Screw Learning, I Have Phlebotinum

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
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Congratulations, Charly! You have just been zapped by the Upgrade Artifact that increases intelligence to TV Genius levels, and suddenly, everyone is coming to you for Schizo-Tech and Hollywood Hacking. Only problem is, you never learned these things.

In Hollywood, this is not a problem. If a character is zapped with an Intelligence Ray, they will suddenly know everything, despite the fact that they never learned it. This could be Justified by saying they uploaded someone else's brainwave pattern etc. into their brains, and therefore know everything that person knows, or that they evolved into a telepath and just sucked up some other people's book learnin', but often it's not. Often, they just give the person the Applied Phlebotinum, and that person knows everything. Period. No explanation. Not even a Hand Wave. No depictions of them actually learning the information. A Wizard Did It. Usually, this trope goes hand in hand with TV Genius.

Despite what the name might suggest, this is not "a machine uploaded X knowledge into character Y's brain" (or "taught Y character X knowledge unreasonably quickly", or any other variants); that's Neural Implanting. This trope is specifically about the distinction between intelligence (the capacity for learning and understanding) and knowledge (the possession of facts and figures), and how in fiction, the mere act of "making a character smarter" often results in them having knowledge they haven't actually learned.

Compare Instant Expert and Hard Work Hardly Works. May be justified by Awesomeness By Analysis - in this case, their brains are sufficiently boosted to figure out all these things very, very quickly.

Examples of Screw Learning, I Have Phlebotinum include:

Film

  • The Wizard of Oz manages this with the Magic Feather the Wizard gives the Scarecrow!
    • Only in the movie, and he gets the Pythagorean Theorem wrong anyway.
      • Justified in the film, where the point was that the Wizard's gifts did nothing. The Scarecrow was already intelligent - that's how he was able to come up with the plan to rescue Dorothy. (Similarly, the Tin Man obviously had a heart, since he was crying over Dorothy, and the Lion obviously had courage, since he went through with the plan to save Dorothy.)
    • Dodged in the book; after the wizard fills the scarecrow's head with bran and needles, the scarecrow says,

"I feel wise indeed, when I get used to my brains I shall know everything."

  • Possibly, The Secret of NIMH.
    • Explained better in the book; the rats are taught to read (granted with experimental drugs injected for added flavor), and are tested for some time before they finally escape.
    • Also, only Nicodemus demonstrated the ability to read following his injection, which does make a certain amount of sense given that he also demonstrates Psychic Powers throughout the film
  • In Deep Blue Sea, apparently when you increase the intelligence of sharks, they suddenly gain knowledge on how humans must breathe air to survive, using the laws of fluid dynamics to their advantage, turn on an oven amongst other things. Hell, they even "learn" how to swim backwards, something that, for sharks at least, is physically impossible.
    • The oven thing was probably accidental. That doesn't explain the swimming backwards thing though. Oddly enough one character does mention that sharks cannot do that (not just that they don't, but that they cannot), but apparently they decided not to dwell on it and decided to concentrate on surviving instead. Unsuccessfully.
      • Might count as a Lampshade Hanging.
      • The shark's plan also includes sinking the facility enough so that they can break through the steel fencing (below water, the fences were titanium). So somehow they also figured out metallurgy?
      • Maybe they hoped to sink it so deep that the fences would be entirely underwater?
  • In Species: The Awakening, Miranda can absorb the contents of a closed book by holding it for a few seconds.
  • Played with in Koi... Mil Gaya. The alien Jadoo cures Rohit's developmental disability and enhances his mental and physical abilities to superhuman levels; but when the alien goes away, Rohit reverts to his previous state. In the end, the alien briefly returns and enhances him again, this time making sure that the changes become permanent.
  • Averted in Phenomenon: George Malley has increased learning & memorization capacity but cannot answer questions about things he hasn't read about.
  • Averted in Limitless, in which Eddie Morra takes a superpill that grants him hyper-intelligence. However, the pill didn't give him straight knowledge, the added brain-power just allowed him to remember everything he ever learned, and also to figure out patterns in the world around him extremely quickly.
  • In PK, the titular alien's biology let him read the mind of everyone he has direct skin contact, and if he maintains skin contact with a person for long enough he can lean the language of whoever he has touched (think some hours instead of the years it takes to learn in the conventional way). Finding someone in India who let him touch them long enough for that, however...

Literature

  • Poul Anderson's Brainwave.
  • The mechanical educator plays a large role in the classic Skylark of Space series, where it is used to teach the space travellers various languages and cultures. One character gets imprinted with the knowledge of the galaxy's greatest physicist and its greatest psychologist and as a result masters telepathy. Better Than It Sounds, though only just.
  • In Men at Arms, Detritus is trapped in a freezer, and since trolls' silicon brains work better in the cold, he starts to become disturbingly intelligent. On the Discworld, this is perfectly plausible. But then he exhibits an expanded vocabulary (e.g. using words like 'cogitate') with no evidence that he'd actually had the opportunity to learn them. This could possibly be justified (like in the example below) by his finally having the intelligence to figure out what those fancy-sounding words meant.
    • It is mentioned in one earlier book that trolls are not unintelligent by nature. When they move to the lowlands which are much warmer than the mountains they normally live in, their brains don't work as well. It's perfectly possible that Detritus already knew the expanded vocabulary, but was unable to recall it until the magical freezer cooled his brain, then overclocked it by cooling it far past the point it would normally have been. Later in the book, he receives a clockwork cooling helmet with fans in it that lets him function at more or less the same level as everyone else.
  • Justified in My Teacher Fried My Brains. The narration explains that the intelligence-boosted protagonist can use words like "anthropologist" because he's heard them before, and now has the brainpower to remember what they mean.
  • Not uncommon at all in the Oz books. The Patchwork Girl of Oz has brains consisting of a cocktail of powdered essence of personality traits, Bungle the Glass Cat has brains made of pink beads (she's very proud of them; every time she brings them up, she insists that they're the best brains around because you can actually see them work), and the Highly Magnified Wogglebug takes it to the logical extreme; the students at his college spend most of their time focused on sports, because all learning occurs through a rigorously scheduled pill regimen. On top of that, anything with a mouth or analogue thereof exposed to Dr. Pipt's Powder of Life can speak, and quite eloquently at times, regardless of the fact that it was (for example) a log with a vaguely face-shaped arrangement of knots a minute ago.

Live-Action TV

  • It seems to happen with Slayers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as all kinds of moves used by Slayers should take years of training.
    • Not to forget Xander's sudden military expertise and knowledge, including military passcodes, when he got turned into a soldier for a night in the Season 2 episode 'Halloween'.
      • That one makes a bit of sense, since he's dressed up as someone who probably knew those things so the knowledge was part of the costume.
    • The vampires too seem to suddenly have super fighting skills once they get sired. Lampshaded in Season seven's 'Lessons' by Dawn:

"But he's new. He doesn't know his strength. H-he might not know all those fancy martial arts skills they inevitably seem to pick up."

  • On Charmed, Phoebe casts a spell to absorb knowledge through her hands by waving them over a book. Strangely, averts being a Chekhov's Gun as it wore off before she had to save the day.
  • Justified on Doctor Who with Donna, who fuses with a part of the Doctor, and not only got that smart, but had that much knowledge.
    • Averted earlier on in 'Planet of the Spiders'. When a mentally challenged character received an upgrade in intelligence (to average, not to becoming a genius), he found himself able to read better. However he realised he still didn't know a lot of the words (like quotient) and actually got a dictionary out to look them up.
  • In the TV show of Honey I Shrunk the Kids, one of Wayne's inventions renders Diane capable of absorbing other people's intelligence, promptly making her an Evil Genius. When Diane discovers this, she also notices that she can now talk about scientific topics with ease. Could be justified if she had absorbed at least a scientist's mind... But so far she had only met two lawyers. Seemingly, if you're smart enough scientific knowledge generates spontaneously inside your brain.
  • Averted in an episode of Stargate Atlantis, wherein Dr. McKay got a shot of a machine designed to make him Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. As a side effect, this made him smarter. However, McKay showed no sign of obtaining new knowledge merely because of the enhanced intelligence, and spent much of his time using his intelligence to actually do research.
  • Completely averted in Kyle XY. Despite being incredibly intelligent, Kyle knows absolutely nothing to begin with. Pretty soon, though, he remedies this by reading an entire encyclopedia.
  • The premise of Wicked Science.

Newspaper Comics

  • In a Calvin and Hobbes strip, Calvin once dreams about getting a "knowledge implant", in the form of extra brain matter, from a pair of robot surgeons. The point of the fantasy is so that he doesn't need to go to school anymore, which to him would be the ultimate of joys.
    • In one story arc, he enlarges his brain to make his homework easier and becomes to intelligent that, within moments, he metally calculates the purpose of the cosmos and all reality into a single, simple answer. However, he was inable to figure out why girls are so weird.
  • Parodied in Dilbert. Wally dreams of approaching the Pointy-Haired Boss and mocking his "Work smarter, not harder" advice ("I didn't realize I could become smarter just by wanting to!"). He then increases his brain size by straining his muscles and says, "Wow! Suddenly I can speak Latin!"

Tabletop Games

  • Boosts to intelligence and knowledge skills in Dungeons and Dragons allow you to retry knowledge checks and "know" something you didn't before. Explained as both A Wizard Did It and that you are actually realizing something is relevant or that you are recalling information that you could normally not bring to mind, rather than knowing something new.
    • If these increases are temporary, however, you don't actually get any new skills. (Except for in Pathfinder, a Spiritual Successor to 3.5).
    • If you've taken another rank in Knowledge, though, then you actually have learned more than you knew before. Which makes sense if the character gains a level at the end of an adventure, and presumably has some downtime to learn something new. When it happens in the middle of a Dungeon Crawl, then it's this trope played straight.
    • Forgotten Realms has elven lore-gems. Having a tiny library hot-plugged straight into mind can be very useful (provided the user doesn't start drooling), but it's not "secret knowledge For Dummies". Novels had loregem users gain access successfully, only to find out they cannot apply much of the knowledge for their goals simply because they miss some key facts… that were far too trivial to record, as any intended user should know those already. Starting with Elminster in Myth Drannor — why would the previous wearers need to record the location of their own home, indeed?

Video Games

  • Played for laughs in Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc, in which Globox becomes a genius as the result of being dangled upside down for so long that all the blood rushes to his head. He also gains an inexplicable upper class English accent and an awareness of the Fourth Wall.
  • In Space Colony, a staff member can be placed in a training pod to level up their skills. It costs credits, but is faster than having them study in the library, especially if they have a low intelligence stat.

Web Comics

  • Kevin and Kell had a storyline involving an Intelligence Ray, which was also used to give sentience to a tree.
  • PvP has both played this trope straight and somewhat subverted it: an arc had Skull gain super intelligence after a freak electrical accident which apparently also caused him to gain great knowledge of science, medicine and engineering (to the extent that literally seconds after the accident, he started listing the physical reasons for his survival). He later decides to go back to what he was before but builds a machine should the need to become intelligent again arises. When later his cat Scratch gains super intelligence, it is handled a smidgen more realistically: yes, he can suddenly talk, but he's shown several times to be actually studying scientific textbooks and he still has a lot to learn about humans, which has caused trouble for him (notably the time he turned the Ottobot into a human looking robot suit then tried to take over the Mayor's office...and got unceremoniously thrown in jail).
  • Girl Genius subverts this. Where sparks who erupt into their potential but were never given formal education being rather pathetic and doing things like baking crazy pies that calm someone when thrown in their face through deliciousness and texture or train wasps to attack (not effectively).

Western Animation

  • In one episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, this happens to Sheen when Jimmy increases the size of his brain so he can pass a test. This ends with Sheen becoming an Evil Overlord with Psychic Powers, of course.
    • There's another episode where Jimmy invents gum that transfers the entire contents of a book into the chewer's brain.
  • Subverted/inverted in one episode of ReBoot: whippersnapper Enzo wants to be smarter so he can help pull his weight, but learning takes too long. So he asks the CPU to just make him the smartest bit in Mainframe, to which it accords by making everyone else dumb as a box of nulls.
  • Avoided in Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. While "Phoenix" (the Pilot Episode) claimed the Series 5 implant makes Dr. Hartford a computer wizard, there's plenty of evidence in the series to support that he was already a Genius Bruiser and the implant is merely a way to access some incredibly sophisticated tools he otherwise can't.
    • It's also shown in several instances ("The Power Within," "Ariel," "Supertroopers") that the S5 implants only crank the Rangers' existing abilities Up to Eleven.
  • Similarly avoided in Static Shock. When Richie gains Super Intelligence, he doesn't really gain any knowledge that he didn't already have; his Gadgeteer Genius tendencies had been present since the beginning of the series, they just get taken Up to Eleven, suggesting that the powers really just drastically improved and sped up his problem solving abilities.
  • A variant in Darkwing Duck: one episode had him transforming into other characters when he'd see them, and thus inheriting their skills: mad science (Mad Scientist Dr Bellum), classical music (a random musician in the park), piloting (Launchpad), and hockey (Gosalyn). He also tended to acquire the equipment of said people too.
  • An episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog centres around a "Genius Chip" that does this, and a Sonic Sez about how this doesn't work in real life, and you're going to have to study.
  • The normally-idiotic Grimlock does this to himself by accident in Transformers Generation 1, becoming immensely intelligent but finding it hard to fit in with the other Dinobots. He eventually transfers his intelligence to the Technobots (after building them in about five minutes) and returns to his normal idiot self.
    • Strangely, this is probably the all-round smartest action on this page as a result of this trope.
  • Notably averted in Mighty Max. Dr. Zygote, after inventing a machine that manipulates evolution, uses it on himself to become a huge-brained "man of tomorrow". Once he's done this... He's harmless: he has acquired new powers, but he doesn't know how to use them. Sure enough, a dozen episodes later Zygote is back and has made some practice with his powers.
  • In the first Ben 10 series, when Ben transforms into Greymatter he gains intelligence and the ability to construct machines out of spare parts. In Ben 10 Alien Force, his Brainstorm form doesn't appear to gain any building knowledge, but does gain an extremely large vocabulary and the desire to show off all of it.
  • An episode of Galaxy High had Doyle use "Brain Blasters" to make himself excel at any subject in school. It was their Drugs Are Bad episode, so....
  • An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes had Beezy get affected by a machine that Heloise intended to use on herself.
  • Get Ed had an episode where Loogie was zapped by a machine designed to enhance organic computers. This resulted in super-intelligence to the point of creating Bigger on the Inside vacuum cleaners. Unfortunately if he didn't reverse the process his Brain would grow too big
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