge of additional spells in-game) at the expense of life points, making overuse of them naturally dangerous. And not all of them can be easily "turned off" once in play...▼
** The other danger of excessive card drawing is that you lose the game if you have to draw from an empty deck. There are several tournament strategies that involve generating obscene amounts of mana, then dropping a [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=5677 Stroke of Genius] or similar card to make an opponent draw their entire deck plus one card.▼
** Also, the hand size limit may be a less lethal example of the trope. A player can technically end up with any number of cards in his or her hand for a time... but at the end of his or her turn, he or she has to discard any in excess of his or her current maximum hand size (which usually starts at seven and stays there unless modified by specific effects), presumably reflecting how much arcane knowledge his notional brain can safely hold for long.▼
** The card [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=43729 Rush of Knowledge] mentions this; "Limitless power is glorious until you gain limitless understanding", the picture shows a mage receiving knowledge, much to his discomfort.▼
* In an issue of ''[[The Sandman]]'', "Calliope", Dream punishes an author by giving him an overload of ideas, so much so that he starts writing them on the walls with his ''[[Couldn't Find a Pen|bloody fingers]]''.
* This was a plot of a [[Nightmare Fuel]] horror comic from the [[Silver Age]]. The man gets hit with a [[Evolutionary Levels|evolution-devolution]] ray, and as his head starts to [[Hollywood Evolution|evolve and gets bigger]] (in the traditional Future Human way of comics from the time), his body "devolves" to that of a tiny lizard.
Line 41 ⟶ 34:
* In his first appearance, The Leader - [[Super Intelligence|superintelligent]] enemy of the [[Incredible Hulk]] - was after an Ultimate Machine containing all the knowledge in the Universe. When he obtained it and downloaded the information in his mind, this proved too much even for his super brain and killed him. [[Only Mostly Dead|Seemingly]].
* In an issue of ''[[Dylan Dog]]'', a scientist is looking for a way to [[90% of Your Brain|unlock the full potential of the human intellect]], but all of his test subjects die in [[Your Head Asplode|predictably gruesome ways]]. It turns out that an adult's intellect is "atrophied" after a life of underuse, and only babies are flexible enough to survive the process. When the scientist, mentally unbalanced after years of frustrations, experiments on his newborn daughter, it finally works [[Gone Horribly Right|even too well]].
== Film ==
* At the end of ''[[Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull]]'', {{spoiler|the villainess gets all the knowledge the aliens possess ([[Memetic Mutation|it was their treasure]]) downloaded into her mind, but it's so much that her head (and then the rest of her) explodes.}}
* ''[[Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen]]'' has Sam get the entire history of Cybertron downloaded into his brain after grabbing an Allspark shard. The result is a mental breakdown that occasionally borders on an epileptic seizure in the middle of his astronomy class. On a good day, the information just leads to him idly scribbling Cybertronian symbols with whatever he has on hand.
* The film version of ''[[Johnny Mnemonic]]'', with the additional kick that the protagonist doesn't actually have access to the downloaded knowledge that's killing him—he's a courier hired to carry data securely in his own "wetware".
* ''The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes'' (1995 version). It was not going to destroy him in this case, but got erased with a "magical noise virus over the phone".
Line 54 ⟶ 47:
* ''Charly,'' an adaptation of the classic ''[[Flowers for Algernon]]'', has an intellectually handicapped man undergo a treatment that boosts his intellect up to normal and then far beyond. Unfortunately, as he discovers from checking out the test rodent Algernon, it'll cause him to burn out and wind up even stupider than before, possibly brain-dead.
* In ''[[Rain Man]]'', Dustin Hoffman's character is an autistic ''savant'' who has superhuman memory retention and computational skills, offset by severe social disability; based on a [[Real Life]] person.
== Literature ==
Line 62 ⟶ 54:
* In ''A Study In Scarlet'', [[Sherlock Holmes]] claims that the reason he is so ignorant of such things as astronomy is that he's trying to save brain-space for forensic knowledge.
* [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Discworld]]'' series.
** In ''[[
** While he doesn't have a brain in the biological sense, Death often finds his vast [[Photographic Memory]] to be a psychological burden. At such times, he tends to get drunk and/or go AWOL while Susan takes care of the family business.
* In the James Allan Gardner book ''Radiant'', the "Balrog" hive-mind spore colony infecting Youn Sue's mind grant her wish to see and think as they do... by spreading her mind slowly to absorb more information while retaining the detail of her original perspective. She pleads for them to stop, but they continue until she blacks out from brain damage. The Balrog then moves in and reconstructs the damaged bits to bring her out of her coma.
* In David Brin's ''[[Kiln People]]'', a widespread technology is the creation of "dittoes", short-lived clay-based copies of a person that share their knowledge and upload their memories into their original at the end of the day. The problem is that the human brain only has space for a few hundred years' worth of
* Averted by the titular immortal of ''[[The Vampire Tapestry]]'', who remains active for roughly one human lifespan at a time, then goes into hibernation for an undetermined period, always waking as an amnesiac.
* In the novella ''Starplex'', this is the cause of one species' (the Ibs) natural death—the crystals that store their memories become full, and new memories begin overwriting their autonomic functions. Other species, once they develop immortality, eventually have to start discarding portions of their memories once they reach a certain age, though it's not clear what the side effects of not doing so would be.
* In [[Bruce Coville]]'s ''[[My Teacher Is an Alien]]'' series, Duncan goes from dumb bully to super-genius after using an alien machine. However, his brain soon begins to pick up information like radio and TV signals out of the air, making it impossible for Duncan to think. Justified: {{spoiler|it turns out the alien's plan was to make his brain into a communication device so she could contact her leaders in space.}}
Line 83 ⟶ 75:
* In the book ''[[Flowers for Algernon]]'', the title-giving mouse and protagonist Charlie Gordon both are given extreme intelligence from an operation. However, {{spoiler|as time goes on both Algernon and Charlie Gordon start to degrade in intelligence before finally dying, with any way to stop this from occurring lost when Charlie started losing his intelligence}}.
▲== Live Action TV ==
* ''[[Stargate]]'' used this a few times:
** In ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'', there are Ancient Repositories, where if you stick your head in you get all the (possibly nearly infinite) knowledge of the Ancients, but a human mind will slowly degrade for as long as the information is still in there. Jack O'Neill got nailed ''twice'' by those devices—and only the fact that he has the Ancient gene allowed him to survive very long in the first place.
Line 92 ⟶ 83:
* This ''almost'' happened to Max in an episode of ''[[Dark Angel]]'' which involved her taking a rival series clone's neural implant and installing it into her own brain. The strain nearly burnt out her nervous system.
* ''[[Doctor Who]]''
** [[Russell T. Davies]] is clearly very fond of
** {{spoiler|Donna has all of the Doctor's mind copied into her head; combined with human ingenuity, this makes her even cleverer than the Doctor. But her mind cannot take it, and the only way to save her is to [[Victory-Guided Amnesia|remove all memories she has of the Doctor and their adventures]].}}
** In {{spoiler|a fatal example from}} "Forest of the Dead" {{spoiler|River Song uses her own brain as a data buffer to download the Library survivors out of the core, killing her in the process}}
* Though it doesn't seem to be actually dangerous, in ''The Second Coming'' Steve (played by future [[Doctor Who|ninth Doctor]] [[Christopher Eccleston]]), discovers that he's the literal son of God, and compares the experience of accessing divine omniscience with a human brain as like "downloading fifty-million megabits into a pocket calculator," and admits that it hurts.
* Lt. Barclay in ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'' episode "The Nth Degree", although the newly gained super-intelligence doesn't seem to be dangerous in itself. The problem comes when he connects his brain directly to the ship's computer. He uploads himself and uses the extra processing power to expand his intelligence, but then realizes that his brain alone would be too small to contain it, so he's stuck in the computer [[Reset Button|until the end of the episode]].
* On ''[[Andromeda]]'', Harper had a database downloaded into his brain (he has a computer port on his neck), and it played out similar to ''SG-1'', only instead of being directed to a single goal like O'Neill, Harper began and abandoned dozens of projects.
Line 107 ⟶ 98:
{{quote|''"Make them stop! They're everywhere. Every city, every house, every room; they're all inside me! I can hear them all and they're saying... NOTHING! GET UP! Please, get up!... Please God, make me a stone."''}}
* ''[[Chuck]]'' entirely averts this {{spoiler|until it's revealed that the reason Chuck was sent the Intersect was because he was one of the few people who wasn't immediately killed by this. After a few years it seems to finally be hurting him.}}
** And then, there's the instances where characters aside from Chuck gain the Intersect. {{spoiler|When Morgan had it, his memories were being fried and his normal personality was being "corrupted" by it. Moreover, in the series' final [[Story Arc]], Sarah had to upload the Intersect in order to rescue Chuck from the [[Big Bad]], who had kidnapped him. However, much like Morgan, her memories took a hit and she ended up losing all that she remembered of the past five years. This gave the villain a chance to use the amnesiac Sarah as a weapon of sorts against Chuck.}} Keep in mind, that these instances involved variations of the Intersect that were tampered with "
* And even
* In ''[[Red Dwarf]]'', episode "Holoship", Rimmer has all the knowledge and experience of two officers of the ship transferred into his own mind so as to pass an exam. Kryten warns him, however, that it could "reduce him to a gibbering wreck". It doesn't, and the result is slightly unnerving. In another episode, the ship's computer Holly finds a way to boost her intelligence and undo three million years of "computer senility". Overclocking it, she gets an IQ of 12,368 (over her original IQ of 6,000) at the cost of reduced run-time: about 3 and a half minutes.
* On one episode of Scifi's ''[[The Invisible Man (TV series)|The Invisible Man]]'', Hobbes was accidentally stabbed with a serum that would cause his intelligence to rapidly increase. However, he'd go through several stages, gradually becoming an [[Insufferable Genius]], then a [[They Called Me Mad|crazy genius]], then, with this trope, his brain would become so advanced he would retreat into his own mental world of absolute knowledge, and stop using or caring about his body at all. Fortunately, it was stopped and reversed at the [[Insufferable Genius]] stage.
** The college students who were injected with the serum eventually realized that life is pointless and committed suicide. Unfortunately, one of them took the creator of the serum with her.
Line 118 ⟶ 107:
* An episode of ''[[Amazing Stories (TV series)|Amazing Stories]]'', "One for the Books", had a man involuntarily soaking up all the knowledge contained in the library in which he worked, which quickly drove him towards madness. In the end {{spoiler|it's learned that it was done by aliens, as a way to gather all that info; they "squeezed" it out of him and went on their way}}.
== Tabletop Games ==
▲* Several cards in ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' provide extra draws (and thus, potentially knowledge of additional spells in-game) at the expense of life points, making overuse of them naturally dangerous. And not all of them can be easily "turned off" once in play...
▲** The other danger of excessive card drawing is that you lose the game if you have to draw from an empty deck. There are several tournament strategies that involve generating obscene amounts of mana, then dropping a [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=5677 Stroke of Genius] or similar card to make an opponent draw their entire deck plus one card.
▲** Also, the hand size limit may be a less lethal example of the trope. A player can technically end up with any number of cards in his or her hand for a time... but at the end of his or her turn, he or she has to discard any in excess of his or her current maximum hand size (which usually starts at seven and stays there unless modified by specific effects), presumably reflecting how much arcane knowledge his notional brain can safely hold for long.
▲** The card [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=43729 Rush of Knowledge] mentions this; "Limitless power is glorious until you gain limitless understanding", the picture shows a mage receiving knowledge, much to his discomfort.
== Video Games ==
Line 123 ⟶ 117:
* It has become an open secret that that Arakune of ''[[BlazBlue]]'' [[Was Once a Man]], but a good portion of his dementia comes from a [[Buffy-Speak|Runneth Overing Skull]]. {{spoiler|He acquired so much knowledge that his mind began dumping random parts of his psyche, and the process is ongoing. Of course, that means the knowledge he possesses about everything--including himself--is essentially random at all times.}} This makes all the attempts to save him with [[The Power of Love]] more tragic.
* ''[[Final Fantasy XIII-2]]'' - {{spoiler|Serah}} and {{spoiler|Yeul}} will experience a vision of the future every time {{spoiler|the timeline is changed by resolving or causing paradoxes}}. While that may sound alright, [[Power Degeneration|each vision effects them worse and worse]] (it begins as a small migraine, and eventually causes them to faint each time) until they {{spoiler|eventually [[Downer Ending|keel over and die]].}}
== Web Comics ==
Line 139 ⟶ 132:
* During the Happy Hour arc of ''[[I'm a Marvel And I'm a DC]]'', an [[Exposition Beam]] is weaponized to do this on a small scale.
* In the ''[[Global Guardians PBEM Universe]]'', this effect is one of the many reasons why 75% of all [[Psychic Powers|mentalists]] end up going stark raving mad.
== Western Animation ==
Line 158 ⟶ 150:
* Also people with [[Eidetic Memory]] can set off a memory at any time by some random thing, be it good or bad.
* Subverted by people who have suffered the loss of a substantial portion of their brains, due to strokes, tumors, accidents or surgery, yet continue to function and accumulate memories normally throughout their lives. Even patients who have entire cerebral hemispheres removed to halt their epileptic seizures don't "run out" of memory-space, despite having only 50% storage capacity.
* In either [[Ripley's Believe It
* Certain kinds of autistic patients known as ''savants'' make up for their seemingly handicapped social skills with superhuman computational ability.
* Solomon Shereshevskii, a Russian mnemotist (who did not, in fact, have an [[Eidetic Memory]]) had the ability to remember things so well that he became dislocated in time; he eventually became unable to tell whether the thing you just told him happened 5 minutes or 5 years ago. He had to literally learn to mentally remove facts from his memory (in other words, deliberately forget). It didn't help that he had fivefold synaesthesia, an extremely strong form of synaesthesia in which stimulating one sense meant a reaction from them ''all''. [[That Other Wiki]] [[wikipedia:Solomon Shereshevskii|has an article on him]].
Line 165 ⟶ 157:
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Head Tropes]]
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Memory Tropes]]
[[Category:Example as a Thesis]]
| |||