Brian Hare and Alan Alda converse outside the chimpanzee enclosure at the North Carolina Zoo. Credit: Maggie Villiger

By Maggie Villiger

Part of my job as Associate Producer for The Human Spark is getting each person who appears on camera to sign our release form, which gives us permission to use what we film with them. To be honest, it’s usually the easiest part of my job! But when we filmed with Duke University’s Brian Hare at the North Carolina Zoo, he resisted.

Brian wanted to wait to grant his permission to air the footage we shot with him until we could guarantee that we’d used no “Hollywood” chimpanzees in our show. He’d recently had a bad experience with another film crew that did include Hollywood chimps in their program about human cognition, and he was adamant that he wouldn’t sign until he could know for sure that The Human Spark had not done the same.

So our crew left North Carolina with footage of a fantastic exchange between Brian Hare and Alan Alda – but with the release form unsigned. At the time, it just seemed like a speed bump, not a brick wall. The Human Spark had no intention of turning to stunt trainers to get footage – our interest is in the behavioral studies that respected scientists do with chimps, not tricks they can be trained to perform. We continued on our travels around the world, filming as we went.

A still from the opening scene of So Human, So Chimp with Alan and Noah the young chimp and Russell the little boy.

One of our most important scenes was the open of the second program, So Human, So Chimp.  Each Human Spark episode begins with Alan Alda setting up the hour’s theme by speaking directly to camera. In this case, the theme is that chimps and human beings share a lot of characteristics, but are also 6 million years of evolution apart. After hearing about a docile, home-raised chimp from another one of our experts, Series Producer Graham Chedd had an idea; he decided the most effective way to get this theme across was to have Alan introduce it while sitting with a young chimp and a young child. Filming with Noah, this young pet chimp who was well-accustomed to being around people, seemed like the safest and most responsible way to create this kind of compelling scene.

Cut forward several months. We needed to get that appearance release signed by Brian once and for all in order to broadcast the footage of him. But through email exchanges, it quickly became apparent we hadn’t fully understood Brian’s objections. He was OK with the material we had shot at zoos, sanctuaries and research centers because they are regulated by tough animal welfare standards. But featuring ANY privately owned chimp in the program would be enough for him to refuse to participate. And so we came to an impasse.

Infant chimpanzees are shot off their mothers' backs in their African habitat and sold internationally – a trade that is threatening chimpanzees with extinction.

Brian patiently explained his ethical objections to us. He believes that filming pet or entertainer chimps helps contribute to the illegal international trade in infant chimpanzees – a trade that is helping push this endangered species closer to extinction.  Brian worried viewers would get the mistaken impression that chimps make good pets; in fact, once they mature into strong and unmanageable adult chimps, virtually all of these animals are given up by their owners. Brian says some are even killed. There’s simply not enough space or resources to rehabilitate the hundreds of pet chimpanzees that are kept across the United States. Brian is troubled by the overall effect on the chimp species in the wild as well as by the suffering endured by individual privately owned chimps. Others agree, and in fact, major scientific, welfare and health organizations have policies against using privately owned primates in films.

Brian’s arguments were thoughtful and reasonable to The Human Spark team though he did concede that there is little scientific evidence that links TV portrayals of animals to the illegal pet trade. His group is currently conducting research into just this question so in future the debate can be informed by empirical evidence in addition to compassion for our primate relatives.

American conservation groups can appear hypocritical when they tell Africans not to keep apes as pets but U.S. citizens are allowed by law. Credit: Vanessa Woods

On the other hand, Graham pointed out how important the opening scene was to the film. Alan’s narration clearly included the facts that the differences between the child and the chimp would increase as they each grow up, and that the native habitats of chimps and their continued survival in the wild is in jeopardy. Graham also explained that the shot that follows this introduction is of Hondo, a full-grown alpha male at the North Carolina Zoo, lunging at his glass enclosure and scaring Alan. Graham felt the contrast between the cute baby chimp reaching up to Alan and the aggressive adult chimp trying to hit him, would powerfully transmit the idea that keeping chimps as pets is a very bad idea. He also added a line of narration that explains how Hondo was captured illegally in Africa as an infant, and shipped to the United States as a pet before he was rescued and eventually brought to the zoo.

We needed to come up with a compromise. Since all of us involved in this debate are in possession of our own human sparks, we called upon our sociability and ability to work together to move toward a solution. First, Graham made sure that Alan’s narration clearly explains the threats to chimpanzee survival posed by the bushmeat business and the illegal international trade in baby chimps. Graham also took out a portion of the opening scene where the baby chimp climbed up unbidden to hug Alan – it was undeniably cute, but in light of the points Brian had raised, Graham agreed that it might give the wrong impression.

Adult chimps can be aggressive and their strength makes them dangerous. Credit: Vanessa Woods

Then The Human Spark production team arranged for Brian to take part in an ethics panel at a major nature film festival. Panelists discussed the use and abuse of animals in documentary films, and Brian was able to educate a vast group of filmmakers about the dangers of filming with privately-owned chimps. He even had a pamphlet [.RTF] ready for festival participants. So, as a result of our experience on The Human Spark, filmmakers are now better informed about the controversy surrounding the use of Hollywood chimps, and more aware of the possibility of unintended consequences.

Finally, we all eagerly agreed to post an explanation of this issue on the Human Spark website. By exploring the controversy and explaining our case study, we hope to get our viewers thinking about the issues as well, something that wouldn’t have happened if we had simply cut the problematic scene and moved on.

Read an article Brian Hare wrote for The Human Spark about why chimpanzees are not pets.

Randall White with Alan Alda in the Abri Castanet rock shelter excavation. Credit: Maggie Villiger

By Randall White, New York University

I have had a love affair with southwestern France and its prehistory for all of my adult life. I first visited the collapsed rock shelter of Abri Castanet, nine kilometers downstream from Lascaux Cave in the Vézère Valley of France, when I was a young graduate student some 33 years ago. At that time, I was doing thesis research on the geographic locations of Cro-Magnon living sites in southwestern France, seeking to understand the logic behind prehistoric choice of living places. Abri Castanet stuck in my mind for reasons both good and bad.

Some of the ancient beads unearthed at the site are displayed in a nearby museum. Credit: Larry Engel

The bad: There had been no excavations at Castanet since the 1920s and the site was in a terrible state of abandon, even serving as the garbage dump for the farmhouse above the site. As a young, idealistic archaeologist in 1976, this seemed to me to be a shocking state of affairs for a site that had yielded much of what was then the oldest known evidence for art and body ornaments.

The good: It was apparent to me that much of the site remained intact and unexcavated. Since the early excavations at Castanet had been done with rather crude, pre-modern excavation techniques, the fact that there remained substantial intact deposits meant that new excavations could someday provide a wealth of data on the precise dates of the early symbolic artifacts and on the context of their production and use more than 30,000 years ago. Was Castanet an ordinary living site…or something more special? What time of the year was it occupied? How exactly were the dozens of engraved and painted limestone blocks related to other human activities and living structures at the site? Were the hundreds of personal ornaments manufactured here or were they brought in by exchange only to be lost or abandoned on-site?

A number of the Abri Castanet finds are housed just up the road at the tiny Musée de Prehistoire du Site de Castel Merle. Credit: Larry Engel

In 1976, as I contemplated the desolation of the site, then obscured by a thick mat of moss, ivy, and decomposing debris, it did not even cross my mind that someday I would undertake decades of research here that would lead to discoveries shedding new light on the evolution of human society and symbol-use. I simply tucked away the fact of its intact deposits into some remote corner of my professional memory.

Who knew that in the 1980s I would become a leading researcher on the subject of Ice Age body ornamentation and that I would return to Castanet several times that decade to study the ornaments from the early twentieth century excavations? Those old collections left so many unanswered questions that, in 1994, I came back to Castanet to dig, hoping that I was right in thinking that it still had secrets to reveal about the ancient Cro-Magnons.

Abri Castanet kept up its part of the bargain. By the time Alan Alda and the Human Spark crew arrived at Castanet in the summer of 2008, I had already directed a Franco-American research team during nine seasons of unimaginably meticulous excavations, recovering even the dust and debris from bead-making, thus proving the existence of workshops for ornament production.

Our work at Castanet might have ended this year had not a major discovery occurred during the 2007 season when we discovered a one-ton fragment of the collapsed roof of the Castanet shelter. The roof had fallen (undoubtedly with an enormous wooompff) directly onto an ancient living surface bearing stone tools, fireplaces and animal bones. On July 9, 2007, we would discover that its undersurface, the former ceiling under which the site’s Ice Age occupants had lived, had been painted and engraved by them.

The Human Spark crew films the excavation team hard at work in the rock shelter. Credit: Maggie Villiger

At the moment of collapse, bits and pieces of animal bone from the living surface became stuck to the decorated ceiling. Six radiocarbon dates on these bone fragments provide dates of 32,400 years ago, making the Castanet decorated ceiling one of the three or four oldest examples of engraved/painted imagery on the planet. Better yet, much of the remainder of the collapsed ceiling, in direct contact with the living surface upon which the artists stood, is still in place. Over the next ten years, we plan to excavate and study more than 20 square meters of the ancient decorated ceiling and the artifactual evidence for human activities that took place under the decorated ceiling before its collapse.

It was great fun to share our work with Alan Alda, Graham Chedd and the Human Spark crew and to illustrate for them the hard-won knowledge of the past that comes from years of patience, persistence and teamwork. If there is a Human Spark II in ten years, come back to see us… We will still be there adding solid new bricks to the edifice of knowledge of the human past.

Archaeology is an exceedingly expensive endeavor and the Castanet project would not be possible without generous assistance from: United States National Science Foundation, the Direction des affaires culturelles de l’Aquitaine (French Ministry of Culture), the LSB Leakey Foundation, the Reed Foundation, the Institute for Ice Age Studies and New York University.

Veronica Waweru shares some of her recreated arrows with Alan as Larry Engel and Peter Miller capture the video and audio and Producer Graham Chedd looks on. Credit: Maggie Villiger

By Veronica Waweru

Ancient human inventions always engender debate among paleoanthropologists. Models are developed to explain the appearance and timing of new “novel” technologies or behavior. I am no different from these researchers and harbor a fascination with the origin of the bow and arrow. This technology is central to discussions on the hunting abilities of ancients. Were they not-too-smart creatures that scavenged leftovers from big cats, did they only hunt docile animals or were they proficient hunters who brought down dangerous animals? These debates often also include comparisons of Homo sapiens of the last 200,000 years to their Neanderthal contemporaries. Often, the discussion pivots on whether early Homo sapiens were better hunters than Neanderthals. The evidence cited by most researchers suggests that our cold-adapted relatives in Eurasia were not such adept hunters – what with their rodeo-rider-type injuries and their large spears that would force them to engage prey face to face. The most damning evidence for Neanderthals’ technological ineptitude is their extinction – at least for those who do not believe that they interbred with Homo sapiens. But that is a different debate altogether!

Veronica holds a stone point that dates to 100,000 years ago.

Stone armatures or points are amongst the most durable artifacts found in the archaeological record. These were used to arm the business end of knives, javelins, stabbing spears, atlatls and the bow and arrow. All of the organic elements of these implements dating back to 200,000 years ago have decomposed, of course. We are left with the stone tips to determine what weaponry system they were part of. Here we apply laws of physics and ballistics, take copious measurements of the stone tips and attempt to extract ancient blood serum and fats from their edges to make our cases. Then we cite evidence of indigenous people who still use spears and arrows to hunt.

My work focuses on finding evidence of the bow and arrow using stone points from Cartwright’s site, located on the Kinangop plateau in Kenya. I have used most methods employed by researchers in the field but also went ahead and had replicas of the prehistoric tips made and hafted onto arrow shafts. We then shot them at sides of pork and a complete goat carcass (very humanely dispatched and used for food afterward). The results indicated that in terms of distance traveled and penetration, some of the points worked well as “arrowheads.”

Veronica examines the arrows of a modern hunter in Kenya while the Human Spark camera captures their exchange. Credit: Maggie Villiger

To any hunter, putting distance between yourself and prey that might potentially fight back is important. Here, arrows have an advantage over spears. Weapons also need to deliver lethal blows, induce massive bleeding or cause damage to internal organs. Penetration depth is therefore important. In a nutshell, we have a lightweight projectile weapon dating to approximately 100,000 years ago in east Africa! One that can be transported for long distances, the head easily replaced, and the arrow shot from a variety of positions and potentially by a group of hunters, without alerting prey. Modern hunters often add a cocktail of poisons to the shafts of their arrows. These are derived from plants (such as the arrow poison tree) that have wide distribution in Africa. Did prehistoric hunters use arrows to deliver poisons to quarry? We may never know because poisons are unlikely to survive that long.

If arrows could be used effectively against large dangerous prey, why not against our enemies? Here the gore starts – coalitionary violence against members of our own species. What might prehistoric people fight over? Perhaps not oil or ideology but scarce food resources during dry climatic conditions brought on by glacial cycles. Would such a weapon, when used in tandem with poisons, not threaten the very survival of a group if people took to shooting each other over resources?

After showing that prehistoric stone tools were likely used with the bow and arrow, I am now investigating the implications of this invention. Many researchers have argued that human aggression has a genetic substrate. I suspect that cultural mechanisms would have evolved to protect members of a social group from each other. I am presently studying poison-tipped arrow use in interethnic violence in Kenya. This will give insights into lethal violence between members of an ethnic group and non-members. 100,000 years ago, long before Hammurabi’s law or the Ten Commandants were in place, ancients may have had an unwritten — albeit tempered — Second Amendment. Thou shall posses and use poison tipped projectiles, but only on outsiders.

Veronica became the center of attention at the Kariokor Market in Nairobi when she showed up with our film crew. Here a vendor exhibits the modern arrows he sells there. Caption: Maggie Villiger

My fascination with the gore and science of ancient projectiles and poisons, led me to join the Human Spark film crew in Kenya last summer. I did some background work to find people to interview about bows and arrows and poisons. Metal-tipped arrows for sale were easy to find. The poison sources and makers were more elusive. Do you want to kill a stray dog? A person? Why not try bewitching them? The best answer I got was that only very old men made poisons, but they lived “very far away” and may not to want talk to women or strangers. So when the Human Spark crew arrived, I had but one contact who made bows and arrows for sale and who failed to persuade his great uncle to speak about poisons. Our first shooting site was a local market in downtown Nairobi. The crew appeared very much at ease among the throngs of curious crowds and open sewers. My favorite part of the whole event was getting pulled over by local policemen on our way out of Nairobi. They are notorious for taking bribes, but one look at the huge camera and they let us go. I almost dared them to ask for a bribe.

Next summer, I will get a big dummy camera to scare away corrupt traffic police, and endure more rides through potholed dirt roads to coax recipes of poison cocktails from unwilling old men of the Kamba ethnic group. The curiosity is intense and unrelenting. I blame it on a primordial curse – The Human Spark!

Setting up. Note the lights in the upper corners of the picture. Credit: Larry Engel

The American Museum of Natural History is truly the icon of natural history museums. It sits majestically between Central Park West and Columbus Ave on the Upper West Side of New York City. I remember visiting it as a kid when my parents took my brother and me to the museum to see the dinosaurs and dioramas. It was an out-of-this-world experience and totally surreal. Cavernous halls, huge beasts, totem poles and canoes. Bones and more bones.

Its facade was used as the museum exterior in Howard Hawk’s great screwball comedy “Bringing up Baby” with Gary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. When I show the opening scenes of the film in my theory class at American University, I fondly remember walking up the museum’s grand steps and entering another world, far removed from the bustling streets of New York City just outside.

Unloading all the gear from our three vehicles. Credit: Larry Engel

Today, we’re here with Alan to pay a short but important visit to Ian Tattersall, one of the preeminent archeologists in the world. He’s a large man in physique and stature. And his office, lined with classic wood and glass cabinets holding ancient clues to our distant past, is cavernous. I expect Cary Grant to appear from behind a cabinet carrying a bone.

Gels, used to change the color of the light. Credit: Maggie Villiger

Although this is not the first scene that we’ve filmed, nor the first location, it may very well wind up as the first scene of the series. Because we have limited time to set up and a big space with which to work, producer Graham Chedd and I have decided to bring in a gaffer (the person who is responsible for setting lights on larger productions) to help light Ian’s office. We did a preliminary scout a couple of days before to determine what look we were after, what range we wanted to give Alan and Ian to move, then what lights we needed and how many people we’d need to get the job done.

So our local gaffer and I worked out a plan of action. On shoot day, he and his assistant brought a truck that came with lights, stands, stingers (extension cables – so-called because of obvious negative potentials), gels, dimmers, ladders, and a lot of other stuff. We parked underneath the museum and it took about an hour to move all our gear through the museum (being very careful not to damage any exhibits, including one on human origins that Ian had curated) and up to the office.

We had decided to not use a big window in the room as a light source because we didn’t want to fight changes in sunlight over the course of the day. I do sometimes use this natural light source as a key light (the main light of a scene), but usually I do that when I’m only at location briefly and the window is a north-facing one (giving generally even light over the course of our time there). We also wanted not to use lights that would produce too much heat or harsh shadows. We settled on a type of fluorescent light that is balanced for daylight (or film tungsten light) called Kinos. They come in different lengths and numbers of bulbs per fixture.

A cart of sandbags and apple crates – that is, weights and stepstools. Credit: Maggie Villiger

We ended up using about three or four banks of them along with a couple of harder-shadow lights. All were set high, some on tall stands secured with plenty of sandbags or propped up on top of the cabinets. It was crucial not to damage the facility or, obviously, any of the skeletons and other bones and artifacts that were stored there. It was also important to us that we lit the space so that Alan and Ian weren’t forced to stand immobile in one position but could move about the room organically. This would make their interaction more comfortable.

I really enjoyed this location because of the wonderful sense of history and evolution with skulls and re-constructions of heads from our ancestors all around the room.

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