do you guys believe that, like some people have genetic mutations that give them special powers or abilities? i for 1 do
anyone else?

It is often said that humans only use a small fraction of their mind's potential. I suppose part of the rest might be some kind of telepathic or telekenetic ability.

But X-Men like powers, I doubt it.

I have to agree with the Master on this one (another groupie speaking up). While we don't use all of our brain that is available to us I don't see ever being able to do X-men stunts.

I agree with MasterPo, also.

Although, a nice set of adamantium claws coming out of my fists when I'm angry, would be so cool!

first of all im pretty sure that wolverine's claws were actually inserted by some scientist freak and not because of a genetic mutation.

also i partly agree with master in the fact that i doubt that anyone would and/or does have the ability to shoot lasers out of thier eyeballs or stop time.

although i do believe that perhaps some of them like the ability to heal and of course telikenesis might be possible.

No, it's impossible.

The vast majority of mutations are harmful, it's rare that any beneficial mutations take place. For any 'X-Men powers' to work you would need to develop an entire functioning system (think of the respiratory system; lots of different parts of the body are required to work together for anything to work at all) which means having dozens or perhaps hundreds of mutations, all occurring simultaneously, which all just happen to work towards this one new system flawlessly...

The odds are infinitely low.



Those people are wrong, we use our entire brain.

That’s true, but we only use about 10-15 percent at once. Different parts, for different tasks, but not all at once.

By the way – MasterPo said “potential” – that’s not the same as entire “brain”

Technically, yes. The full brain has many autonomic functions we aren't aware of in our daily lives.

But as far as our cognative abilities and concious mind, it's said we only use a fraction of the potential.

Wait, i'm getting confused with the brain thing.

It's a know fact that we are using our brain potential around 10-15 % right ?

The brain is more powerful enough than 100 supercomputers and so...can someone get the real fact...

Are we using our inteliigence portion of our brain fully or portionally?

No, that's a myth.

We use the whole of our brain, and the whole of its potential.

sh**...i've been cheating myself that i'm a genius all this while.

What a day

I might not have expressed my self clear enough – we are using 10-15% of specific parts of our brain right now – when we do something else or think or feel or move or whatever, in another way than we just were, we are using some other 10-15% of the brain.
We use all our brain, just not all of it all the time.
I saw some scientific program on it about a month ago, where there where pictures from cat-scans (and some other scan I don’t remember the name of) so even if the theory is old, it is still valid to some point.

I already know that. Only a small number of neurons in our brain are active at any given point, however that doesn't mean we would unlock any 'special powers' if we were to maintain 100% brain activity. Like I said, we use the whole of its potential.

After hearing the myth,

my chance of becoming a genius is now a null.

well youll never get anywhere if you say never to everything that doesnt come naturally to EVERYONE i have read about a girl in france who with a single touch sends furniture flying across the room i think it was somekinda electromanipulative thing she couldnt control
and a former technitian could grab an electrical appliance and transfer its enery onto a piece of paper which would instantly ignite into flames
so never say never

Of course part of the reason we use all our brain is because we spend years pruning off neurons we don't use. An infants brain has many more neurons than an adults, but we spend years optimizing it. If you want an interesting example, before the age of 16-ish (I think this was the upper limit), you can remove a hemisphere of the brain, and the person will still grow to be fully functioning, simply because their brain still has extra neurons/synapses to work with. As with many other things, it's a situation of if you don't use it, you lose it.

Some people have philosophized that the human mind is not yet capable of handling all the "power" that would come from increasing the mental capacity of the brain. Some have speculated that madness (in all it's forms) is the result when someone does tap into the increased potential.

There have been many clinical studies that show a clear connection between madness and advanced creativity. It has often been said that many of the great artists, poets, thinkers in history all suffered from some form of extreme chronic mental illness. And idiot sevante's (e.g. Rain Man) clearly have advanced capacities in one form but are greatly retarded in other more basic and common mental areas.

Perhaps at our current level of mental evolution our mind "shorts out" when we try to kick it up a gear? Perhaps at our current level the cost of going higher is damage to our minds?

I didnt say that - but it might be so, and it might not - who knows what would happen if we was able to use it all at once - besides a breakdown in the psyciatrical health care system

Well in that case, I've been wrong all along!

Thank you for showing me the error of my ways...!



I think it would result in a form of seizure or something similar. There's got to be a reason why the brain doesn't allow for it to happen.

First off, Adamentanium doesn't exist, it was made up. Second off, Titanium a true metal and strongest in the world is so strong that you couldn't graft it to someone's skeleton because the sheer friction it would take for the person to move the metal or to have the claws come out would break there bones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamantium_%28comics%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium

Heh while I don't think anyone is really thinking about adamantium claws...

Wolverine's power wasn't his claws (heightened senses, and regeneration -- allowing them to anchor the metal to him)... Even just looking over the link you provided.. Titanium isn't the strongest metal in the world, it's no stronger than steel.. what it's got going for it is the highest strength to weight ratio. As for grafting it into the skeleton.. I doubt it would create much friction - bones don't normally rub against other bones. As far as breaking other bones.. they are grafted with titanium that should reinforce them from being broken (which is more likely to happen when using the claws than when extending them). As far as actually performing the graft.. right now? I doubt it.. in future - nanomachines might be able to do it /shrug.

Check out 17-4 PH Stainless Steel (annealed), 4340 (chromoly) Normalized Alloy Steel, and if you want to go heavy - check out Tungsten )

Nocturnal is quite correct. The healing ability of Wolverine could be achieved using nano-technology. This would also grant immortality as the nano machines would be able to reconstruct your DNA to the point of it being new and repair physical damage. Titanium is a fairly maleable metal but when alloyed with another metal can be very strong and light. I would say the best material we could use would be Tungsten Carbide suspended in a Titanium aloy matrix these are called "Cermets" has the hardness and wear resistance of tungsten carbide + the flexibility and lightness of the titanium aloy. The blades would keep thier edge for a long time and be very hard to snap.

It wasn't that his claws were graphed to him. His entire skelton was infused with Adamentanium (isn't atomantium like in atoms? Not Adam is in Adam&Eve). That why his skull was able to resist a bullet.

Titanium is refequently used now for implanted medical devices (joints, valves, screws/bolts etc). The body does not recognize titanium as a foreign material and doesn't cause an immulogical response.

Do you feel smart reading all that off of something? I know alot of the stuff you people are saying, I am a Marvel maniac.

Lol started thinking about this, but could you imagine how long it would take the average person to recuperate from having titanium applied to every bone =p

Having rigid, unbreakable bones would not be a good thing in all circumstances. If it were, then natural selection probably would have given us much less flexible bone structures. It is perfectly powerful enough to have done so, but instead it gave us the skeleton we have. There has to be a reason why.

Think about the ribcage. It bends and flexes under impact. Sometimes, its members fracture or even break. Bending and breaking happen to absorb a lot of kinetic energy. If the ribcage were less flexible and breakable, more of that kinetic energy would have to go somewhere else, and there is no place for it to go but soft tissue. That includes vital organs. If the ribcage were very rigid and totally unbreakable, practically all of a given impact would be absorbed by soft tissue, including vital organs.

Think about why engineers built "crumple zones" into cars as a safety feature, and you'll see what I mean.

I don't know if I'm right about that, but I first started thinking about it when wondering why it is that certain human maxillofacial structures are so fragile. Certainly, evolution could have granted us nasal bones thick enough to withstand a puny human fist without breaking. The same goes for our orbital bones and our weird glass jaws. Why did natural selection fail to fortify these structures?

I think the answer has to be "crumple zones," and part of the reason we need them is that human brains are particularly big and delicate. Impacts to the head tend to accelerate the head rapidly in a given direction, and that's how brains get damaged or destroyed. A nose or jaw that flexes or breaks under impact absorbs a great deal of that impact in so doing. Otherwise, all that impact would be spent accelerating the head, causing the brain to bounce around in the cranium that much more. That is why evolution has given us skulls that are rock-hard only in areas that directly protect the brain. Areas that do not serve this function protect the brain by being more or less "breakaway" structures.

It's hard to protect a brain as big as ours is. Evolution could have done it by not only fortifying the skull but building up the neck, shoulders, and torso so that the head wouldn't tend to bobble around so violently when punched. This requires bigger legs to carry it all around, of course, and this wholly more robust anatomy introduces a whole new set of problems, chiefly how to feed it and where to get rid of all the heat it generates. And you still have the problem that if the head does suddenly accelerate-- as when coming to a stop against a rock or tree-- the brain still goes splat inside its little fortress.

But the robust model of humanity seems viable enought that you'd have to wonder why evolution never tried it. Well, evolution did try it. We call the result neanderthal, and it did rather well for a long time, albeit in a relatively cold climate and with a relatively sedentary lifestyle compared to that of subtropical, far-ranging homo sapiens. Eventually, our more gracile ancestors managed to out-reproduce the chunky, clunky neanderthals, displacing them completely and taking over their habitat.

To me, Wolverine represents the neanderthal model-- compact and extremely robust. There's a reason why humans appear as we do and not like that. Nature supported our type better. But I'm sure that technology could support the robust type, and it sure would be interesting to see how a neanderthal would do in a fight. Probably mop the parking lot with your average human.

Genetic mutations can go wrong also.

While in general I agree with you, as for grafting a metal to bones the case is slightly more complicated. In bones when you increase density/strength to prevent breaking, you also increase rigidity. So bones become less flexible and break, leading to all the problems you point out. Metal on the other hand tends to be more elastic, and isn't necessarily as rigid when stronger than bone. So for example a piece of metal with enough strength would bend and then flex back to it's original shape (think of the whipiness of a titanium golf club compared to it's steel counterpart). So you might be able to get away with some light grafting that would stop your bones from breaking, without necessarily decreasing their flexibility - though I'm by no means certain about this.

Yes, that seems completely reasonable. I guess that what it comes down to is, whether the bones are rigid or flexible or they break or don't break, the main problem is that the vital organs tend to go splat.

I do wonder if anything we could engineer for the skeletal system on its own (without modifying other systems) would constitute an improvement over the system nature gave us. I lean toward "yes, but only for certain purposes and under certain circumstances." What annoys me is the idea in pop fiction that there is some "next step" in evolution where the product is "superior" to what went before, and this is mapped in a simpleminded way to things like super-healing and bones that don't break. It all stems from a misunderstanding of what "fitness" means in an evolutionary context. I wish more people understood it better... and wherever the X-Men are discussed, I can't help thinking about it.

I think human body chemistry pretty much requires the bones to be made from calcium? If you replace it all with some metal, you'd need to redo everything? I read one sf story where an operative's calcium was replaced with chemically similar magnesium, so his bones would bend instead of break, but I think in practice they'd die of blood poisoning.

I just happen to work in the field of engineering so I guess it's something I know a bit about. No I didn't read it off something, the Titanium Cermet bit was actualy based on a project I did for Engineering Science at College. Nano-technology is advancing quickly and is probably the key to immortality. Little machines that can repair your body down to the molecular level. I imagine it will only be for the rich though

if im correct which, hopefully i am isnt nanotechnology little robots that are nano size.

so i dont see how these mini robots could make you immortal.

please explain?

No, I don't. I believe people may have delusions which may lead them to believe they have special abilities though.

The idea is that they could repair you at the cellular level, something impossible at the moment.

I know what nanomachines are, I am not a idiot.

You guys are so funny!
Banana Man, I luv ya!
I was joking about the claws, what I really want is Rogue's power to kill with a touch!

Yay i'm wubbed!

Wow, cool.

So I'm crazy cuz I've tapped into the unused bit of my mind?

I still can't move cars just by thinking about it tho.

I can!