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{{trope}}
[[File:
▲[[File:HEADASPLODbutfigurativelyd_122.jpg|link=Shintaro Kago|right]]
{{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!
[[Blessed
The thing about super-human knowledge and intellect, is that often you don't get [[Required Secondary Powers|a super-human brain to put it in]], and there's only so much room in there. As your brainpower goes up, [[Power Degeneration|your survival rate goes down]]. Time is running out, and you either have to figure out a way to ditch your new super-smarts or die - either by hemorrhage, [[Your Head Asplode|cranial explosion]], or body strain.
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Compare [[Deadly Upgrade]]. Also compare [[The Fog of Ages]], where an immortal being has been collecting memories for so long that they're overwriting the oldest ones. Not to be confused with [[My Brain Is Big]], where the skull ''literally'' runneth over and the brain shows outside it. See also [[Super Intelligence]].
{{examples
▲== Anime & Manga ==
* In [[Osamu Tezuka]]'s ''Phoenix'' story "Civil War", the historical figure Taira no Kiyomori desires the blood of the titular bird so he can become immortal and continue to lead the Taira Clan, instead of letting it get run into the ground by his incompetent sons. He starts having second thoughts, however when he has a vision of himself in the 21st century, where he's become an invalid due to his brain having run out of space for new memories and has to be periodically hooked up to an "Amnesia Machine" or he'll go crazy. Other characters who do gain immortality, or at least very long lifespans don't seem to have this problem, but that might just be because they usually end up becoming hermits whose lives are largely monotonous.
* This is pretty much the plot of the first arc of ''[[
* In ''[[
* Played for laughs in ''[[K-On!]]'', where [[Cloudcuckoolander]] Yui forgets all the chords she learned after cramming for an exam.
* This is how Ed describes the feeling of going past the Door of Truth that connects humans with the ability to use alchemy in ''[[Fullmetal Alchemist]]''.
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*** Well, no one said he was ''rational'' at that time.
* The titular character of ''[[Naruto]]'' faces this downside to his Shadow Clone training strategy. With hundreds of clones he can experience years of training in one day, but the backlash when the clones disperse is enough to render him unconscious while his brain tries to process the information.
* At the end of ''[[
== 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 ''[[
* 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.
* In ''[[
* In the [[Captain Atom]] / Wildstorm crossover, Cap does this to Voodoo when she tried to invade his mind. He uses his neural uplink to the Pentagon's computer net to basically KO her with the Internet.
* In his first appearance, The Leader - [[Super Intelligence|superintelligent]] enemy of the [[
* In an issue of ''[[Dylan Dog]]'', a scientist is looking for a way to [[
== Film ==
* At the end of ''[[Indiana Jones and
* ''[[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
* ''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".
* Subverted in ''[[Flash Gordon (
* {{spoiler|Doctor Ostrow}} suffers this fate near the end of ''[[Forbidden Planet]]'', after [[Deadly Upgrade|intentionally overusing]] a [[Precursors|Krell]] [[Upgrade Artifact|learning machine]] to try to figure out what's killing them.
* In ''[[Phenomenon]]'', George Malley has a UFO encounter that gives him advanced brain processing power and telekinesis. However, [[Deadly Upgrade|it also gives him a brain tumor.]]
* ''[[
* ''[[The Butterfly Effect]]'': thanks to [[Mental Time Travel]], the hero suffers mental instability, migraines, and institutionalization when the doctors find out "he has four lifetimes' worth of memories in his head!"
* ''Charly,'' an adaptation of the classic ''[[
* 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 ==
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* 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 memories
* 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
* In [[
* The Dark Templar trilogy of books from ''[[
* A short story and script for several anthology series: a man invents a memory enhancement drug, but finds that the result drives the adult insane. A baby/young child takes the drug, and their developing brain adapts to the new load. As a result, the child becomes a rich genius and take control of his parents and then the world.
* In [[Poul Anderson]]'s ''World Without Stars'', humanity has achieved near immortality, but because our brains weren't designed to hold centuries of memories, every hundred years or so, people have to go in and decide what memories they want to keep, and what they want to forget.
* In ''The Ellimist Chronicles'' (an ''[[
* ''[[The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel]]'' series has Gilgamesh. Yes, ''the'' Gilgamesh from the earliest written story. He has [[
* A [[Science Fiction]] story released in one of Asimov's anthologies had people suddenly going catatonic because the new invention of TV stored a memory for every frame shown on-screen, causing people to run out of storage space. The President, advised of the problem, held a live teleconference to warn people of the problem and froze up while watching himself on the monitor opposite him.
* In ''[[Foundation]] and Earth'', {{spoiler|Daneel}} is revealed to suffer from a bad case of this.
* In a variant, Kate in ''[[The Long Dark Tea
* In ''[[Time Enough for Love]]'', part of [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s Future History series, this is noted as an issue when a computer seeks to download its personality into a [[Wetware Body]] in order to [[Pinocchio Syndrome|experience life as a human]]. The computer's mentor and confidant has to remind it that it won't have nearly the same processing power or capacity for information storage, and indeed once the feat is accomplished, the now-female human Minerva discusses the choices she made in terms of which memories to discard and which to keep in order to avoid this trope.
* In ''Inheritance'',{{spoiler|Galbatorix}} is defeated this way. {{spoiler|Realizing that Galbatorix and his infinite amount of power would be unable to kill with any amount of attacks thrown at him, Eragon decided to just cast a spell that would make him understand all the pain he has caused. He [[Goes Mad From the Revelation]]. It's cooler and more epic than it sounds.}}
* The Bruce Sterling short story ''Our Neural Chernobyl'' is written as a review of a monograph studying the social and cultural effects on the world after an engineered virus is released that causes rampant dendritic growth - essentially, making people's brains extremely plastic and adaptive so they can constantly learn and think at faster and faster rates. It also frequently causes lethal burnout, nicknamed "chernobyling" after the Chernobyl power plant disaster in the '80s. Eventually, the virus even jumps species, with some animals showing signs of increased yet distinctly inhuman intellect.
* A character in M. John Harrison's Viriconium stories can only remember the last two centuries of his life, although evidence suggests he is far, far older. He lives in a vast underground complex full of machines he doesn't remember
* In the book ''[[
▲== 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
*** Only the fact that he has the Ancient gene allowed him to receive the knowledge in the first place. Notice how the Repositories only really react to him, and other ATA Gene carriers.
** Also in ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'', Orlin, an ascended Ancient takes a human body in order to help the main characters with the current [[Big Bad]]. Unfortunately, he holds onto the necessary knowledge for too long; he ends up suffering massive brain damage, and has to be institutionalized.
** In ''[[
* 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.
* ''[[
** [[Russell T. Davies]] is clearly very fond of this
** {{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
** 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
* Lt. Barclay in ''[[Star Trek:
* 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.
* ''[[Married...
** And at the climax of the show, a short film overwrote the answer to the last question... ''which was about a sports accomplishment of Al's''.
* In the ''[[
* In ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'', Matt Parkman has this problem when he gets his telepathy, but after a while he learns to control it better and the problems stop.
* ''[[Joan of Arcadia]]'' had an episode where a child Joan had babysat earlier in the season died. In the middle of a [[Rage Against the Heavens]] rant at God, God offers to show her what he sees and hears every day. Fifteen seconds later, she's on the floor, unable to deal with the downsides of omniscience.
* Cordelia from ''[[
* ''[[
{{quote|
* ''[[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 ''[[
* 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.
* ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'': Seven of Nine downloads huge amounts of data straight into her head, but can't handle it, and starts creating wild conspiracy theories.
** The scary thing is how much sense most of them make, given the evidence she provides.
* 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}}.
▲* Several cards in ''[[Magic:
▲** 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 ==
* In ''[[
* It has become an open secret that that Arakune of ''[[
* ''[[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 ==
* ''Mindmistress'' gets her super-intelligence from a [[Applied Phlebotinum|Phlebotinum]] pulse that kills the target in two weeks unless reversed (the brain grows so much that it is analogous to brain cancer). Her non-super self is mentally challenged.
** Also used in a different way in a later story, where the villains of the week attempts to steal her knowledge. They all go
** Forthought is an ordinary man who underwent the same process. He is considerably smarter than MM and with his more advanced mental capacity he wills his brain to not have cancer rather than transform back.
* ''[[Homestuck]]'' - Sollux is a high-level psionic. The mind honey which boosts his lusus from idiocy completely [http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004053 overloads] his brain when he eats it.
* ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'':
** The Bradicor are aliens found on a backworld planet. The collapse of the civilization nearly a million years ago was due to their experiments with immortality, specifically replacing the brain with more resilient and self-repairing material (the rest is straightforward body repair via medical [[Nanobots]]). Unfortunately, their species' brain architecture wasn't up to handling memories accumulated long past their natural lifespan, so they began to go insane, due to too many days going by that were too similar for the mind to sort out. The only ways to avoid it were [[Brain Uploading]] into less organic computers or installing selective amnesia to live on in permanent state of mild senility. The former worked until they had [[Mutually Assured Destruction]] go past assurances (which was even easier, since all those mainframes were stationary); the latter made the survivors an obscure relic living mostly as primitive hunters-gatherers.
** The F'Sherl-Ganni (aka the Gatekeepers) have secure long-term memory archive in those horns. Seeing how they are functionally immortal creatures with complex enough society and lax enough ethics to engage in all sorts of politics, it should be no great surprise that they have a bad habit of misplacing or losing some of the data, too.
* ''[[Girl Genius]]'' has the "Queen's Hedge", a hidden off-site backup created by Her Undying Majesty Albia, the [[God-Emperor|Eternal God-Queen]] of England for her permanent memories. As her trusted assistant explains, that's because normal human brains start having troubles with memories after the first century, [[Mad Scientist|Sparks]] can push only somewhat farther (the oldest was Simon Voltaire, over 2 centuries old), and however much "the second ascension" improves this, the capacity is still finite — and she is many ''millennia'' old. This necessity prevented her from recognizing the entity who killed several of other Eternal Queens and almost got herself a few thousand years ago, until she reviewed stored memories of that incident decades after their <s>second</s> <s>[[Time Travel|first]]</s> last (so far) meeting. Naturally, once they left, she did the sensible thing — combed the entire storage for any ''other'' memories involving the same entity. It seems to have been a taxing pastime, seeing how after this she was ranting and barely capable of controlling her temper.
== Web Original ==
* Apparently, this is what happen to humans coming in contact with the mysterious being [http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-606 SCP-606] residing at the [[
* During the Happy Hour arc of ''[[I'm a Marvel And
* 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 ==
* ''[[Code Lyoko]]'' example: Jérémie once tried to use the same quantum memory technology that powered the Supercomputer to enhance his own brainpower. Of course, it backfired due to both the immense physical strain and the fact that XANA introduced the possibility of that maneuver as a [[Red Herring]].
* In an episode of the ''[[Men in Black (
* The episode of ''[[Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius]]'' where Sheen, who is somewhere between [[The Ditz]] and a [[Cloudcuckoolander]], is hit with Jimmy's brain-gain helmet, [[What an Idiot!|without fixing the issue of the original brain-drain helmet]], a limiter. Sheen gets outstanding [[Psychic Powers]], an [[A God Am I]] complex, and [[Refuge in Audacity|a head the size of a]] ''[[Refuge in Audacity|house]]'' before the [[Reset Button]] is hit.
** At one point, Jimmy calculates the maximum possible number Sheen's IQ could grow to. ''[[Serial Escalation|It hits infinity.]]''
* This is used against a villain in one episode of ''[[Darkwing Duck]]''. In the final showdown, DW and Launchpad get their hands on the [[Shout
** Not just IQ. The device also gives you ridiculous [[Psychic Powers]], ranging from prescience to manifestation (Launchpad materialized a giant fridge out of thin air).
* Happens to [[
* In ''[[
* In ''[[
▲* In ''[[The Batman (Animation)|The Batman]]'', Dr. Strange gets all the knowledge in the universe in return for helping {{spoiler|the Joining}} - when he receives it, he ends up comatose (though The [[Martian Manhunter]] can still read his mind to get the information they need to defeat {{spoiler|The Joining}})
▲* In ''[[Xiaolin Showdown (Animation)|Xiaolin Showdown]]'', using the Shen Gong Wu named Fountain of Hui grants the user insight to anything and everything. However, without its sister-Wu the Eagle Scope, which is mostly an uber-telescope, the Fountain of Hui will only grant the user a humongous head and random facts, such as the length of the world's largest toenail, which they will babble incessantly for about a week.
** It also seems to be imply that using the Fountain of Hui without the Eagle Scope results in pain accompanying the above huge head and random facts spouting given that Omi's immediate action after saying the length of the world's largest toenail is to grip his head and complain "Ow…"
* In ''[[X
== Real Life ==
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* 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]] [
* One of the theorized causes of old age dementia is that your brain reaches its effective capacity, and then stops working properly.
** This is supported by the behavior of computers that are built to mimic neural architecture and then overloaded with data.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Memory Tropes]]
[[Category:
▲[[Category:Trope]]
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