Avatar: Power in Surrender

There were gaping holes in the science behind Avatar, but it wasn't a scientific study — it was over two hours of awesome entertainment. And by awesome, I mean mesmerizing enough to bring you into an entirely new world so that you forget all those pesky problems that have a tendency to knock so loudly on the doors of our frontal cortex. When we enter the magical world of cinema, the characters onscreen become our avatars — if we have the strength to surrender.

When I saw this movie, the audience could not shake its compulsive need to check in with wireless communication for even two hours. While the humans onscreen surrendered entirely to their avatars to explore the world of Pandora, the people around me couldn't disconnect from their phones for even three hours. The iPhone screen next to me was distracting, but I would not be deterred. I was going to enter this world, no matter how much concentration it took. The one-sided phone conversation going on behind me only renewed my determination to escape into a world of ten-foot blue creatures, floating mountains, and trees that communicate through electrochemical synapses. 

The movie's protagonist Jake commits wholly to the avatar because the freedom to move around is so liberating in comparison to his real life in a wheelchair. I want to know if all this running and jumping around improved the feeling Jake had in his legs. According to a recent study in Nature,¹ "new motor skills are learned through repetitive practice and, once acquired, persist long after training stops." Granted, Jake was paralyzed and so neural regeneration might have required a kick-start. But if science had advanced to a point where the human genome could be seamlessly merged with the genome of a species that evolved on an entirely different planet, I would imagine that the field of spinal cord injury had progressed as well. The Nature study found that synaptic connections in the living mouse brain responded very quickly to motor-skill learning and, in fact, rewired permanently. This training induced the growth of new dendritic spines, which stabilized and stuck around long after training had stopped. Could Jake's movement as an avatar have strengthened neural connections in his spinal cord?

In addition to newfound freedom, Jake has a lack of fear that allows him to embrace life as an avatar. This bravery and "purity of spirit" make him the perfect explorer. The only thing that bothered me about this hero story was that Hollywood seems to love the idea that scrappy talent can easily overcome years of hard work. In the film Good Will Hunting, Will rarely even opens a book — brains and heart are all he needs to succeed. In the movies sheer talent easily outcompetes hard work, but my experience in life has been that hard work can actually get you pretty far, despite the Hollywood mythology.

Jake gets to really "see" the hearts and souls of the human-like creatures living on Pandora. The head scientist for the operation, Dr. Grace Augustine, is transfixed by the science. The connections between trees on Pandora are electrochemical and similar in nature to the synapses in the brain. She too "sees" the reality of life on Pandora — as she dies she experiences the true "scientific" phenomenon contained in the tree of ancestors worshipped by the Na'vi people. She does die — but you've got to make some sacrifices for the flow of a good melodrama.

So take a breath, ignore the scientific missteps, and take a leap into the world of Pandora.

References:

1. Xu, T., Yu, X., Perlik, A., Tobin, W., Zweig, J., Tennant, K., Jones, T., & Zuo, Y. Rapid formation and selective stabilization of synapses for enduring motor memories. Nature 462, 915–919 (17 December 2009).