In some ways, it is a companion piece to his 2016 film “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World,” which considered the Internet as a reflection of humanity as well as possibly its antithesis, imploring tech experts to think about their work in personal and moral terms they usually aren’t asked about. While everyone interviewed in “Theatere of Thought” believes it’ll still be a few decades to connect the dots, the ever-curious Herzog is willing to start making those connections now in a film that’s alternately playful and profound, attempting to close the gap between human consciousness and other species as well as advances in technology that can influence the way we think on an unconscious level. This may not sound like the “Rosetta Stone for the brain” that Yuste claims it to be initially, but it was with the use of calcium imaging that he helped develop that began to measure how its neural system worked specifically, making it not so large a leap to imagine that it won’t be long before similar tricks of the mind can be identified in humans. Yuste marvels at what he’s learned from the hydra, a seemingly trivial creature that wasn’t recognized as anything more than a plant for some time until it was discovered to have a nervous system and with just one foot, moves incrementally by putting its foot in its mouth to do a somersault. Early in “Theatre of Thought,” Rafael Yuste, described as a co-conspirator on the road trip that serves as the basis for Werner Herzog’s latest adventure, talks about how there’s a “valley of death,” a chasm between the experimentation and research that can be done to learn of human behavior before it can actually be performed on humans, generally on animals.

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