At the opening of InScience, Peter Hagoort steps onto the stage for the umpteenth time, this time at the ninth edition of film festival. Since the beginning, he has been chairing the festival board, but this is another baton he is handing over. Last year he took his leave as director of the Donders Institute, his farewell speech as professor of Cognitive Neuroscience will follow in September, and at InScience he is now putting a stop to nine years of chairmanship. “You have to give way in time,” says Hagoort. He stands in theatre LUX one last time to receive dignitaries, the mayor of Nijmegen, the rector of the university. After 20 years of leadership the public stage is as familiar to him as the laboratory. But a little more tense than usual as his opening act at InScience approaches. “It is always exciting to show the brain in action,” he says.
Science in action
InScience’s opening programme is called ‘Brain Landing’. The audience in the packed main hall of LUX is introduced via a screen to Diede, the participant who is going into an MRI scanner two kilometres away, in a Donders lab. The screen in LUX shows Diede’s brain while she watches film images – the same seven film fragments from the InScience programme that the audience also gets to see. Like a ringmaster, Hagoort leads the audience through the images. “We see in Diede’s brain the response to the images, and this gives an impression of how the processing of film images happens in your own brain,” he explains.
“Houston, can we start?!”, Hagoort shouts from the stage to Donders’ researchers, who are busy sending Diede’s brain images to LUX. Thumbs up in the control centre. Diede’s brain turns yellow (the visual cortex) and red (our audio processing under the skull roof near the ears). The researcher goes through Diede’s brain layer by layer, the audience fascinated by the play of colours. The mission was a success, Hagoort and his team at Donders have done the trick. “This is a bit different from what you are used to as a scientist,” Hagoort said beforehand. “Normally, we present the results of our research in an article or otherwise. You have that under control, but what we are doing here is offering an insight into the process of science. There is no guarantee of a good outcome, which is quite exciting.” Science in action, then, and while the presentation may fail, this is what it is all about, Hagoort explains. “We started Donders without knowing exactly where we would end up, with no guarantee of success. But that is part of the game. Without this risky research, we will not progress in science and knowledge development.”
Brain transplant
During the drinks afterwards at LUX, Hagoort does not tire of answering bystanders’ questions. This evening, many have seen a brain – and with some imagination, their own brains – in action for the first time. There is amazement, but also concern. “Peter, imagine if you suddenly discovered on stage that Diede has a brain tumour. You would not want that, would you,” asks one of the guests. Hagoort can reassure the guest: beforehand, we did a brain scan on Diede. “Her brain is ‘clean’, otherwise we would not have exposed her to the public,” he says. Another guest questions the intimacy: “It is not nothing when you allow others to have a look into your brain just like that, it seems a bit embarrassing. How do you monitor those boundaries?” Hagoort also parries this question, which has been asked many times before. “I do not see it as something intimate. Compare it to a scan of a stomach: for me, seeing that is mainly something fascinating, the brain is an organ as well.” It would be different if the images shown in LUX betrayed Diede’s emotions, or her thoughts or dreams. “But we cannot see that, all we can observe now is the response in the brain to different stimuli. What we see is the necessary condition for having experiences, not the experiences themselves.”
At the end of the evening – Hagoort was not free of bystanders for a moment – he looks back with satisfaction. What is the most interesting question he has ever been asked on an evening like this? That question prompted a nice thought exercise for him: what happens when you implant the brain of one person to another? Do you then become equal to that person? Certainly not, was the answer, which Hagoort elaborated into a short story. In it, the brain of top researcher and minister Robbert Dijkgraaf moves to the skull of Richard de Mos, a former alderman of The Hague with a somewhat shady image. De Mos will certainly not be the same, Hagoort explains: his memory capacity will change, for instance, as will his speed of information processing and emotion regulation. But he will not become a new Dijkgraaf, because everyone’s brain is embedded in an environ-ment. The external impulses in Dijkgraaf’s brain – his garden, family, colleagues, pets and whatnot – exert influence on the person, and those environmental aspects are not transplanted. Hagoort would love to carry out the experiment one day, but he realises it will never happen. “It has to remain a dream experiment, we are not going to lift the skulls for this,” he says.
Moon landing
Earlier in the evening, when Hagoort is given the stage to open InScience, the audience is surprised with a film about the first moon landing, in 1969 by Apollo 11. “With big sleepy eyes, I stayed awake late into the night to follow it,” he looks back on that moment. “I was a young lad and could not take my eyes off it.” The ‘giant leap for mankind’ (the words of Neil Armstrong when he took the first step on the moon), also left a big mark on Hagoort. What has always driven him as a scientist is his fascination with the brain. “Hacking your way through the jungle hoping to find something, the suspense of that trip.” That fascination is undiminished, even after 20 years of research at Donders. “Just imagine: 86 billion nerve cells in that one organ, a strand of a hundred thousand kilometres of wiring if you put the connections between all the neurons back to back. Our brain is by far the most complex organ in the universe known to us.”
Hagoort ended his opening with Leo Vroman’s 1985 poem ‘Biology for Youth’. In it, the poet-scientist describes his amazement at what goes on under the cranium, “the box we no longer need to open”. Many times before in speeches, Hagoort has brought up this poem; it continues to move him. “In Vroman’s time, we could not look into the brain without opening the box, now we can. We look into the healthy brain but leave the skull box closed. Vroman could not have imagined that some 40 years ago. But even now that we have much more knowledge than Vroman did then, the fas-cination remains. It is all still much more complicated than we initially thought.” Room for poetry remains, says Hagoort. Indeed, he has mastered the art of writing himself and has a small oeuvre of poetry about the brain to his name.
Tireless
Those who have worked with Hagoort for years within InScience all attest to his hard work to obtain finances for the festival, and praise his ambassadorship for the brain. Hagoort breathes the spirit of the festival, says InScience director Daisy van de Zande. “The film culture and science are inextricably linked in this feistval. People are always looking for answers to new fundamental and practical questions.” Co-director Ybo Buruma, a Supreme Court of the Netherlands justice: “Hagoort works tirelessly, in the belief that his field is so much fun.” Van de Zande added: “He highlights the wonders of his profession, exactly what makes the combination with film so natural. Donders also stands for imaging, so do we.”
When Hagoort was asked beforehand what setting he preferred for this farewell portrait, he did not have to think long: a public festival. Tonight, he again shows that such a festival suits him well. He also takes the stage to account for the many millions that flow to Donders year after year to look even deeper into the brain. But he does not seek support for that spending in promises of cures for brain disorders that have puzzled science for so long, such as Alzheimer’s, or neurological diseases like ALS. No, the path he chooses is fascination, like the fascination of the child who dreamed of travelling to the moon. That dream was fulfilled, Donders’ dream will come true as well. “Our fundamental science of today is the knowledge of tomorrow, from which we are all going to benefit. That requires patience, brain research is relatively young. After all, it is only for 20 years that we have been able to look into Vroman’s box.”
