DOCUMENTARY TACKLES QUESTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
German filmmaker Werner Herzog speaks to scientists about the processes in our brains through which thoughts and feelings arise
The issue of consciousness is one that scientists have vowed to crack in the 21st century – defining what it means to be conscious, and working out how the phenomenon arises from our physical brains.
Theories abound, with some neuroscientists claiming that consciousness is an illusion, or a by-product of our brain’s physical processes.
In the intriguing Theatre of Thought, eccentric German filmmaker and documentarian Werner Herzog focuses on how consciousness comes about.
In the future, will audiences for his films be able to read his thoughts, he wonders – saving him the time and expense of making a film.
“How can we read thoughts? Can you implant a chip in your brain and in my brain, and see my new film without a camera? Sometimes mice even prefer invented cartoon worlds, so who is the ghost writer of our mind, of our reality?” Herzog asks in his notes to the film, screened at the DOC NYC festival in New York this month.
Herzog was a towering presence on the international film scene in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the 21st century, he switched to documentaries.
Herzog’s documentaries are analytical, but he brings a poetic rather than journalistic approach to his work, and his penchant for asking offbeat questions is what makes Theatre of Thought so interesting.
The neuroscientists he meets are often forced to consider aspects of their work they hadn’t thought about – such as the possibility of communicating with animals via brain-sensor technology, or whether we can learn about the existence of an afterlife via such sensors.
Herzog is not an expert in neuroscience and was guided by his friend Professor Rafael Yuste, a neurobiologist at Columbia University in New York. He covers subjects including controlling robots – and other people’s limbs – by means of brain sensors, and influencing mice actions by firing light beams at their brain. He also addresses bioethical and privacy issues.
Herzog often veers into the confluence of neuroscience, philosophy and psychology to consider topics such as our sense of self and personal identity.
Dr Christof Koch, his first interviewee, is a specialist in how consciousness arises in the brain, and admits there are more questions than answers.
“The central mystery of the ancient mind-body problem is how does thought, how does consciousness, how does colour, emotion, pain, pleasure and love and hate, emerge from this tissue [the cortex]?” asks Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.
Koch conducts experiments on mice brains, as these are very similar in construction to the human brain, just smaller.
But Yuste, Herzog’s scientific adviser, conducts experiments on even smaller creatures – hydra, small aquatic creatures around a few millimetres in size. Yuste believes this may throw some light on human consciousness.
Hydra possess about 300 neurons – messengers which send the electrical impulses around the brain that enable it to operate – compared to the human’s brain’s billions, and Yuste has developed a dye to show when and where they are firing.
“If we can understand hydra, it’s a bit like breaking the code of an ancient language. This is the earliest nervous system in evolution – they were the first animals to have neurons, around 750 million years ago.”
Analysis of the small creatures may lead to useful information about our own consciousness because “we suspect they [hydra] are social animals, and each animal knows who or she is – they have a self”, Yuste says.
“This is a fundamental problem of evolution – how do you know you are you?”
One fascinating aspect of the hydra is that if the creature’s cells are separated and then placed in a Petri dish, they will reform – they know that they belong together. No one knows how this happens, Yuste says.
Although he points out many positive benefits, like the ability of paralysed patients to control robotic arms, Herzog worries about how technology like brain implants may lead to the kind of brain control that we see in science fiction films.
An interview with Professor Karl Deisseroth shows that this can already been achieved at a basic level – in mice, anyway. Deisseroth and his team have invented a way to activate the neurons in animals with light, enabling them to control their emotions and behaviour.
Researchers called neurotechnologists are also designing mechanical interfaces that can read information from a human brain and make sense of it.
“The ability to decode information in the brain is down to measurement, so the more the measurement improves, the better the decoding will get,” says Professor Uri Hasson, from the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.
Neuroscientists can already achieve a very basic “telepathic” reading of an image that a test subject is thinking about.
Such advances have sparked worries about privacy and political manipulation, and Herzog discusses these. But he also features a comment about patients’ rights from Professor Joseph Fins, a bioethicist from New York’s Weill Cornell Medical Centre.
“There is a possibility of infringing rights, but there are also the people suffering from brain injuries who have a right to treatment. Sometimes these rights come into conflict. So we have to negotiate them very carefully to understand that rights go both ways. There are negative rights and positive rights.”