Hutton to speak about The Blue Brain Project
Noah Hutton, a documentary filmmaker and neuroscience enthusiast will deliver a talk entitled “Engaging Minds: The Blue Brain Project and the Race to Understand the Human Brain” on Tuesday, April 15, at 7 p.m. in the Campus Center. His talk is free and open to the public.
Noah Hutton 
has created films on topics that range from the oil boom in North Dakota, to a concert documentary about jazz drummer Dave King, to leukemia and bone marrow donation (following a Grammy-winning musician, the founder of a major charity, and an Olympic hopeful in their personal journeys). His most ambitious project to date, however, is the documentary series he’s filming through 2024 on the work neuroscientists are doing through The Blue Brain Project to reverse engineer the human brain (in a massive simulation on IBM supercomputers).
Hutton brings to bear both his educational experiences and his love of filmmaking in his documentary work. As the son of actors Timothy Hutton and Debra Winger, he spent his childhood on and around film sets and developed a passion for filmmaking at an early age. Hutton attended the Fieldston School in Bronx, N..Y., and graduated from Wesleyan University, where he studied art history and neuroscience.
Hutton is a now a director based in New York City, working through his production house, Couple 3 Films. His first feature film, “Crude Independence,” was an official selection of the 2009 SXSW Film Festival and won Best Documentary Feature at the 2009 Oxford Film Festival. In 2009, he began filming his documentary series about The Blue Brain Project.
Hutton’s April 15 Distinguished Lecturer Series talk will focus on “Bluebrain,” a 14-year documentary film-in-the-making about the 21st century race to understand the human brain.
The film serves as an ongoing state-of-the-union for the current state of brain research, surveying the work of prominent projects and their leaders in years to come, with yearly shorts released ahead of a full re-edit into a documentary feature due for completion in 2024. As the simulation of the full brain is built over the course of this decade by the Human Brain Project, so too will this documentary about a historic quest in human history.
For more information about this Distinguished Lecture, call Gayla Shaw at 768-9452 or email info@umpi.edu. Hutton’s talk is free and open to the public.
