STRAIGHT TALK
with Noah Hutton
The Blue Brain
Project headquarters in Lausanne,
Switzerland, from
Bluebrain: Year
Four.
Noah Hutton is a film director whose recent work addresses the field of neuroscience.
Having been interested in the brain since his time at Wesleyan, Hutton directed 30 short films
for Scientific American in 2011 and is currently in his fourth of 14 years creating Bluebrain, a film
documenting the various brain mapping projects around the globe. Hutton lives and works in
New York, NY.
SAiA: Before we get to talking about your
various films and other projects, while you
were at Wesleyan you studied art history and
neuroscience, and subsequently founded your
own production company, Couple 3 Films. How
did you come to such an unusual course of
study, and when did film make its way into the
picture?
NH: When I got to college, I got hooked first
on art history. I went deep with it, in different
directions, during my first two years there. I
thought it was a great way to study history in
general, by checking out the visuals each culture
produced and the intricacies of the contexts
they were made in. But then I happened to
take an introductory neuroscience course,
which I could luckily just walk right into at
a liberal arts college like Wesleyan. I think I
tried it out because I had read E.O. Wilson’s
book Consilience the summer before, and in that
book he talks about the “language of thought”
as being a great unifier of disciplines, and I was
SciArt in America February 2014
curious to see what this language of thought
was all about.
In terms of filmmaking, I had been shooting
and editing short home videos since I was a kid;
it was always a hobby and just how I made sense
of my family, long weekend days, in between
time. I grew up in a film family, so the culture
and this way of life were always around. I think
by the end of college I just started to try to put
together this hobby I had developed along the
way with the things I had become interested
in out in the world, to try to see those things
through the camera.
SAiA: In 2011 you directed a series of short
films about the human mind for Scientific
American. Can you talk a bit about the making
of and structure of this series and what ideas
you explored? )9