Transcriber: Liz Medendorp Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
Have you ever wanted to be a superhero?
Or thought, more to the point,
what it might be like to exceed the limitations,
the real or perceived limitations that you or others put on,
what you can do,
what you can achieve, what you're capable of doing in your life.
Superheroes represent metaphors for us to consider
going beyond the normal expectations of what we can do.
We can think of our modern-day superheroes like Iron Man and Batman
as really just iterations that have come through time, back to the story of Icarus,
building some waxen wings with feathers
and trying to fly off the Isle of Crete.
He went beyond what we would normally think of as human ability
in order to try and achieve something.
My background is that I'm a neuroscientist
and I got into science through my study of martial arts,
and I got into martial arts through being opened up
to many different ideas because of the comic books
that my mom would bring home for me
after going grocery shopping each week.
She loved comic books, she used to like the old Tarzan
and all the kind of pulp fiction comics
from the early days, and Batman and so on,
and she really infused in me as a young boy
a real love of being creative and thinking beyond and reading widely.
And I think it was because of all those experiences that,
when I was about 13, my older brother, he was 9 years older than me,
started doing martial arts, and I thought I would do martial arts too,
for those reasons I just mentioned,
also because I thought it might be a nice additional way
to annoy my older brother.
So if I could hit multiple checklists on something interesting, kind of cool,
and annoy my brother, why not do it?
So I started and just never stopped.
Once I started, the reason I've never stopped doing martial arts
is I became captivated by the potential the human body has
and the wonderful things that can happen if we only bend our wills
towards training or trying to achieve something.
I saw myself gaining more and more skills from the age of 13 on
over the years of training,
that I was able to do things I never imagined being able to do before,
and I could see my teachers doing things
that seemed fantastical the first few times I saw them.
Because of that, that love of understanding or trying to get
a better idea of what was happening in my body,
I went off and studied kinesiology as an undergraduate,
and then as a master's student,
and was trying to do what I could
to understand better how does the body work,
how are these things that I've gained abilities in
and other people have done,
how does that happen? From that, I got interested in the brain
and understanding how the movements themselves occur.
And when I'm trying to put all this stuff together,
I was thinking, what is it about all of this that knits what I've done
and why I'm interested in these things?
And if I think about that,
we can think about human ability and potential very simply.
There's you, there's me, there's us,
and we can think about our abilities and what we can do
as moving in different directions on a continuum of performance:
Enhanced performance,
which is the idea of going beyond what we're capable of doing now,
which is where I started in my whole quest
to learn more about how the body works.
Or we can be on the other end of the continuum
if we've had some sort of injury, or there's been a damage,
we've had an accident, or a stroke, or even a broken limb;
our bodies are weakened.
That's where I eventually got interested in my own research,
and a lot of the work that I do in neuroscience.
My research program is around the recovery of ability after stroke
and coming up with therapies to improve the walking ability
that people can regain after nervous system damage.
But when I looked at this whole picture, one of the things that, when I'm thinking
and was reflecting some years ago about what I was doing,
what was my impact in society
as a professor and as a scientist, and as a member of my community?
What was I doing to engage the community more?
What kinds of things could I do more?
That was juxtaposed against a growing frustration
with the fact that we've all got human bodies,
and yet most of us don't know how those human bodies work.
We know more about our computer than we do about our bodies,
our own things that we've carried with us all through our lives, literally.
And because of that I feel we fall prey too often to infomercials or strange diets
because we don't know any better.
Or we might see, wow!
- this actual, real system exists -
Wow! An eye training device I can learn
to move my eyeballs around and I'll lose pounds a day!
(Laughter)
Well, you'll actually lose a pound about every three years
based on the calories that would be, you know, do it now, feel the burn,
as you wiggle your eyes around. (Laughter)
And yet if you don't really understand how your body works,
why would you not think that was a good thing to do?
I mean if it's pitched a certain way, we believe what we read or hear.
Because I got so frustrated, I thought,
is there something I can do towards trying to contribute towards improving
the literacy that people have about how their bodies work
and the wonders of the human body?
And can I combine that with my interests in science, martial arts, and comic books?
And I started thinking back to what we talked about a few moments ago
about the metaphor that superheroes serve for us
as going beyond, as going beyond our lives,
and started thinking, what about more realistic superheroes
that really seem accessible to people?
Can we use those as metaphors?
So I started thinking more about that,
and I started to coalesce these ideas into some book concepts.
So, when I was thinking about Batman, I came across a quote
by the very famous writer and editor for DC and Marvel Comics, Denny O'Neil,
who wrote that "Batman was the most realistic of the great superheroes...
...he wasn't bequeathed those abilities, he sweated for them."
So Batman's got this kind of concept of something that has achievement
that we could maybe do ourselves wrapped up in it.
Or if you think about Iron Man,
which maybe seems like it might be a little different.
But again, Iron Man is pitched as a human being.
And David Michelinie who is a very famous writer for very influential story arcs
in the Iron Man comics wrote that Iron Man is a superhero with no superpowers.
He could be you or me, if we had the money
the inventiveness, the courage, and the willpower.
So these superheroes are kind of superheroes that don't require
something like divine intervention, or being, you know,
we started off with an image that was briefly up there of Superman,
nothing against Sups, but he was born on another planet,
and we can't really do that because we're born here,
so it's kind of a different category. (Laughter)
But Iron Man and Batman had this feeling to them that if we go back to this idea
of the enhanced you and the weakened you,
and the you in the middle, and the we and the us,
that maybe we can use that idea to think about Batman
as representing the training concept. What can we do with training
to move our biology in one direction towards enhancing our abilities?
And what can we do when it comes to the idea of technology
and thinking of Iron Man as representing a technological device that we could use
that represents our use of technology and what does it do to our bodies,
and how do we respond to these things?
And when you think of all these things, lots more questions come up.
And what's really interesting is you begin to appreciate,
and I've gained a much deeper understanding for how the body works
and how we can think of thinking about how the body works in different ways.
And there's lots of questions that come up about what we can do with that information
and how it can be used.
When I first started off writing these books and doing more,
I didn't realize that I was on a track to be trying to become
a science communications superhero in my own right,
trying to use that as something to really fulfill my own inner need
to contribute more to society
that fueled my own passion towards trying to communicate more to people
about how their bodies work.
And in many different ways, I almost laugh about it when I talk to people now,
that when I first wrote these books, in particular the Batman book,
I never really thought of its use in schools and for children.
It was mostly for adults, I was thinking.
And yet, when I go and talk to schools
and engage with a kid in grade 7 who wants to know all about how their bones work
and when they're thinking of the context of Batman or what happens to Iron Man,
is it like what astronauts experience in space?
All these things, or when a kid comes up to me afterwards and asks me,
after hearing my talk and discussing all about the science of their bodies
and thinking of superheroes and being able to do whatever they want to do,
picks up one of my books, looks at it, turns it over,
and asks me something that I've only ever been asked one time by this one girl.
She said, "Hm, what does it feel like to write a book?"
Not what was it like, not how hard was it, not how much time did it take,
what did it feel like?
And I said to her, "You know, I've written lots of scientific papers as a scientist,
but this is my first, you know, this kind of book like this," and I said,
"It feels pretty good."
She said, "You know, I think I'm going to write a book."
And I said, "I think you are too, and I think I'd like to read that book."
She had a big smile on her face and put the book down.
I think of those things about what information, what do we inspire,
what can we do as scientists to go on like that?
But what are some specific things to take forward as scientific messages
about my own experience in analyzing these superheroes?
I've created the superhero checklist.
You can draw it down if you like, or you can memorize it if you want.
It's not that much information.
It's really hard becoming a superhero, but let's pretend.
The superhero checklist, when I think about all the training
that would be required to produce both a Batman and an Iron Man,
as the two more realistic superheroes I've been discussing so far --
The extent of the physical training is very extreme,
as alluded to with some of the images we saw at the beginning
with some of the martial arts training in the extreme,
sort of impact training shown in that video.
That physical training is a big part of both of those superheroes,
Batman and Iron Man, and we're talking decades of training
because the expectation on them goes beyond what we'd ever imagine
that we could ever do.
You hear lots of talks about people being able to exceed their abilities,
but you've got superheroes who actually have to go and defend themselves
against all manner of attack, but they won't kill anybody.
They won't use lethal force. They'll hurt rather than harm.
And this takes a tremendous amount of time and involves an extremely large dollop
of mental training to have the ability, the steel will, to push themselves
and to be able to keep themselves under composure
to be able to respond appropriately.
To also think about not just the physical and mental ability but the time taken.
It's no easy task, even as we see in some of the movies
that have come out about superheroes recently
that show good depictions of how long these things actually take.
It's decades of training, decades of R&D, if we're thinking about Iron Man;
It's a long time.
So you have to have a commitment to do those things.
These superheroes do represent for us
not just this idea that they gain something.
There's a reason why I called my first book "Becoming Batman",
the second one "Inventing Iron Man" because it's a process.
It's not just be this or have this.
It runs a bit contrary to our modern ethos
so we can just walk into a store and buy something.
You can't buy Batman's skills, you can't buy the ingenuity
that went into creating the Iron Man suit of armor.
You need the commitment and the time.
You also of course need, if you're going to think about the ability overall
for human ability, you need the genetic component, which is something that is,
until now, pretty much predetermined, but going forward
with what we are experiencing in biotechnology and genome therapies,
we're getting to the point where
we'll be able to do something about those on purpose.
We also have the issue of money and of course we can't do much about that.
Probably no coincidence that Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne are billionaires.
So "billionaire" is unfortunately one of the checklist items down there.
(Laughter)
But that's okay because I want to talk to you near the end of my talk now,
about not what it means for really becoming a superhero,
but rather, what if we boiled down all the things
that are part of the superhero-ness we've just been discussing?
What do we really have? Well let's look at some panels
from some comic books to illustrate a few points I want to make.
This panel you see was in Batman #1 in 1940 from a story called
"The Legend of Batman: How He Came to Be."
This is the first that Batman's training is ever shown in the comic books.
On the one panel, we have Bruce Wayne shown in the laboratory,
training to be a scientist, and on the right,
we have him doing his athletic skill training needed to become Batman.
I would say we could call this pretty minimalistic.
This is a bit of a very snapshot idea of probably the training
that wasn't really needed, but it got the idea across, and boy,
as somebody who spent years going to school to get my Ph.D. and so on,
and spent more than 30 years doing martial arts,
I wish I could have seen this, though, because if this really works,
apparently you need 5 minutes in the lab, I'm reckoning that's how long
you can hold your hand like that without fatigue and shaking, (Laughter)
You just need a barbell and hold it over your head like this.
The downside is you have to wear very odd blue pants. (Laughter)
But the interesting point about all this is that what this panel shows us is
Bruce Wayne was a scientist, a detective, the ultimate in physical skill as well.
He was doing lots of different things, even within the things
there were lots of different things he did lots of different things.
He had many, many skill sets, if we think about what Batman represents.
And this tells us, I think, when you look at both of these superheroes,
this idea of being good at many things.
Nowadays we specialize in things. We do just this or just that.
If it's physical, we just do marathons, or we just do power lifting, as examples.
Instead, these superhero lessons are that they're well rounded.
They're good at many things, which allows them to be excellent at what they do.
Batman is not the best athlete in each individual category: the fastest runner,
the runner that goes the furthest, the highest jumper.
But if he was a decathlete, he'd win the decathlon for being Batman
and come first to third in every event.
Very well rounded. Maybe we'll see him at the games this summer.
(Laughter) He'll stand out for sure.
We can also think of Iron Man as another example to highlight another point
about what we can distill down about lessons for life
coming from thinking about superheroes.
This represents the inside cover of the first comic book
where Iron Man was shown, Tales of Suspense #39 in 1963.
Now, I want you to look at that image for a moment.
In particular, look at the way the head and the shoulders of Iron Man are drawn.
You can see the wiggly lines.
It doesn't suggest strength. It suggests staggering, vibrating,
not moving around very well.
One of the things that is important in this story, you've got
this superhero wearing this exoskeleton that can amplify his ability
and give him all kinds of power and strength, yet in this story
we learn that he had to learn to walk again once he put that suit of armor on.
He had to go back and literally, the panel describes him
walking like a baby for the first time. Or, not a baby, obviously, but an infant.
A baby for the first time would be impressive, however. (Laughter)
Iron Man represents, therefore, a way to look at something in a very different way,
and I think the true value is to see the familiar with new eyes.
I think we think of Iron Man as we see in the movies now, in The Avengers,
and the Iron Man films, and the comic books nowadays.
We don't think of it as coming from that kind of origin,
but really that is a way to appreciate differences.
We can see the familiar in new things, in new ways,
when we just change our perspective.
That's been a big part of my own journey as a science communicator
in the last number of years, I've tried to look at superheroes
through the lens of science, which is a different way of viewing it.
It's had broad impact on all aspects of my life, even my normal science
gives me a different perspective, and I think it allows us to find
opportunities that may have been there before and we might not have seen.
How about this, we can also think of the Hulk.
Now, not as realistic as Superman, pardon me, as Iron Man and Batman,
at least not without the genetic therapies
but we have this idea of the Hulk saying, "Why shouldn't I be the Hulk?"
This is, of course, what we all probably ask, why shouldn't I be the Hulk?
Why be a puny scientist?
I think of this when I'm shaving in the morning, typically. (Laughter)
Why am I a puny scientist when I could be the most powerful man walking the Earth?
Now, what does the Hulk tell us here?
Really what the story of the Hulk is telling us is to think about
following a passion.
Now, Hulk's passion is to smash things, (Laughter)
and to smash them up a lot, and just keep smashing.
I don't want you to think about smashing things,
I want you to think about smashing preconceptions, smashing the shackles
of the bonds that hold you back from doing the things
you think you want to do and that you're capable of.
That's the message from all these superheroes and the metaphor they give us.
They follow their passions as far as they can go.
So if we come back to this idea of you: the enhanced you, going from weakened
to the you you want with training and technology,
we can distill all this stuff down into three points with one additional point.
Be good at many things. Try to do new things and try to gain new skills.
See the familiar with new eyes.
Try to make sure you follow a passion to drive you.
And above all, you need to have the will to act.
That's the line that separates success from failure.
The people who step up and try to do the things,
not just talk about what their passions are,
not just think about what they might want to try that's something new
not just say, well maybe I'll try that but I'm not so sure
I want to do it's something new. Actually do it.
I'd like to leave you with this quote that I just love, which says,
"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination."
Please use your imagination to find the superhero in you.
(Applause)