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

Alan describes where we’ve been looking for The Human Spark to some members of the North Carolina press. Photo: Maggie Villiger

Asheboro, NC

A small horde of North Carolina TV and print journalists converged on the North Carolina Zoo early this morning to see Alan meet the chimpanzees there – and hear from him about our project. We were there to meet not only the chimps, but also the newly appointed Assistant Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, Brian Hare.

Brian is only 32, but has already had a stellar career as a researcher into the social skills of chimpanzees and their close relatives, bonobos. Alan, having entertained the journalists, was making friends through the thick plate glass with Hondo, the alpha male of the NCZoo chimp group when Brian arrived. When the two men sat down to chat, Hondo, who had been calmly munching breakfast, suddenly hurled his whole body at the glass where Alan was sitting.

Hondo in a more contemplative mood than when hurling himself at Alan through the glass. Photo: NC Zoo by Tom Gillespie

Brian: That’s just, “Hello and welcome to the neighborhood.”

Alan: To my neighborhood, right?

Brian: Exactly, to his neighborhood. That’s exactly it. He just knows who’s the alpha male out here and he wants to make a potential coalition partner of you, Alan.

Hondo’s display unfortunately left a large smear on the glass that we had to live with for the rest of the interview. But his outburst allowed Brian to make an important point about one of the differences between chimps and humans that we’ve set out to explore: chimps have a much harder time controlling their emotions.

Brian: He can’t inhibit. “You guys are new… I’m really excited… I need to display.” And so he makes a plan over the next 60 seconds but it’s not the next 60 days, as we might. But Hondo is a very nice guy, he has a long history with humans and the truth is he just wants some attention.

One of the major themes we’ll be tackling is how much chimps (and other non-human primates) see others as having minds like their own. This has been a hugely controversial subject over the last few years, and Brian has been in the thick of the debate. Alan and Brian got into it right away:

Click the image to view larger. Brian and Alan discussing chimpanzee minds – while chimps keep an eye on what’s happening on the human side of the glass. Photo: Maggie Villiger

Alan: It’s so interesting to look into their eyes, because there seems to be a look of some comprehension. I mean, I get a look back from him. He’s observing me. It looks like thought is going on.

Brian: That’s one of the things our research has been all about, trying not only to figure out, do they think, but are they thinking about you thinking? And when they look into your eyes, is it like you looking into somebody else’s eyes, where you are trying to size up somebody and say, “Oh, what does he know? Is this a friend? Is this somebody who is a foe?” That’s part of the excitement, trying to figure out exactly what is going on in their heads.

In the coming weeks we’ll be trying to figure out what’s going on in the heads of chimps and monkeys at research facilities here the United States, as well as the Caribbean, Europe and Africa. And along the way we’ll be taking a look into the heads not only of our fellow primates but also of our own species – as well as a species that’s much more distantly related – dogs – who are apparently better able to understand certain human social cues than our primate cousins. Brian Hare was actually the first to suggest this, way back when he was an undergraduate.

Hondo, meanwhile, kept up his attempts to be a part of the conversation, and will no doubt eventually succeed in getting his opinions expressed on your television screen…

– Graham Chedd

Learn a bit more about Brian Hare’s research with chimpanzees, bonobos, dogs and foxes from these articles:

• Smithsonian Magazine: Dogged
• Duke Research: Going to the Source

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

Apache Junction, AZ

We spent this weekend in Arizona, filming by the light of a blazing campfire (and a literal truckload of lights, including our very own moon) a conversation Alan had with archeologist Curtis Marean about how modern humans came to replace the Neanderthals — who’d been doing quite nicely until our ancestors decided to leave Africa and check out Europe.

Keeping warm by the campfire in the chilly desert night air, he and Curtis had a great time together chatting about what our ancestors brought with them to Europe that enabled them to replace its then-inhabitants, the Neanderthals. Not what they brought in their hands, but in their heads — basically a more flexible approach to making a living and a greater capacity for cooperation among themselves. This emphasis on our social nature will be a major theme of The Human Spark.

– Graham Chedd

Here’s Director Larry Engel talking about his plan for filming this nighttime desert scene… and a glimpse of how it all looked in the end.

Tanya Smith shows 3-D images of Neanderthal teeth photo © Larry Engel, 2008

Graham Chedd here. Last time, I was telling you about our visit to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility – and about the trouble I got into there.

We’d come to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility at the invitation of Tanya Smith, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (where there’s a lot of very cool Human Spark-type research going on, so we’ll be filming there later). Tanya is an expert on teeth, which as she points out are by far the most durable parts of our bodies – in fact they are practically fossilized as they grow. What’s more – and I found this astonishing when she first told me – teeth have daily growth lines hidden inside them, much like tree rings, which can reveal their owner’s early life history – and how quickly they grew up.

Here’s Tanya, alongside some 3-D images of Neanderthal teeth.

Peering inside teeth to see those growth rings needs very powerful X-ray beams – beams millions of times stronger than you get from your dentist. That’s where the synchrotron comes in. And because the X-rays are so potent they are also deadly, which is why there are all sorts of safety precautions. For instance, we were allowed inside the synchrotron while the beam was turned off for routine maintenance for an hour or so, and we were all given special little keys. The synchrotron can’t be turned on until all these keys are returned and in their little locks.

The Emergency Stop button photo © Larry Engel, 2008

There are also big buttons like this everywhere…

including in the room where the teeth were actually scanned. Now, before the beam is activated the room it has to be cleared of people, and to make sure the room is thoroughly checked, there are buttons in the corners that have to be pushed. I volunteered to push one of these buttons – and pushed this one.

Of course, it was the wrong one (pretty obvious now, but at the time… not so much). An eerie silence fell as the entire facility, except for the lights, shut down.

After a moment of shocked disbelief (“What did you do!?”), Paul Tafforeau, who is Tanya’s collaborator at the ESRF, recovered his composure and set about informing the authorities what had happened and getting everything back up and running again. He even forgave me (sort of) and no one came to haul me away.

Here’s Paul, with another set of Neanderthal teeth, these from a child.

Paul Tafforeau examines a set of Neanderthal teeth photo © Larry Engel, 2008

This fossil has a fascinating story, and one we’ll tell in the show, because it was the first Neanderthal fossil ever discovered, in 1829, long before Neanderthals were officially recognized and named, and long before Darwin suggested that humans had evolved.

We don’t yet know what Paul and Tanya found out from the scans. That’s going to take several months of careful growth ring counting and analysis. But we do know they were happy with the images they got, and that by the time we get to putting together our program, they’ll be able to tell us how quickly these Neanderthal children grew up.

Next we’re off to the University of Oregon in Eugene, where we’ll find out what parts of Alan’s brain provide him with a couple of uniquely human skills – his facility with language, and the ability to use a screwdriver….

I just hope there are no big red buttons.

Belgian archeologist Michel Toussaint, with the Neanderthal skull photo © Larry Engel, 2008

Hi, I’m Graham Chedd, who with Alan Alda first came up with the idea for The Human Spark a couple of years ago. We’ve just finished our first shoot, so this is a good moment to begin what will be a regular series of blogs as the production makes its way to your PBS station, we hope some time next year.

Alan will chime in soon. But on this first shoot, while I was in Grenoble, France, filming a 50,000 year-old Neanderthal skull getting its teeth X-rayed, Alan was lying in a tube in Los Angeles having his head scanned – so that we can all peer into his brain later.

Here’s Belgian archaeologist Michel Toussaint holding the fragile Neanderthal skull at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. Normally it resides under lock and key at the national archaeology museum in Paris. The photo was taken by Larry Engel, by the way. Larry is The Human Spark’s director, and will also be the cameraman for most of the filming

The big question we’re trying to answer in the first show of The Human Spark is how, when, where and why we got to be who we are from who we used to be. Humans that looked much like us existed some 200,000 years ago, but the first obvious evidence of people with minds like ours – people we’d recognize as us – dates to about 35,000 years ago, when they started painting the walls of caves in Europe, like the famous Lascaux caves in France. We want to know where these people – and their minds – came from.

More on that in later blogs (hint: much of the story takes place in Africa). But this first shoot was with researchers seeking the answer to a simple question: how long did it take Neanderthals to grow up?

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility photo © Larry Engel, 2008

Neanderthals had been living in Europe and getting along just fine for at least 100,000 years before our ancestors showed up. Then the Neanderthals disappeared. Just how and why we replaced them – what gave us the edge – is one of the most fascinating mysteries of archeology, and one we’ll be diving into in this show. But one intriguing idea is that our ancestors had longer childhoods than did Neanderthals, and so more time to absorb all the complicated stuff we need to learn.

So how do you find out how quickly Neanderthals grew up? That’s where this machine comes in – a giant particle accelerator that generates one of the most powerful and concentrated beam of X-rays in the world – and a machine that I managed, in an act of stunning stupidity, to shut down entirely.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. More on that next time.