adam_grif wrote:
Except every person's brain still has to do what it normally has to do anyway, and the "you only use 10% of your brain" thing is a myth. Where does the extra
power to process 160,000 times faster than normal come from? Can neurons even fire signals fast enough to get to 20, 400 or 8000x speed? In fact, where
does the ability to process 20x faster than normal come from? It's not like you can just allocate idle cycles to speed up thought.
Distorted time and being in dreams for weeks makes sense when you aren't really living 1 second for every 1 second that appears to have passed, when you skip from events to events and often don't events complete one before you're at another. Obviously that's not what's happening in the movies.
Who said anything about the "10% of your brain" myth? Certainly not I (I studied a little neurology at uni anyway), and certainly not in the film, given Cobb was talking about creativity rather than physiologically. In any case, the 10% figure is not strictly a fiction. It's the idea that we have 90% of our brain that is
never used, not that we don't use all our brain at once. The perpetrators of this idea buy into psychic powers and seeing into the future or telekinesis because they think we have latent, primal parts of the brain we forgot how to use. It's bunkum. For the most part we don't use all our brain, since we don't need every neurone firing at the same time, especially in a sedentary state and given the heat output and energy usage.
So the idea of the machine using spare capacity from those connected isn't really that much of a stretch, especially if some people aren't dreaming as in-depth as others, as I would presume the deeper you dream, the more activity your brain performs for the various layers.
It could be that the drug is not just any normal anæsthesia or sedative anyway. It was tailor made for these kinds of tasks, and there are drugs that increase the efficiency of mental processes (hell, pure O2 being breathed for several minutes can produce better mental acuity for a long while) which may explain why the participants are still able to lucid dream and carry out extraction or inception, but not suffer being overly groggy or even going into a dreamless state as if knocked out cold.
Whiplash wrote:People, make sure you give the soundtrack a listen to, its great stuff.
Like the film, it needs repeat listens, but I really like it, even if there are a lot of similarities with David Arnold's work and only two real action cues. "Dream Is Collapsing", "Mombasa" and "Time" are the best, though I wish Zack Hemsey's trailer music was a bonus track.