In 2008, the journalist Jonah Lehrer paid a visit to a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, to profile Henry Markram, a world-renowned neuroscientist. Markram, a South African, had trained at a series of élite institutions in Israel, the United States, and Germany; in the nineties, he published foundational papers on neural connections and synaptic activity. Markram’s work in the laboratory, which involved piercing neural membranes with what Lehrer described as an “invisibly sharp glass pipette,” was known for its painstaking precision. Lehrer’s visit, however, had been occasioned not by Markram’s incremental contributions to the field—it’s not easy to sell a colorful profile on the basis of such publications as “The neural code between neocortical pyramidal neurons depends on neurotransmitter release probability”—but by Markram’s pivot, in the early two-thousands, to brain simulation.
Neuroscience, Markram declaimed to Lehrer, had reached an impasse. Researchers had generated an enormous wealth of fine-grained data, but the marginal returns had begun to diminish. If there was to be real progress in understanding what exactly was going on in our heads, a more enterprising approach would be required. With the help of supercomputers descended from I.B.M.’s Deep Blue, he planned to construct a full-scale model of the brain from the ground up: each individual neuron would have a digital analogue. A by-product of this computational strategy would be a solution to the mystery of consciousness. Of his effort, Lehrer wrote in the sadly long-defunct Seed magazine, “Markram hopes that it represents a whole new kind of neuroscience.” As Markram put it to Lehrer, “You need to look at the history of physics.” He continued, “From Copernicus to Einstein, the big breakthroughs always came from conceptual models.”
Such unapologetic self-mythologizing on the part of a subject is difficult for a journalist to resist, and Lehrer was patently captivated by Markram, who had “an aquiline nose and a lustrous mop of dirty blond hair that he likes to run his hands through when contemplating a difficult problem.” Though his eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, Lehrer comments, Markram could “pass for a European playboy.” Lehrer was primed to believe Markram, and, when treated to a theatrical visualization of one of the team’s preliminary achievements, of a simulated portion of a mouse brain’s neocortex, he was not disappointed. One of Markram’s scientists told Lehrer that their study of neurons in silico—that is, on a chip—was more propitious than the in-vivo and in-vitro processes used by “actual” experimenters: they enjoyed access to much cleaner data than their error-prone human colleagues did. Lehrer wrote, “The model, in other words, has exceeded its own inputs. The virtual neurons are more real than reality.”
At the time, Noah Hutton was studying neuroscience as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University. Hutton was an aspiring filmmaker—his first documentary, “Crude Independence,” which he shot in a North Dakota boomtown between his junior and senior years, premiered at SXSW before he graduated from college. Hutton had encountered Markram’s seminal early work in a class on mammalian cortical circuits, but, as with Lehrer, it was the brain-simulation effort—the attempt to construct the legendary “brain in a vat,” with all of the philosophical issues it entailed—that took hold of his imagination. In 2009, when Hutton was in his final year of college, Markram delivered a viral TED talk in which he claimed that he could simulate a human brain within ten years.
“I was fully awe-inspired,” Hutton told me recently. “Markram was a hero of mine, and I thought, I need to get in on the ground floor of this.” Lehrer’s profile had ended with the usual backside-covering caveats—to be sure, Markram might not succeed, etc.—but Hutton wanted the entire glorious arc. He e-mailed Markram a few times but received no response. Hutton had recently shot a music video for a band called the Amygdaloids, a side project of the N.Y.U. neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, and LeDoux offered to vouch for Hutton. With LeDoux’s endorsement, Hutton secured an invitation to Lausanne to make his pitch. There were other documentarians circling the program, which was called the Blue Brain Project, but, if Markram was committed to seeing the whole thing through in ten years, Hutton said, he was prepared to make the same investment. Hutton was twenty-two. “There was no one else crazy enough to commit to that timeline,” Hutton told me, and Markram was won over by an ambition that seemed commensurate with his own. Hutton was taken to a screening room to experience an updated version of the fly-through that the team had shown Lehrer, and he shared Lehrer’s fervor. “I was just awestruck by the visuals. I was an acolyte, and we immediately had a kind of teacher-student relationship. I had not a shred of critical energy.”
For the next decade, Hutton made an annual pilgrimage to Lausanne to check in on the project and interview Markram. The first eight visits were self-funded—Hutton was supporting himself as a commercial editor in New York—and all of them were solo; Hutton had no one to help schlep his equipment around or set up his shots. His final product, the excellent “In Silico,” had its streaming début in September. Hutton is a talented filmmaker—“Lapsis,” a low-budget sci-fi movie that he wrote and directed himself, appeared last year, and portends a career in the conceptual mode of someone like Alex Garland—but few documentary projects extend for more than a year or two, and in most instances their trajectories are rigged up to fit an arbitrary ending. Had Hutton encountered his subject over the standard documentary interval, he almost inevitably would have come away with a version of the story that Lehrer told: a familiar tale of a bold, charismatic visionary destined to triumph over the forces of cautious bureaucracy, opening up expansive new vistas of inquiry. As it turned out, however, Hutton found himself narrating a much more complicated story—one in which his own personal hopes for the project would be implicated.
An early montage sets us up for what seems like the first version of the story: a series of neuroscientists at prestigious institutions explain that we don’t know nearly enough about the brain’s intricacies to permit wholesale simulation, and that it might be a century or more before we have such knowledge. In his TED talk, Markram explains that he’ll have nothing to do with such prognoses of impossibility, and in his year-one interview with Hutton he goes even further: as he sees it, the epistemic modesty of the neuroscience community is an alibi for timidity and self-preservation. A full-brain simulation, in his view, is the necessary basis we need to solve such problems as Alzheimer’s and severe autism; his son is autistic, which gives his work a particular personal urgency. “As a scientist, you want to sit back and say, ‘O.K., it’s enough for me to study my microcircuit, and I’m happy,’ ” he tells Hutton, shuffling papers in front of himself with feigned dismissiveness, as he nods in imitation of scientific paper shufflers. “I don’t think that’s enough. And that’s what keeps me going.”
If Markram succeeds, Hutton explains, in voice-over, brain researchers will neither need to experiment with animals anymore, nor run up against the limits of invasive procedures on human subjects. Markram goes on, “We’ll have an intelligence. You’ll be able to dial down a molecule and see that you dropped the I.Q., dial up a molecule, see that you raised the I.Q. I believe that we will understand the brain before we finish building it.” With naïve admiration, Hutton asks Markram what keeps him going, and Markram responds to the softball with a gentle head pat of a smile. “Well, I want to see this built. In ten years, as I said, it’s going to be built.” Hutton is ushered into a screening room and shown a fly-through of a portion of simulated mouse brain; the “Blue Danube” waltz plays, and stunning visuals unfurl before his eyes. Hutton says, “Though it was just a tiny piece of the whole, this was the first rendering of the most detailed brain simulation ever attempted.” He told me, “I thought, ‘Holy shit! No one else has ever seen this—I’m seeing inside of a brain! I had a few years of that feeling.”
When Hutton returns for another visit, in 2011, the team has made what they describe as a significant leap: they have seen, for the first time, glimmers of brain activity that they hadn’t themselves programmed, a sign that the simulated brain has begun to exhibit emergent properties. Hutton lingers on a shot of their computer displays, where a wave of color washes over the digital neurons. Their promotional apparatus has also been upgraded, and Hutton notes the introduction of giant touch screens. One of Markram’s lieutenants shows him a bottle of champagne they’ve locked in a desk drawer for future celebrations of breakthroughs they feel certain are imminent.
That year, Hutton read a new book by the neuroscientist Sebastian Seung, then at M.I.T., that described his skepticism of Markram’s brain-simulation project. In an interview, Seung, who is just as good-looking, charismatic, and camera-ready as Markram, seems unable to take Markram’s venture seriously: “If we don’t have detailed knowledge about the connections in neural networks that we can really depend on, I think that the endeavor of simulating them is really bound to fail.” Seung explains that the fundamental problem with Blue Brain is that there are no intermediate benchmarks. Absent some connection to the real, experimental world of rats in mazes or humans in MRI machines, Seung explains, there’s no way to know whether Markram’s team is simulating something like actual brain activity or merely producing cool graphics. Hutton cuts back and forth between his interviews with Seung, who calls brain simulation “highly unrealistic” and a “waste of time,” and Markram, who calmly explains that his efforts have been “severely distorted” by his critics, who are hopelessly limited by the old, plodding ways of doing things. Markram seems to pity them in their attachment to a superannuated model, as if they were still hard at work refining inquiries into the Ptolemaic spheres; as he puts it to Hutton, “We’re dealing with a cultural change.”
Hutton, for the most part, gives Markram the final word; after all, he had hitched his own ten-year project to Markram’s. Privately, however, Hutton was less sure. He told me, “I thought, Do I need to jump over and follow Sebastian now? Have I picked the right vessel for the film? But I felt I had to stay with it.” Hutton felt “malleable, tossed in two directions.” When he met with Markram’s critics, he found their story—that Markram represented the conquest of traditional neuroscience by computational colonists—persuasive, but, when he relayed versions of these opinions to Markram, he was once again convinced that Markram was misunderstood, a maverick visionary. Hutton realized that his own role in the documentary had to change. He told me, “I’d made two documentaries before, and I wasn’t in those films at all—they were vérité-style. I’d thought this film would be the same. But then I thought: who’s the narrator? It wasn’t Henry, because at that point I couldn’t place him at the center of the film. I had to step in, which meant I had to figure out my own point of view.” Before Hutton returned to Lausanne for the third year, a short portion of his work in progress, including his interview with Seung, was published by the Scientific American. When he arrived for the next shoot, he was steered aside by one of Markram’s subordinates; in the future, they told him, they wanted to know who else he was talking to. Hutton put the warning into the film.
On a superficial level, the rest of “In Silico” is about Markram’s rise and fall: through the brute force of his salesmanship, he brings together hundreds of researchers from as many institutions to win a flagship billion-dollar grant from the European Commission, and his efforts at Blue Brain become the centerpiece of what’s known as the Human Brain Project. Hutton is swept up in the renewed enthusiasm for a far-reaching effort now described as akin to the Human Genome Project, or to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research; at one point, he appeared on MSNBC to announce that he had updated his own timeline to fifteen years, to track Markram’s, and he was partway through what was now a fifteen-year documentary. Markram’s imperial stewardship of the Human Brain Project was, however, short-lived: eight hundred neuroscientists signed an open letter of protest, arguing that the neuroscientific community had been sold a bill of goods, and that participants had been enlisted against their better judgment in what was no longer a coördinated effort to study the brain but a monumental boondoggle and an egregious squandering of scientific resources on expensive information technology. Markram was pushed out of the Human Brain Project, and resumed his old position at Blue Brain, which was supported by the Swiss government.
By year seven, Markram has begun to fully turn inward; he tells Hutton that he’s tired of fighting for his position in the media, and that he’s decided that this is his “silent year,” that he’s going into “hibernation.” His science, he believes, will speak for itself. He removes his microphone, ending the interview early. In voice-over, Hutton explains the way he’s been buffeted back and forth between the outside critics and Blue Brain’s spellbinding visuals. (Hutton’s own animated sequences, by the wonderful illustrator Andrew Khosravani, are, by deliberate contrast, decidedly anti-realistic; cartoonishly florid and surreal, they bring to mind the interstitial scenes from Monty Python.) Now, Hutton’s narration continues, “something else was starting to creep in, a sense of multiplying touch screens, curved screens, headsets, but a lack of meaning to anything and anyone outside this glass-and-steel building in Geneva.” Markram now suggests, against all evidence, that the ten-year timeline was never supposed to be taken literally, he insists that his team remains on track to complete the construction of a digital mouse brain; he produces as confirmation the fact that their simulations are growing larger and more theatrically vivid with the passage of time. Where Jonah Lehrer, the journalist, had to conclude with boilerplate about how Markram might very well fail, Hutton has put himself in the opposite position: Markram, he grants, might be vindicated in the end. But, even if that never proves to be the case, Hutton goes on, the story of scientific progress is as much a story of mistakes as it is one of successes. He allows that there’s a certain grandeur in Markram’s ability to make mistakes on such a tremendous scale, and with such tremendous initiative.
All of this is, of course, true enough, but Hutton’s more profound point is that there remains an important difference between being wrong and being not even wrong. The danger isn’t that Markram has made mistakes, but that the mistakes he’s making aren’t productive—or are only productive on a meta level, insofar as they suggest that science is only on rare occasion the proper realm for Nietzschean heroism, and that layers of bureaucratic oversight tend to exist for good reason. The portrait of Markram that ultimately emerges is of a lordly sovereign stalking the halls of an island mansion, an autumn of the scientific patriarch. Perhaps Lehrer was caught in the usual short-term trap—that, had he had Hutton’s longitudinal Sitzfleisch, he would have discovered that the whole thing was a castle in the air. (As the blogger Scott Alexander recently put it, “just as economists have predicted ten of the last two recessions, so science journalists have predicted ten of the last two paradigm shifts.”) But there were clues available to Lehrer even then—ones that made their way, unexamined, into his own article. Markram had compared himself to Copernicus, suggesting that his own conceptual breakthrough would be of the same order. But Copernicus did not begin with a new conceptual framework. Copernicus began with the sense that there was something about our astronomical measurements that didn't quite add up. It may have been a conceptual breakthrough that solved the problem, but it was the painstaking incremental work—what Thomas Kuhn called the practice of “normal science”—that demonstrated that there was in fact a problem to be solved. ♦
