{"id":255,"date":"2009-08-07T06:52:15","date_gmt":"2009-08-07T10:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/humanspark\/?p=255"},"modified":"2018-09-10T15:14:03","modified_gmt":"2018-09-10T19:14:03","slug":"spark-blog-behind-the-scenes-and-inside-the-skulls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/humanspark\/video\/spark-blog-behind-the-scenes-and-inside-the-skulls\/255\/","title":{"rendered":"Spark Blog: Behind the Scenes and Inside the Skulls"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

By Graham Chedd<\/p>\n

Now, I don\u2019t want to get too excited, and I don\u2019t want to give too much away \u2013 after all, we want you to watch our shows when they are broadcast. But I think we\u2019ve just seen the first signs of the Human Spark<\/em> \u2013 right inside Alan\u2019s head.<\/p>\n

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Alan takes a look at the fresh pictures of his own brain. Photo: Larry Engel<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

We spent the day at MIT\u2019s McGovern Institute, where Alan\u2019s brain was being scanned while doing tasks set for him by MIT\u2019s Rebecca Saxe<\/a> and Harvard\u2019s Randy Buckner<\/a>.\u00a0 Our filming Alan while he\u2019s having his head examined is nothing new, by the way; in the days of Scientific American Frontiers<\/em> 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 \u201cplump hippocampus,\u201d the brain region involved in helping lay down memories. Randy confirmed Alan\u2019s hippocampus is still plump; in fact, Randy told Alan that he wouldn\u2019t have guessed his age from looking at his brain.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a story behind why we filmed with both Randy and Rebecca, who \u2013 while both rising stars in the neuroscience field \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

As Rebecca told Alan: \u201cI saw Randy giving a talk about thinking about the past and I looked at these pictures [of the brain] and I thought, \u2018that looks really familiar.\u2019 And so I went back to Randy afterward and I said, \u2018I\u2019ve got pictures that look a lot like those pictures.\u2019 And so since then we\u2019ve been working together to try to ask: what\u2019s in common? What\u2019s the same about thinking about your own past, your own future, and also other people?\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, you\u2019ll have to wait for the answer until The Human Spark<\/em> 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<\/a> 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 \u2013 which was what Alan\u2019s 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\u2019re doing nothing very much is one of the hottest topics in neuroscience just now. As Randy puts it succinctly: \u201cWe think we\u2019re seeing the idle brain not being so idle.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Rebecca prepares to slide Graham into the MRI for his first ever brain scan. Photo: Larry Engel<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

I\u2019m 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 \u2013 well, Sparks are flying.<\/p>\n

As a postscript to the day, Rebecca offered me a chance to have my brain scanned in the McGovern Institute\u2019s very fancy new MRI machine, which looks, by the way, a little like a set for \u201cHouse.\u201d Now this is something I\u2019ve been given the chance to do many times over the years, going back to not long after MRI machines were invented. I\u2019ve always said no, reasoning that my brain might turn out to be a little less than the perfectly honed machine I\u2019ve always assumed it to be. But this time, inspired by Alan\u2019s pristine hippocampus, I allowed myself to be slid into the tube and tried to think of nothing. You can see the results below.<\/p>\n

I have a sneaky feeling Randy thought Alan\u2019s brain looked better.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/humanspark\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/7\/files\/grahams-brain.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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