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.

In the quest to discover the human spark, researchers often rely on volunteers who let them investigate their behavior, inclinations, and abilities. Average, everyday people… just like you!

A couple of labs at Harvard University have created a Web site called Test My Brain, where the public can participate in online experiments.  Find out how good your “gut number sense” is or how skilled you are at recognizing faces — and contribute to the advance of science at the same time!

Visit Test My Brain

Different animals look at the world with different eyes, literally. The colors a species can perceive is dictated by the types and number of visual pigments found in the retina. Humans and most primates are trichromats, meaning we have three pigment varieties that absorb light in our eyes and then transmit that information to the brain. Some birds and reptiles have four pigments, allowing them to perceive ultraviolet wavelengths that we can’t. And other mammals have just two pigments.

This article from Scientific American examines how our color vision system may have evolved. And through their experiments, authors Gerald Jacobs and Jeremy Nathans discovered some intriguing brain adaptability when new sensory inputs are added.

Scott Watrous is the MRI Technologist in the lab at the University of Oregon where we filmed Alan getting a brain scan. One of Scott’s most important responsibilities is making sure that nothing that can react with a magnet gets anywhere near the MRI machine. Watch this interview to learn more… and then check out the YouTube clips below that demonstrate WHY the “no metal” rule is so key!

Check out these YouTube videos:

• Oxygen bottle in an MRI magnet
• Oxygen Cylinder in MR Scan Room
• Missile Effect
• Chair gets stuck in an MRI machine

The Human Spark crew visited Helen Neville in her Brain Development Lab at the University of Oregon. Check out some behind-the-scenes photos from our day filming with her and colleagues — and research volunteers.

Remember those counting monkeys?

Earlier this summer, we posted about a study that revealed that monkeys could listen to a series of beeps and then equate it to a visual representation of the same number. One of the researchers behind the study, Kerry Jordan, explained that we have a primitive number system that “allows us to estimate quantities without using language” and that we share this ability with many animals. Humans also have another number system that is symbolic and must be learned.

An article in The New York Times this week discusses a batch of new research that seems to show that these two number systems are actually more connected than was previously thought.

In one study, a group of 14-year-olds were given a test to evaluate their approximating prowess. On a computer screen, they watched as slides covered with blue and yellow dots flashed across the screen. After each slide they were asked whether there were more blue dots or yellow dots.

The results were very interesting:

Comparing the acuity scores with other test results that Dr. Mazzocco had collected from the students over the past 10 years, the researchers found a robust correlation between dot-spotting prowess at age 14 and strong performance on a raft of standardized math tests from kindergarten onward. “We can’t draw causal arrows one way or another,” Dr. Feigenson said, “but your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math.”

While they note that it’s difficult to determine a causal relationship between symbolic math skills and those required for approximation, the findings certainly provide some food for thought. And if you want to test your own number instinct, you can try out a version of the dot-spotting test on The New York Times Web site.

When Alan volunteered to wear the EEG cap a while back, this is what he watched.

Courtesy Brain Development Lab, Univeristy of Oregon

When you look in the mirror, you instantly recognize the person gazing back at you as yourself.

Scientists use this reflection recognition as a test of self-awareness. The idea is that our ability to recognize ourselves underlies other higher cognitive functions.

Until recently only great apes and some other big-brained mammals such as dolphins and elephants were thought capable of passing the “mirror test.” Enter the European magpie.

Get more info:

• “The Magpie in the Mirror” – ScienceNOW News
• “Magpie Passes a Test of Personhood” – Wired Science Blog
• “Mirror Test Shows Magpies Aren’t So Bird-brained” – New Scientist

Filming conversation between Alan and neuroscientist Scott Frey. Note the grabbing tool on the table… can Alan successfully grasp the paper cup with it? Photo © Maggie Villiger 2008

The first few days of shooting with Alan have nicely confirmed one of the key inspirations for the series: that many very different sciences — and scientists — are out there looking for the Spark — even if they don’t know it. A couple of days ago we were in Oregon, peering with both an MRI and a brain wave monitor into Alan’s brain to find out how he employs it for two of the most distinctively human traits, language and tool use.

Alan models the EEG cap that will measure Event Related Potentials through his skull as he listens to spoken language. Photo © Larry Engel 2008

It turns out that the places in his brain involved in both talking and planning how to use a tool are physically quite close together. Is there an evolutionary connection? We’ll see…

These days with Alan have also confirmed how key he is to the project.

He patiently endured perhaps an hour in the claustrophobic and noisy MRI scanner imagining how he would use a tool, and another hour in what looks like a swimmer’s rubber hat studded with electrodes watching animated penguins talking gibberish (but grammatically correct gibberish).

Then he conducted lively and probing conversations with the scientists doing the studies — and also made them laugh, something you don’t see too much of in the average science documentary.

– Graham Chedd

When new discoveries are made in the field of neuroscience, you often hear that particular areas of the brain are active at particular times, or that other areas don’t have anything to do with specific skills. Once you dig deeper than the headline, you might start to wonder how scientists actually KNOW what’s happening in “the brain.” There’s not just one master brain out there for them to crack!

Neuroscientists rely on volunteers who are willing to have their brains analyzed while they perform particular tasks. With luck, over time the scientists are able to look at data from enough individuals to get a sense of what is happening in an “average” brain during their task of interest.

Brian Moore is one of the people who has volunteered a couple of times for Helen Neville’s language fMRI studies at the University of Oregon. Find out why in this video clip. Brian is deaf, so he signs his remarks. The voice you’ll hear is that of his interpreter, whose hands you might see a bit at the right of the frame.

Most research programs are always on the lookout for volunteers… if this possibility intrigues you, check out what’s happening at your local colleges and universities!