It looks like “Bambi” will evade another spear, this one thrown by Alan Alda. Photo © Larry Engel 2008

We’re in the middle of a group of people sitting on the ground. They’re hitting rock against rock. Alan is among them. Flakes fly off from large chunks of black obsidian. They are all trying to make the perfect stone tool — a sharp-edged stone cutter that was used by early humans for hundreds of thousands of years in our past. We’re not in a terribly exotic location like Africa. No, we’re in the heart of Long Island, NY at Stony Brook, which is part of the State University of New York. John Shea is the group’s leader, a professor in experimental archeology. Alan has come to learn first-hand how early stone tools were made, and why making tools in the way that humans did deep in prehistory has so separated us from other tool-using and tool-making species.

I had to make sure that my lens was well-protected, so I put a clear UV filter in the matte box. This way, if a sharp flake hit the camera it would chip a $250 filter rather than a $25,000 lens. The flakes are harder than glass, and they’re sharp. In fact, surgeons use obsidian blades in some of the most delicate surgeries they perform.

Veronica Waweru sets Alan Alda up with replica bow and arrows. Photo: Maggie Villiger

We have a busy day ahead of us. First it’s the flaking. Then we head to the sports complex where we experiment with more sophisticated weaponry — spears and arrows. Being able to take down prey from a distance provides a great advantage over trying to attack it up close and personal. The move from hand axes to more sophisticated hunting tools (and techniques — including group, or shared, hunting) may have been one of those human sparks that we’re looking for. It takes more social interaction and trust to hunt together than to go it alone. It also indicates a move away from scavenging toward more aggressive hunting and larger prey.

Veronica Waweru, a Kenyan, is here on the ball field with us. The construction and use of arrows is her archaeological specialty. She’s especially interested in the contemporary and ancient use of poisons in conjunction with arrows. Arrows, she and Shea explain to Alan, are even more sophisticated than spears. They not only demand the construction of the weapon itself, but also of the launching device — the bow. This may have led to divisions of labor among the early toolmakers, perhaps another indicator of the human spark… more trust and social interaction.

In any case, everyone, including Alan, is taking aim at a Styrofoam deer that John plopped down in the middle of the field. No one is doing a very good job of hitting the target, and I’m trying not to laugh too hard and shake the camera when a spear does make its mark. Everyone takes several steps closer to the prey. No hits. Another few steps closer. Finally a few spears hit home, including one from Alan, who’s very pleased with his marksmanship.

With weapons and deer in hand, we finally head back to the classroom (after eating hand-delivered pizza in the lounge). There, John is preparing to demonstrate another example of early humans’ ability to make things.

We move the tables and chairs to the back of the room, hang a black backdrop, and put up a couple of lights so John appears more in limbo than in a classroom. I’m in very close to him with the camera. He had warned me that the flakes coming off the rock are extremely sharp and that I should wear gloves to protect my hands. I did for a while, but then after changing lenses for better macro (close-up) work, I didn’t bother putting the gloves back on. Big mistake.

I’m filming no more than a foot away from John and I feel a little touch on my left knuckle; I have my left hand out in front of the camera supporting the lens and focusing. Not thinking much about it, I keep filming until John stops working and looks at me. Peter Miller, our sound recordist and a good friend of mine, also looks down at me. I’m dripping nice deep-red blood all over my pants as I move to change the camera angle on John.

One small fleck has sliced my knuckle nearly to the bone. We scramble for the first-aid kit, clean the wound and bandage it up tight. Blood seeps through but eventually clots. The wound ends up healing fast and without a scar, something that John said would happen because it was such a clean cut. And I never even felt it.

John Shea displays his bead handiwork. Is this one piece of the human spark? Photo © Larry Engel 2008

Back to work, John is now working with a small stone tool with a pointy end to make an object that has little to do with hunting. He’s working with soapstone, a rather soft rock. He first takes the small piece of soapstone and whittles on one side, then the other, finally creating a tiny hole. Then he works around the hole, reducing the size of the stone until he’s made… a bead. He finishes his creation by staining it a deep red from a piece of ochre that he dissolves in a little bit of water.

As an experimental archeologist, Shea seeks to better understand our ancestors by discovering how ancient things were made and used. In struggling to manufacture primitive tools and artifacts, he learns to better understand the techniques, the raw materials and the labor needed for their creation and use. Beads have become something of a new passion for him and his peers – they indicate a capacity for art and symbolism and also that their makers had the time and labor to pursue the creation of objects not directly related to food and survival. They’ve recently been discovered in several new locations in Africa at sites that push the date for beadwork far deeper into our past.

As we’re about to wrap the day, we ask John what he thinks the human spark is. He answers that perhaps one spark was the creation of a hole in a small piece of stone.

When they aren’t distracted by unfamiliar camera crews, the chimps Lisa works are quite good at calmly working on computer games.

By Lisa A. Parr, Yerkes National Primate Research Center

It’s always a little nerve wracking when people come to visit the chimps. Despite the fact that the chimpanzees I study are extremely well-trained, follow simple verbal instructions, and would perform most of our tasks without the small amounts of sugar-free Kool-Aid that we give them as reinforcement (because they are fun), they are still powerful, wild animals with their own free will. You can almost never get a chimpanzee to do something it doesn’t want to do: they are too big, too strong, and almost certainly too smart. And if Murphy’s Law has anything to say about it, when you do want them to do something, you are definitely out of luck if there is a camera crew involved. Such is the situation when Alan Alda and the Human Spark filming crew recently visited my lab at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Lisa and Alan observe a chimp working on a facial expressions task. The animal is looking at computer-generated faces like the one on the screen beside them.

In my research on social cognition, I am interested in what kinds of information chimpanzees garner from faces. Can they tell different individual chimpanzees apart if presented only with their faces? Do they recognize different categories of facial expressions, and if so, how? Ultimately, my lab is interested in drawing parallels between human and chimpanzee facial expressions and the extent to which they may be involved in communicating about emotion.  To do this, we have trained six chimpanzees to discriminate images on a computer monitor by selecting those that match using a joystick-controlled cursor. We have shown that chimpanzees discriminate faces and facial expressions much like humans do, using the entire configuration of facial features, and particularly features related to the shape of the mouth.

While this might sound like it’s straight out of the movie Project X, the chimpanzees actually learn this task very quickly and perform extremely well, even when we make the tasks quite challenging. Well, that is to say on a typical day. On this day, however, two large male chimpanzees (that have been part of my research program for almost 15 years) were confronted by several unfamiliar men holding expensive video equipment.

Lisa Parr (right) and Alan Alda (center) attempt to work on a computer task with a distracted chimp as cameraman Peter Hoving films. Photo: Maggie Villiger

To compose the scene (the producers thought it was a good idea at the time), Alan and I were positioned directly in front of the 1 ¼ inch thick Plexiglas window that separates the chimpanzee portion of my testing room, where the chimpanzees have their own computer, from the human-tester portion of the room. We had unintentionally created what Alan later referred to as his “King Kong moment” (forgetting for now that King Kong was actually a gorilla).

The chimps were more interested in being tough guys in front of the film crew than doing their usual computer tasks.

You see, chimpanzees are extremely territorial in the wild. So, instead of sitting and diligently showing off their computer-skills, as they would on a regular day, these two chimpanzees did what any self-respecting male chimpanzee would do: try and intimidate the group of strangers with their characteristic bluff-display. Such a display consists of chimpanzees standing bipedally (on both legs), puffing out their hair (piloerection), swaying back and forth, charging at the offending parties, hooting and screaming loudly, and throwing any objects that are within reach. These displays are demonstrations of sheer power and, in the wild, males use them to reinforce their dominance, intimidate rivals, and aid in coalition formation. I’ve seen these displays so often that I sometimes forget how awesome they are, not to mention when there is only 1 ¼ inch of Plexiglas separation between us!

Needless to say, Alan and I survived, although the chimpanzees won this contest (again), and the cameraman’s skills prevailed as his nerves were tested holding the camera steady despite the large, blurry black figures jumping back and forth in his lens. So, for the rest of the afternoon, instead of working quietly on their tasks, the chimpanzees frolicked and played, occasionally returning to remind us of who was in charge, and Alan and I were finally able to discuss chimpanzees, facial expressions, and the challenges researchers are faced with when trying to understand cognitive abilities in other animals.

The crew films Randy Buckner and Rebecca Saxe in the control room while Alan lies in the MRI machine, having his brain imaged. Photo: Maggie Villiger

By Graham Chedd

Now, I don’t want to get too excited, and I don’t want to give too much away – after all, we want you to watch our shows when they are broadcast. But I think we’ve just seen the first signs of the Human Spark – right inside Alan’s head.

Alan takes a look at the fresh pictures of his own brain. Photo: Larry Engel

We spent the day at MIT’s McGovern Institute, where Alan’s brain was being scanned while doing tasks set for him by MIT’s Rebecca Saxe and Harvard’s Randy Buckner.  Our filming Alan while he’s having his head examined is nothing new, by the way; in the days of Scientific American Frontiers we must have had him in and out of some half dozen MRI machines over the years. In fact, Randy remembered one of those shows, where another Harvard researcher had told Alan that he had a “plump hippocampus,” the brain region involved in helping lay down memories. Randy confirmed Alan’s hippocampus is still plump; in fact, Randy told Alan that he wouldn’t have guessed his age from looking at his brain.

There’s a story behind why we filmed with both Randy and Rebecca, who – while both rising stars in the neuroscience field – are actually working on two apparently unrelated special skills we humans possess. Rebecca has made her name by studying the brain regions involved in thinking about other people, especially thinking about what they are thinking about. Randy, meanwhile, has been studying how we think about the past, and more recently, how we think about the future.

As Rebecca told Alan: “I saw Randy giving a talk about thinking about the past and I looked at these pictures [of the brain] and I thought, ‘that looks really familiar.’ And so I went back to Randy afterward and I said, ‘I’ve got pictures that look a lot like those pictures.’ And so since then we’ve been working together to try to ask: what’s in common? What’s the same about thinking about your own past, your own future, and also other people?”

Well, you’ll have to wait for the answer until The Human Spark is on the air. But I can tell you that Alan had to perform two very different tasks in the scanner. One for Rebecca involved figuring out what a character in a video cartoon was thinking. (Rebecca tested children on the same kinds of social cognition tasks Alan tried. Read about her latest study on how these skills develop as kids mature.) The other for Randy, a word task, actually had nothing to do with what Randy was really looking for – which was what Alan’s brain was doing while he was simply waiting in the scanner, staring at a cross hair and letting his mind wander. What our brains do when we’re doing nothing very much is one of the hottest topics in neuroscience just now. As Randy puts it succinctly: “We think we’re seeing the idle brain not being so idle.”

Rebecca prepares to slide Graham into the MRI for his first ever brain scan. Photo: Larry Engel

I’m going to leave it to you to work out why Alan and the crew found these ideas so exciting, with the not very subtle hint that figuring out what others are thinking on the one hand, and being able to mentally time travel on the other, are two skills which, if not uniquely human, are in humans uniquely powerful. And the discovery that they appear to involve related brain areas – well, Sparks are flying.

As a postscript to the day, Rebecca offered me a chance to have my brain scanned in the McGovern Institute’s very fancy new MRI machine, which looks, by the way, a little like a set for “House.” Now this is something I’ve been given the chance to do many times over the years, going back to not long after MRI machines were invented. I’ve always said no, reasoning that my brain might turn out to be a little less than the perfectly honed machine I’ve always assumed it to be. But this time, inspired by Alan’s pristine hippocampus, I allowed myself to be slid into the tube and tried to think of nothing. You can see the results below.

I have a sneaky feeling Randy thought Alan’s brain looked better.

The Human Spark crew films Alan Alda and Dan Gilbert deep in conversation. Photo: Maggie Villiger

Walking the dog this morning and enjoying the sound of birds singing reminded me of an entertaining exchange Alan had with Dan Gilbert of Harvard University, and author of the book Stumbling on Happiness. The birds sounded happy, but of course we can’t infer that: the real reason for their singing is to find a mate or defend a territory, and so get to pass on the genes for singing.

Dan and Alan were chatting on the Weeks Bridge over the Charles River about Dan’s top pick for what makes us human: the ability to “prospect,” the opposite of retrospect — in other words, to think about the future, “to explore alternative worlds without having to live in them.” While Dan agrees that other animals can look forward in time “in very small amounts,” we do it “orders of magnitude differently and better than any other animal.”

There were acorns on the ground around the bridge, and I’d given one to Alan to remind him to ask Dan a question about whether squirrels are thinking about the coming winter when they bury nuts.

Photo by Diliff, under a CC license

Alan: So what’s the squirrel doing when it plants the nut?

Dan Gilbert: It’s planting a nut, in the here and now, because the day is getting shorter, less light is hitting the little squirrel eye and going into its little squirrel brain, and so it runs the “nut burying program,” in the same way your computer can run programs without thinking about — knowing about the future. You know, if Ben Franklin were to come into the present and see a computer, he would say, there must be a little man inside it. There must be someone inside who knows what to do and what’s going to happen. That would be wrong.

We’re never tempted to anthropomorphize our computers because we understand the circuitry that’s making them run. We don’t understand squirrel circuitry or dog circuitry or cat circuitry well enough, and so we look at the dog, cat and squirrel and say it must know what’s coming, because if I were doing that, I’d do that because I know what’s coming.

Alan: So we assume the squirrel is at an unconscious level mapping where it put the nut, have we found out they just keep digging till they find the nut?

Dan: We can’t know for sure what the squirrel’s doing in its own mind, but I would suggest that squirrels do everything at the unconscious level because they’re not conscious, so everything they’re doing is some sort of program. A squirrel is an amazing automaton. Now that’s not with any disrespect to squirrels…

Alan: If we get letters from squirrels, I’m sending them to you. I don’t want to deal with squirrel letters…

Or chimpanzees, if it comes to that. There is much debate among researchers about whether chimps plan for the future. Mostly this revolves around whether chimps think how they might use a rock or stick in some later task, and the debate’s been further enlivened recently with the report of the chimp in the Danish zoo apparently stockpiling stones to throw at visitors. But even if they do think ahead an hour or two, while that’s more than any other animal that’s been studied, Dan Gilbert is pretty sure they’re not planning for retirement.

- Graham Chedd

Sound Recordist John Garrett and Director/DP Larry Engel size up shooting conditions.

The day we had scheduled to film with Harvard University’s Dan Gilbert dawned beautiful – but frigid! If we were planning to shoot in a lab or office, that wouldn’t really matter, but the idea was to film Alan Alda and Dan in conversation outside. We needed a compelling discussion because their talk focused on a topic that was crucial to our Human Spark story, but we also wanted an exciting location that added some visual flair to the film and subtly illustrated the breadth of our human abilities.

Producer Graham Chedd thought a chat en plein air would add the visual variation we needed and be a big improvement over the “two-guys-sitting-on-a-couch”-type shot that is too often the easy default. The goal was to position Alan and Dan in the middle of a footbridge that spans the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge. Luckily they were both very good sports and we had gloves!

Do you know who Dan is? If you don’t know him from his book Stumbling on Happiness [more info at Wikipedia], perhaps you saw his quote on a Starbucks coffee cup:

“The human brain is the only object in the known universe that can predict its own future and tell its own fortune. The fact that we can make disastrous decisions even as we foresee their consequences is the great, unsolved mystery of human behavior. When you hold your fate in your hands, why would you ever make a fist?”

In this video Dan talks about distilling his work down to a 59-word message – an ability closely tied to the Human Spark.

When Amanda Henry went through airport security in Washington on her way to Boston she made the inspector nervous when her bag revealed dental instruments – apparently the security officer hates going to the dentist. The officer may have been even more freaked out if she knew the teeth Amanda was on her way to clean with her dental picks belonged to a 100,000-year-old.

A very famous 100,000-year-old at that – at least in archeological circles. The teeth are still all neatly in place in a skull now at the Peabody Museum of Harvard University [tons of images here], where it has resided in secure climate-controlled storage since it was unearthed in the 1930s from a cave in Mount Carmel, in present-day Israel. We had met the skull the day before, when Dan Lieberman had arranged for it to be brought out of storage and introduced to Alan.

Known as Skhul 5, the skull is the oldest known human with almost modern features, and so plays a pivotal role in our story. He poses the central puzzle we’re trying to get to the bottom of: people looked like us apparently long before they started behaving like us – at least according to the commonly accepted view that the modern human mind – with what we are calling the Human Spark – didn’t evolve until tens of thousands of years after the owner of the Skhul skull and his like lived in the Middle East – most likely alongside, or at least at the same time as, their cousins the Neanderthals.

The Human Spark camera rolls while Amanda demonstrates her dental scraping techniques to Alan. Photo: Maggie Villiger

As we’d just been learning from Alison Brooks, it’s now looking increasingly likely that the Human Spark in fact started to glimmer much earlier in Africa, perhaps even before the ancestors of Skhul 5 made their way north. So archeologists would love to know as much as possible about how Skhul 5 lived. It was Alison who told us about Amanda, a student of hers at George Washington University, who – armed with her dental picks – was going to demonstrate to Alan how she’s figuring out what Skhul 5 ate.

After carefully removing the skull from its padded box, Amanda showed us how she very, very gently scrapes dental plaque from the skull’s molars (much more gently than your oral hygienist cleans yours).  Plaque, she explained, is the perfect material to preserve microfossils from the plants Skhul 5 ate – starch grains and tiny silica bodies called phytoliths that Amanda will be able to identify under the microscope and tell what plants they came from.

Amanda’s care in her scraping wasn’t only because, as she reminded us, the skull is priceless, but also because, “I have to leave some plaque behind in case somebody comes up with a different way for studying it in the future.”

Alan wanted to know if she poked around in his teeth, could she find out what he’s eaten.

Amanda: Well it depends, how good are you at brushing and flossing?

Alan: Oh just great, yes.

Amanda: I’ve actually done some experiments where you eat whatever you normally eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. At the end of the day , you take one of these dental picks…

Alan: And you could say what the person had eaten?

Amanda: Some of it, sure.

Alan: No kidding.

Amanda: It’s quite easy. It’s not just in the plaque. It’s in any of the pellical, basically the scum that builds up on your teeth. As that hardens into plaque then it’s more permanently kept on your teeth. I don’t know, actually, how far back I’d be able to tell what you ate, whether I could just tell this morning what you had for breakfast, or what you had three weeks ago.

Fortunately for Amanda, and despite the astonishingly good shape of Skhul 5’s teeth, he lived a good long time before the invention of dental floss, so she has high hopes of discovering what he ate 100,000 years ago.

Alan summed up the reaction of all of us: “Astonishing.”

- Graham Chedd

Larry Engel films Alan Alda with Dan Lieberman and a VERY old skull at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Photo by Maggie Villiger

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

Can a Yalie survive a film shoot at Harvard?

What’s it like to film at Harvard or MIT, two of the most prestigious universities in the United States, if not the world? First of all, we know that there are a lot of really, really smart people here. Thinkers, researchers. So that’s a challenge in and of itself. But for a Yalie, it’s even harder. Okay, so I was at Yale way back in the late 60s and early 70s (during the Vietnam War protests and the Black Panthers in New Haven — interesting time — Google it!) so by now I should be over any sense of competition with Harvard, but alas I discover that The Game (keep Googling, but please come back) still compels me to be somewhat suspicious as we start production here.

Regardless of my slight unease, Cambridge is a beautiful city and Harvard’s campus a classic. Trees and green lawns — well-manicured of course — quads and ivy-covered buildings. Within these halls sit some really fascinating professors and investigators. Between Harvard and MIT, over the next few days Alan will sit down with eight researchers and their associates, and go for a “spin” in an fMRI machine (the big magnet!) Indeed the topics of conversations are far-ranging — from Stone Age tools to Theory of Mind to biomechanics — all in our continued effort to uncover the human spark.

Where to begin? Well, parking is always a challenge around any college campus and Harvard is no exception. It always takes an inordinate amount of time to unload gear, load into the building that we’re working in, and get the cars parked.

Larry sets up his shot to illustrate how human feet have evolved to withstand the impacts of running. Photo by Maggie Villiger

We start in the Peabody Museum and one of the first researchers we pay a visit to is Professor Dan Lieberman.  He looks at biomechanics — namely how we, and other animals, use our bodies to move through the world. He’s done research on running for many years. He argues that we humans evolved to become the best long-distance runners on earth. While we cannot out-sprint many animals, we can outlast them all — and that creates a real advantage for us.  Instead of attacking prey up close and personal (and thereby putting ourselves in peril), all we have to do is run our prey to exhaustion, then dispatch it. This change in hunting strategy may have been one of the “sparks” that we’re searching for. It may have pushed people toward more cooperative behavior, thus building closer bonds among us.

But what got me excited was that Dan has discovered that we’re really meant to run barefoot, not in soft cushy sneakers.  In fact, he tells Alan that running barefoot is around 15% more efficient than what we normally do. Dan takes to the treadmill to talk with Alan (Dan can run and talk at the same time frighteningly easily) and demonstrate how our bodies have evolved to support bipedal running, from the way our necks are connected to our heads to the way our hips are shaped differently than other primates’. The latter may have led to babies being born less developed (in order to pass from the womb through a narrower passage between the hips) and therefore in need of a longer growing cycle outside the womb.

But Dan also runs not quite barefoot. In fact, I’m intrigued with his non-sneakers. They have a rubber sole, but it’s very thin. No padding at all. A stretch fabric over the foot and a Velcro strap to hold it secure, really just protection for the skin on your soles. The coolest part is that it looks like a glove for your foot — each toe fits into its own little chamber.

Larry Engel outfitted in his new favorite shooting attire. Check out his feet.

I try one on and instantly like it. I like walking around barefoot anyway at home, and realize that these might come in handy, well “footy,” for filming. Here’s why: When you have the camera on your shoulder you usually want to minimize shakiness and create as smooth movement while walking as you can. One of my techniques is to use short steps and try to think of each joint in my body as a mini-gyroscope that helps separate my body’s movement from the camera’s. I also use sneakers with good soles and cushion. Now I wonder if maybe filming barefoot might not be better, at least for interiors. So in the next scene I take sneakers off and really like the way I can feel the floor and absorb the shocks of walking better!

Much to my wife’s chagrin (she knows I like gadgets), I order a pair.  I start training in them for outdoor and long-term use. Dan warned me that it takes some getting used to because you put different pressure on your joints and especially your calves. He recommends that I start with just two minutes of additional treadmill work a day in them. He also says that using them should help relieve knee pain and swelling, and back aches. Hmm. Well after a few days of taking them on the treadmill, I agree with him — my calves ache. On the other hand, my knees and back don’t.

I now shoot as often as I can with them. Maybe it’ll turn into a trend in the industry; who knows.

- Larry Engel
Director and Director of Photography

Alan looks on as Larry gets some closeup shots of chimps through the glass. Photo: Maggie Villiger

We hit the ground running. Alan had a quick press conference at the zoo, just by the chimpanzee area, and as soon as it was over, and before I was ready with the camera (I wanted to add a polarizing filter and matte box to cut down on reflections in the glass barrier), Alan and Brian Hare were immediately engaged in conversation. As in all of our shoots, this was a genuine discussion between Alan and the scientist and there’s no going back once their exchange gets rolling!

Reflections from the sun, smudges from the chimps – shooting at the glass enclosure had its challenges for Larry Engel. Photo: Maggie Villiger

So, we went to work. I had to be careful of our reflections but it was not an easy task and we picked up Graham, Maggie, John and me every so often. Further, with a small viewfinder, it was extremely hard to notice reflections in the background — unless there was movement. Nonetheless, Alan and Brian were talking about what we think chimps are thinking and how could we come to understand their minds better in order to understand ours better. And this was a great conversation.

Since Brian and Alan were talking to one another before the glass, they couldn’t quite see the chimps behind them. It was fascinating to listen to the conversation concerning our nearest living relatives and their framework for perceiving the world and communicating with us and one another — all the while watching them through the viewfinder observing Alan and Brian conversing. Every so often a chimp would sit down and simply stare at them. It was a wonderful image and a great moment. A few times one would come running down the path and bang against the glass, startling the two deep in discussion and making them laugh.

I must admit that I find zoos generally depressing. This is a feeling that I’ve had since I was a boy and my parents took our family to the Bronx Zoo many years ago, well before zoos changed much of the way they housed animals. But here, I better understand that in many ways zoos are critical to survival for many species and are also critically important to our quest to understand better who we are and how we are connected to other animals with whom we share the planet. I only wish I could meet our relatives face-to-face without the barrier of the glass. We have a chance for that if we get to Africa.

- Larry Engel
Director and Director of Photography

Check out a tiny excerpt from Alan’s remarks at the press conference:

Tanya explaining her mimicry work to Alan

Duke University: The Fuqua School of Business

When I first heard about the Human Spark project, I was excited.  What makes us uniquely human is a question that has intrigued social scientists for over a century. Much of my work over the years has focused on aspects of social interaction that occur outside of conscious awareness, including behavioral mimicry (picking up the mannerisms and gestures of others without awareness or intent).  When I first talked with Graham about covering this research in his program, it was clear that he and Alan had in mind a very different kind of television program from what I’d seen in the past.  They truly wanted to dig in to what it means to be human, exploring perspectives from the neurological to the anthropological.  As a scientist, I’ve always been impressed with the collaborative work that Graham and Alan have done in the past, so I was thrilled to be included in this project.

Tanya watched the action from next door, via hidden cameras in the experiment room. Note the Human Spark crew filming Alan being subtly mimicked.

The day of taping was fun and interesting for me.  I don’t often directly observe my participants interacting with the confederates in my studies.  But we had Alan go through one of my typical experiments as if he were a participant.  My graduate students played the roles of the confederate and experimenter and interacted with Alan.  One of them mimicked his nonverbal behaviors, including his mannerisms, posture, gestures, and other motor movements.  Alan didn’t notice the mimicry (as our participants never do), but at the end of the interaction it was clear that he and the confederate were having a good time and enjoying the task together.  In fact, our research has found that mimicry during social interactions leads to more enjoyment of the task and liking between interaction partners.

My participation in this project has energized me to think at a broader level, connecting research on nonverbal behaviors to more micro and macro perspectives in an effort to better understand what it means to be human.

- Tanya Chartrand, Duke University

Watch Tanya describe what it was like for her as a scientist to be involved in a television shoot for The Human Spark.

Alan Alda takes turns describing photos with Tanya’s confederate, Amy Dalton, who is discreetly mimicking his postures and movements. Photo by Larry Engel

Durham, NC

Today we’ve just finished shooting here at Duke University a series of experiments with Tanya Chartrand on how we humans unconsciously mimic each other, and how doing so helps us become more social.

Our social nature will be a major theme of The Human Spark – and it came up again today when Tanya made Alan the unwitting participant in a study of social mimicry. I’d kept Alan in the dark about today’s filming, so he had no idea what to expect when we sat him down in a room with a graduate student, who was described for him as a fellow participant in a study in interpreting pictures. In fact she subtly mimicked Alan’s body language – so subtly that he never caught on, but that should, if he was typical of the subjects in Tanya’s study, have made him feel more benign.

Alan and Tanya discuss her mimicry study while viewing footage from the hidden cameras in the testing room. Photo by Larry Engel

Alan and Tanya got so into the findings and implications of her research that it was hard knowing when to call cut, and when I did they’d simply set off on a new tack that soon had us rolling the camera again.

The day finished as days on the road with Alan usually do, dinner with the crew, going over what had happened during the shoot, enjoying the things that had gone both right and not quite as we expected – often the best moments – and speculating about the next shoot, which will be yet another angle on the Spark; a day at the North Carolina Zoo about an hour and half’s drive from here talking with Brian Hare about cooperation among chimpanzees, and how it is similar or different from human cooperation.

– Graham Chedd