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

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.

Alan Alda recently chatted with Steven Pinker in his office in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. Much of Pinker’s research has focused on language – and not surprisingly language is central to his conception of what makes us human.

Watch this video clip to learn more about three big things Pinker thinks set us apart from other animals.