As soon as, on the peak of COVID, I dropped off a ebook on the residence of Werner Herzog. I used to be an editor on the time and was attempting to assign him a overview, so I drove as much as his gate in Laurel Canyon, and we had the briefest of masked conversations. Inside 30 seconds, it turned unusual. “Do you have got a canine? Just a little canine?” he requested me, staring out on the hills of Los Angeles, apropos of nothing. He didn’t watch for a solution. “Then watch out of the coyotes,” Herzog stated. “The coyotes will come and eat it. That’s what they do. They hunt for little canine.”
I felt for a second as if I had entered a Herzog documentary, as a result of that is what he does: permits himself to articulate the internal ping-pong. Many individuals would possibly stand in the course of a jungle thicket and have this sort of deep thought (as Herzog as soon as did on digicam): “We now have to change into humble in entrance of this overwhelming distress and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming development and overwhelming lack of order.” However they might most certainly maintain it to themselves. Herzog’s sense of surprise appears to overspill any filter, whereas mine hides behind the scenes of disgrace most of us possess. And even when, now that he’s in his 80s, this guilelessness has change into a little bit of a shtick (he has voiced self-serious variations of himself a number of instances on The Simpsons), it’s nonetheless his attraction. It helps that his Teutonic timbre makes even his most blatant observations or obvious inanities sound by some means, weirdly, profound.
In his newest documentary, Theatre of Thought, Herzog applies himself to the mysteries of the human mind. The subject is extra scientific and technical than most of his directorial targets, which are likely to indulge his abiding curiosity in nature’s violent and irrational methods—grizzly bears and volcanoes, cave artwork and albino crocodiles. Simply how uncomfortably geeky a match that is for the extra intuitive Herzog turns into obvious lower than quarter-hour in, as he’s listening to Darío Gil, a head researcher at IBM, sketch out the main points of quantum mechanics on a whiteboard. Herzog all of the sudden lowers the audio on Gil’s lecture and amplifies his personal voice-over. “I admit that I actually perceive nothing of this,” he says, “and I assume that the majority of you don’t both.”
If I can spoil issues a bit: Herzog learns little or no in regards to the mind. Sure, he goes on an in depth tour of cutting-edge analysis, discovering that scientists are coming nearer to studying our ideas, that we might quickly have the ability to management synthetic limbs with our minds, that quantum computer systems would possibly replicate the workings of the cerebral cortex. However the thriller of thought, of consciousness, stays a thriller. Herzog himself closes his movie by embracing defeat, saying that he’s now even “extra mystified.”
This would possibly sound just like the train was a dud, besides that we additionally spend nearly two hours inside Herzog’s noggin, and it’s a wild one. His questions and digressions, which depart the scientists staring dumbfounded on the digicam in awkward silence (which he prolongs for our pleasure), do a significantly better job of illustrating the intricacies of the human thoughts than any MRI.
Think about this quick, random sampling of Herzog’s interjections, following the earnest efforts of researchers to clarify their pioneering work:
“Would you want to speak with a hummingbird?”
“So you might by some means press a button and style a schnitzel?”
“May or not it’s that all of us reside in some form of constructed fantasy world?”
“If anyone had been dying and so they had this interface, might the particular person, proper after dying, report again to you that there’s heaven?”
“How silly is Siri?”
“Is that this constructing behind you for actual?”
At first, these questions appeared nearly like a stunt; the closest corollary that got here to thoughts was Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G, asking ridiculous questions with a straight face and making comedy out of the interviewee’s battle to reply. However the responses themselves didn’t maintain a lot consideration—although I’ll say that many of those scientists had a stunning openness to Herzog’s repeated insistence that we would all be dwelling in a Matrix-like simulation. And Herzog was not organising a joke. He was simply letting his thoughts meander the place it needed.
Simply over a minute right into a dialog with Tom Gruber, a pc scientist who helped create Siri, Herzog’s consideration is snagged on a TV within the background of the shot, which is taking part in a looping video of fish swimming in faculties. “I received intrigued by the pictures on the display behind him,” Herzog’s voice-over all of the sudden cuts in. And he’s off in a reverie, Gruber’s speaking head changed by shimmering clouds of fish swerving in unison. Herzog wonders out loud: “Do fish have souls? Do fish have desires? Do they solely dream this panorama? Do they assume? Have they got ideas in any respect? And in that case, what are they interested by? Is identical thought concurrently in all of them?”
That is simple sufficient to giggle at. However the distinction between the quantifying impulses of the scientists and the gloriously squiggly strains rising from Herzog’s mind is revealing. Herzog usually refers to himself—together with originally of this documentary—as a poet, although he’s not significantly identified for writing verse. What he appears to imply is that there’s the realm of knowledge, after which there’s something deeper—a set of existential questions, a manner of trying on the world and chopping proper to good and evil, to the soul, to the character of nature. I wouldn’t essentially place extra worth on this poetic method to the issue of being human than a scientific one, however set in opposition to Herzog’s musings, the scientists do find yourself seeming too medical and mechanistic about what goes on in our heads. I do know which method I would like to debate over schnitzel.
One researcher from UC Berkeley, Jack Gallant, exhibits Herzog how particular voxels—tiny spots on our cortex—correspond to completely different ideas. It’s attainable to decode the mind this fashion, figuring out the place these notions reside. However when Gallant exhibits Herzog an instance of 1 voxel’s contents, the consequence appears extra Dada than information: the ideas “sheriff,” “goose,” “brown,” “robin,” and “purse” all exist in the identical place. The query of what it signifies that these concepts are grouped collectively within the folds of our mind appears higher answered by a poet. And Herzog involves his personal dismissive conclusion, one which’s simple to endorse: “The place our numbers and names and ideas are positioned might be mapped, however there isn’t any map of our ideas.”
