The Lawnmower Man – VR Holds the Key to the Evolution of the Human Mind

Ironically today in the 2020’s the visions of the Metaverse we are presented with, by the likes of Facebook and Microsoft, are really quite dull.

The same boring office meetings, but in a virtual world -YAWN-

For a more fertile set of ideas we can travel back to the 90’s, when the Internet was in it’s infant years and thus the sense of potential and excitement was much more expansive and ambitious.

30 years ago (!) Hollywood gave us The Lawnmower Man, a movie that explored an idea of the Metaverse which, as Pierce Brosnan’s character describes, holds the potential to evolve the human mind far beyond it’s born limitations.

This is achieved through entering a Virtual Reality world and engaging in various experiences that rewire how the brain and mind works, including even the development of telekinesis abilities.

Ok it concludes with the central character, a gardener with the mind of a child, evolving to such an extent he becomes a megalomaniacal psychopath, the important point is to stretch our ambition to imagine vastly more exciting potential for the Metaverse than Microsoft Office 2030.

It’s often been said that we only use a small % of the potential of what the human mind is fully capable of, and perhaps unlocking this complete capacity could be one major advance that the Metaverse makes possible.