That mind is partially exposed through Herzog’s running narrative, such as when he muses about cumulative habits and whether fish have souls– a variation stimulated by his interview with Siri co-inventor Tom Gruber. “In the background, I saw his TV screen still on, we didn’t switch it off, and I saw some very, very strange school of fish,” stated Herzog. “I asked him about the school of fish, which he had filmed himself. And all of a sudden, I’m only interested in the fish and common behavior. Why do they behave in big schools, in unison? Why do they do that? Do they dream? And if they think, what are they thinking about? I immerse the audience into a very strange form of underwater landscape and behavior of fish.”

We look the inner functions of Herzog’s mind in the sort of concerns he asks his topics, such as when he queries IBM’s Dario Gil, who deals with quantum computing, about his enthusiasm for fishing, generating a passionate smile in reaction. He accepts talk to University of Washington neuroscientist Christof Koch after Koch’s early-morning row on the Puget Sound and consists of music from New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux’s band, the Amygdaloids, in the movie’s soundtrack. He asks married researchers Cori Bargmann and Richard Axel about music, their supper discussions, and the linguistic abilities of parrots. In so doing, he draws out their natural mankind, not simply their clinical know-how.

“That’s what I do. If you don’t have it in you, you shouldn’t be a filmmaker,” stated Herzog. “But you see, also, the joy of getting into all of this and the joy of meeting these scientists. We are talking about speaking parrots. What if two parrots learned a language that is already extinct and they would speak to each other? What would we make of it? So I’m asking, spontaneously, because I saw it, I sensed it, there was something I should depart completely from scientific quests. And yet there’s a deep scientific background to it.”