The premise in Luc Besson’s movie Lucy is the silly trope that 90% of human cerebral capacity goes unused. This is flat-out false. The human brain uses 20% of the body’s total energy but it represents only 2% of the body’s mass. Natural selection drives biological organisms to minimize waste; why would an animal build such a costly organ and let 90% of it go idle.

Mapping brain regions is starting to allow us to restore lost movement to the paralyzed and grant limited amounts of sight to the blind (lab mice, that is). But will scientists be able to go even further in coming decades, allowing us to upgrade, copy, or even move our brains around to other substrates besides a meat puppet with a shelf life of about 100 years, at best? These and other far-off future concepts took center stage in the program Cells To Silicon: Your Brain in 2050, part of the Big Ideas Series at the 2014 World Science Festival. “Tonight we can dream a little bit,” moderator and NPR journalist Robert Krulwich said in his introduction. “Science invites crazy dreams.” Welding a brain to a machine is what allowed Cathy Hutchinson—who was left completely paralyzed by a brain stem stroke—to take her first drink of coffee under her own power in more than a decade. Hutchinson raised the water bottle full of java to her own lips with a brain-linked robotic arm developed by Cells to Silicon panelist and Brown University researcher John Donoghue: The arm is linked via wires to a hairbrush-shaped brain implant about the size of an …

The modern era has already seen a measureable uptick in certain areas of brainpower. Since the 1930s, standardized test scores have been steadily increasing, a phenomenon called the Flynn Effect. You might assume that the rise in IQ scores is due to people doing better on basic math skills and memorizations—basically, anything we can study for. But what’s especially interesting about the Flynn Effect is that the opposite seems to be true: Humanity’s biggest improvements have been in abstract thinking and general cognitive functioning. One standard intelligence test is Raven’s Progressive Matrices, developed by English psychologist John C. Raven in 1936. The test is a series of 60 non-verbal multiple-choice questions that’s ideal for measuring abstract reasoning. A test-taker is shown a series of patterns in a 3×3 grid, with one picture missing; the person has to pick the right pattern out from multiple choices. It’s not the kind of test you can easily cram for.

The line separating human from machine got a bit fuzzier last month, when Google finalized two patents for smart contact lenses designed to alert people with diabetes to potentially dangerous dips in blood sugar levels. Around the same time, scientists at the University of Louisville helped three people with complete lower limb paralysis move their legs and feet by stimulating electronic devices they’d embedded in their spinal cords. And earlier this year, doctors implanted a chip in the brain of a man with complete paralysis that allowed him to move objects with his mind with the help of a prosthesis.

In Audrey Niffenegger’s novel “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Henry DeTamble is a man with a rare disorder that causes him to involuntarily travel through time. His wife Clare experiences life linearly, but never knows when or where she will see her husband next. “Each moment that I wait feels like a year,” Clare says. “Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting.” You don’t need a time-traveling husband to have a warped experience of time like Clare’s—think of how long a Monday back at work seems to stretch out, and how quickly the weekend flashes by. Time should march steadily, but that doesn’t always match our perception. Neuroscientists and psychologists are searching for answers to this conundrum, using psychophysical experiments and brain scanning technology to unlock just how human brains track the passage of time. Researchers are gaining insights, and some of these findings could help us to better understand, among other things, disorders like schizophrenia and Parkinson’s where sufferers have trouble perceiving time.