How does River's brain work?

POSTED BY: ZachsMind
UPDATED: Sunday, April 4, 2004 12:15
VIEWED: 9588
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CARDIE

Tuesday, January 6, 2004 4:57 AM

River attacked the Blue Sun logo on Jayne's shirt; Jayne just happened to be in it at the time. She may have intuited that he was a guy who could be easily bought by Blue Sun, and she wanted to warn him against it, saying that he looked better in red, i.e. as someone loyal to the people on Serenity, and also as an oblique threat that she'd kill him if he betrayed them to B.S.

Cardie

HKCAVALIER

Tuesday, January 6, 2004 7:43 AM

Hey Zachs,

Forgive me if you've made this clear somewhere above, but what the heck is the diffence between a "mystical psychic" and what? a "scientific psychic?" Are you saying it is impossible to accept telepathy without believing in fairies? Are you saying that remote viewing is fundamentally unscientific? Last I checked, telepathy and clarvoiance were staples of Sci-fi. Hello, Mr. Spock?

It's pretty clear you've got some kinda axe to grind (and hey, that's cool, I've got plenty), but I'd appreciate it if you'd grind it explicitily rather than waging your private battle with "mysticism" off screen somewhere. What's your beef? Why isn't the simplest answer--River's psychic--acceptible to you? As you say it is "unnecessary" to explain her perception as "psychic," so I can say that it is unnecessary to go through all these mental gymnastics to explain her behavior as some mechanistic simulation of psychic awareness.

In OIS, the three most reliable, grounded, least fanciful people on the ship--Mal, Zoe and the Shepard all seem to be able to wrap their heads around the idea of River being psychic. Why not you?

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

ZACHSMIND

Tuesday, January 6, 2004 2:32 PM

"Are you saying it is impossible to accept telepathy without believing in fairies?"

That would be putting words in my mouth. I'm not talking about the possibility of believing in ESP versus the fae in this reality. That would be comparing apples to oranges. What you personally believe in this reality is up to you. I'm talking about the fictitious reality of Firefly. In said virtuality, faeries have yet to be proven by science. Telepathy and precognition have yet to be proven by science. The fact that happens to be the case in this reality, is pure coincidence.

Whedon has used psychic phenomena in the BuffyVerse and with great success. My personal favorite was in BtVS's "Help" with the short-lived but much loved character of Cassie. However, the FireFly universe is a little different. The genre for the series is space western, not horror fantasy.

For speculative fiction it is good to have a scientific basis for everything, or at least the illusion of such. Otherwise the virtuality doesn't hold water. Even if that explanation is left vague for the audience, so long as there is a scientific basis, the fictitious reality holds up better under intense scrutiny.

------------------------------
"Hang on, travelers..."

BROWNCOAT1

Tuesday, January 6, 2004 2:51 PM

Zachsmind wrote:

Quote:
Regarding Ruby:

"Her sister got killed. Mother got crazy, killed the sister. That one lived."

Ruby can't speak. So how did River know this about her? Easy. River observed the girl for most of that day, and from Ruby's behavior, River surmised that Ruby once had a sister and a mother but that her mother went crazy and killed her sister, leaving Ruby alone. The fictitious Sherlock Holmes was able to learn much more about a person after observing them for a manner of minutes, so the theory that River could learn about someone after spending a day with them, not far-fetched.

I disagree. There is no way by simply observing a little girl physically moving around, if in fact she moved at all, that River could deduce that she had a sister and that their mother went insane & tired to kill them both.

I think it more likely that River's brain was altered or enhanced by the Blue Hands. The tinkering they did may have given her the ability to use more than the 5-10% of the brain capacity that the average human uses. Telepathy and precognitive abilities may be results of this tampering, but I do not think that River actually has control over those abilities or when they occur.

"May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."

KURUKAMI

Tuesday, January 6, 2004 4:26 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by ZachsMind:
I'm not questioning the validity of psychic phenomena. I'm saying in this case it's not necessary to make that assumption. She can be "psychic" in a nonmagical sense and that's perfectly valid. In which case, the use of the word psychic is misleading.

Which brings us to dear Mister Whedon. From Kurukami's findings on the audio commentary:

"What we're seeing obviously are psychic visions of things we've either heard or don't yet understand."

Notice that Whedon does not refer to River as A psychic. He says what we're obviously seeing are visions of things we've either heard before or don't yet understand. "psychic visions."

Evidently you missed the quote where he clearly says:

Quote:
Now right here, we're going through the ship again, to what is my favorite shot, River listening. This shot here, the Batgirl shot as I call it, I had to shoot four times before I found the right angle. The point of the scene, storywise, is that they are being listened to, below and above, by two people who are outsiders, who hear everything they're saying, but, and can understand it on a level that even they can't, since she is psychic and he is so intuitive as to be nearly psychic, yet they also can't understand a great deal of it because it is just, there's a synapse in them that is broken.

Emphasis mine. :)

History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it merely shouts "Weren't you listening the first time?!?" and lets fly with a club.

LTNOWIS

Tuesday, January 6, 2004 9:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by ZachsMind:
Telepathy and precognition have yet to be proven by science.

Is there proof for noiseless floating chandelier mechanisms, interstellar transport in a matter of days, or visible beam weapon mechanisms? Or even proof of the basic theorys they'd need? No, you just assume they use unknown methods. Same with telepathy. The "she's got ESP" theory is a lot more believable than your "she figures things out logically" theory.
Remember Time for the Stars by Heinlein? Everything stringently followed the laws of physics, except for the idea that twins sometimes had ESP. So River having ESP wouldn't defy Firefly's regard for scientific accuracy.
Oh yeah, it might be easier for you to accept if you thought of it as ESP instead of psychic ability.

HKCAVALIER

Tuesday, January 6, 2004 9:43 PM

Thank you, LtNowis,

Just as beam weapon technology is an extrapolation from lazers, so esp is an extapolation from the faculty of intuition studied for nearly a century now in psychology.

Are you aware of the work of Sheldrake and others in England on Morphic Field Theory? It posits a bio-electical field effect to account for mysterious processes like unerring bird migration, the schooling of fish and how pets are able to sense when their owners are coming home. There is a lot of evidence for animals being able to sense others over great distances without the aid of the five official senses. Very soon ESP may be far more "scientific" than ray guns...

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

AERRIN

Saturday, April 3, 2004 7:20 PM

Quote:

Whedon has used psychic phenomena in the BuffyVerse and with great success.....

For speculative fiction it is good to have a scientific basis for everything, or at least the illusion of such. Otherwise the virtuality doesn't hold water. Even if that explanation is left vague for the audience, so long as there is a scientific basis, the fictitious reality holds up better under intense scrutiny.

I'm curious to know whether you are a big scifi fan, or if Firefly is one of your firsts. I ask this because it seems to me that what this is coming down to is a question of semantics: you argue that River is not 'mystically' pyschic, and you seem to be assuming that if we use the word 'pyschic' with regards to River that we are talking about the same sort of 'pyschic' that existed in the Buffyverse. In my mind, they are, and have always been, two completely different things.

Sci fi has long used pyschic abilities as a plot point without ever moving into that 'mystical' realm. In fact, it's often used it to bring into question the whole notion of 'supernatural' - to say that things that have been accepted as 'supernatural' are actually quite natural.

The thing about the supernatural is that it tends to mean 'things that we think happen but cannot explain rationally'. As time goes on, and we uncover more and more of the world, things that were previously 'supernatural' (solar exclipses, meteor showers) become 'natural' because we can explain them.

In the Buffyverse, pyschic phenomenon were certainly mystical, in that they were related to 'magic', but I'm not sure they were /supernatural/ - because they did in fact function according to a set of rules that could be discovered and understood. They were simply a different set of rules than what most of the world knew and accepted.

But back to Firefly - You mention that with speculative fiction we need to have a scientific basis in order for it to hold water. I very strongly believe that we /do/ have that basis, in two parts.

1) It is the future. It's simple, but neat, and many, many sci fi works have been based on little more (Anne McCaffrey's Rowan series comes to mind). In the same way that we now understand solar eclipses, it seems reasonable to speculate that centuries from now, we will be able to control gravity and use more of our brainpower than we currently do, in ways that we currently cannot. And let's face it, there's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that comes with the basis of sci fi so that we can explore the more intriguing questions (IF humans could teraform planets, what would happen? IF humans would control gravity, what would they do? IF humans were able to manipulate brains into pyschic activity, how would that happen, what would that mean, how would it affect people?)

2) The Blue Hands. /This/ is the scientific basis that has been presented in the Fireflyverse context. The basis here is that the Blue Hands tweaked River's brain, letting out already latent (NOT mystical) abilities. To further this, the assumption is that /everyone/ has these abilities to /some extent/ - they simply do not /use/ them because of various inhibitors in the brain. (although I suspect some will argue with me on this point, but if we're working semi-logically, I think that's the conclusion) I suspect that they chose geniuses to perform these experiments on because they already use more of their brain than most humans, and so the chances of messing her up as they try to get a maximum of brain usage are smaller.

Theoretically, should the Blue Hands perfect their experiments (and I'm not sure that's possible, given what it did to River), they could make /anyone/ into this. The assumption is not that River is getting pyschic powers from some unexplainable force. It's that science has poked and prodded and released something that is inherent to the human brain.

That sort of reasoning, I think, holds up just as well as floating chandeliers or gravity control as far as 'speculative science'. As others have mentioned, folk

CHRONICTHEHEDGEHOG

Saturday, April 3, 2004 8:30 PM

While I believe River is simply psychic in an ESP way, I think what you're reffering to is something called Mindsight, it's when our mind takes all we know about something (consciously and subconsciously) and pieces it together into a single conscious thought. This is (most likely) how we know when the dog wants to come in from outside or how we're thinking of someone we havn't seen in a long time and the next day they call.
It's certainly possible that River has a very enhanced mindsight capability, but like I said, I still stick to the ESP idea.... or possibly both.

BLAZINGBUG

Sunday, April 4, 2004 12:40 AM

On the subject of how River's mind works, I have a theory.

We know they removed the part of her brain that allows her to push thoughts in the back of her mind. What if what she picks up are those same thoughts in others? The thoughts that you try to push to the back of your mind.

That might be what we see in OiS. Simon's hidden selfishness, Jayne's betrayal, Mal's loss of hope at Serenity, Book's dark past, and Inara's secret. All things they have pushed to the back of their minds. We get nothing from Wash and Zoe because their minds are "preoccupied." And Kaylee is just an open cheerful book.

I think Joss might go for a "poetic" telepathy like that.

"Wacky fun..."

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