Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(72)

In monkeys and apes, the same sort of test has been done by having them watch an experimenter hide food in one of several horizontal pipes. Obviously, the primates remembered where he had put the food and confidently selected the correct pipe. If the food hiding had taken place in secret, however, they were not sure which pipe to pick. They peeked into the pipes, bending down to get a good look, before selecting one. They realized that they needed more information to succeed.41

As a result of these studies, some animals are now believed to track their own knowledge and to realize when it is deficient. It all fits Tolman’s insistence that animals are active processors of the cues around them, with beliefs, expectations, perhaps even consciousness. This viewpoint being on the rise, I asked my colleague Rob Hampton about the state of affairs in this field. The two of us have offices on the same floor of Emory’s psychology department. While sitting in mine, we first watched the video of Lisala carrying her huge rock. Like a real scientist, Rob immediately began to imagine how to turn this situation into a controlled experiment by varying the locations of the nuts and the tools, even though for me the beauty of the whole sequence was Lisala’s spontaneity. We had nothing to do with it. Rob was impressed.

I asked him if his work on metacognition had been inspired by the dolphin study, but he rather saw this as a case of convergent interests. The dolphin study did come out first, but it wasn’t about memory, which was Rob’s focus. He was inspired by the ideas of Alastair Inman, a postdoc in Sara Shettleworth’s Toronto lab, where Rob worked at the time. Alastair wondered about the cost of memorizing things. What is the price of holding information in mind? He set up an experiment on pigeon memory that was similar to the metacognition test for monkeys that Rob developed.42

When I asked what he thought of people who draw a sharp line between humans and other animals, such as Endel Tulving’s shifting definitions, Rob exclaimed: “Tulving! He loves to do that. He has done a great service to the animal research community.” Tulving says those things, Rob believes, because he thinks it’s fun to set a high bar. He knows that others will go after it, so he pushes them to come up with clever experiments. In his first monkey paper, Rob thanked Tulving for his “incitement.” Meeting the senior scientist not long thereafter at a conference, Tulving told Rob, “I have seen what you wrote, thank you!”

For Rob, the big question in relation to consciousness is why we actually need it. What is it good for? After all, there are lots of things we can do unconsciously. For example, amnesic patients are able to learn without knowing what they have learned. They may learn to make inverse drawings guided by a mirror. They acquire the hand-eye coordination at about the same rate as any other person, but every time you test them, they’ll tell you that they’ve never done it before. It is all new to them. In their behavior, though, it is obvious that they have experience with the task and have acquired the required skill.

While consciousness has evolved at least once, it is unclear why and under which conditions. Rob considers it such a messy word that he is reluctant to use it. He adds, “Anyone who thinks they have solved the problem of consciousness hasn’t been thinking about it carefully enough.”


Consciousness

When in 2012 a group of prominent scientists came out with The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, I was skeptical.43 The media described it as asserting once and for all that nonhuman animals are conscious beings. Like most scientists studying animal behavior, I really don’t know what to say to this. Given how ill-defined consciousness is, it is not something we can affirm by majority vote or by people saying “Of course, they are conscious—I can see it in their eyes.” Subjective feelings won’t get us there. Science goes by hard evidence.

But in reading the actual declaration, I calmed down, because it is a reasonable document. It doesn’t actually claim animal consciousness, whatever that is. It only says that given the similarities in behavior and nervous systems between humans and other large-brained species, there is no reason to cling to the notion that only humans are conscious. As the document puts it, “The weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” I can live with that. As you can see from this chapter, there is sound evidence that mental processes associated with consciousness in humans, such as how we relate to the past and future, occur in other species as well. Strictly speaking, this doesn’t prove consciousness, but science is increasingly favoring continuity over discontinuity. This is certainly true for comparisons between humans and other primates, but extends to other mammals and birds, especially since bird brains turn out to resemble those of mammals more than previously thought. All vertebrate brains are homologous.

Although we cannot directly measure consciousness, other species show evidence of having precisely those capacities traditionally viewed as its indicators. To maintain that they possess these capacities in the absence of consciousness introduces an unnecessary dichotomy. It suggests that they do what we do but in fundamentally different ways. From an evolutionary standpoint, this sounds illogical. And logic is one of those other capacities we pride ourselves on.





8 OF MIRRORS AND JARS



Pepsi was the star of a recent study on Asian elephants. The adolescent bull passed a mirror test conducted by Joshua Plotnik by carefully touching a large white X that had been painted on the left-hand side of his forehead. He never paid attention to the X that had been put with invisible paint on the right-hand side; nor did he touch the white one until he walked up to the mirror in the middle of a meadow. The next day we reversed the sides of the visible and invisible markings, and Pepsi again specifically felt the white X. He rubbed off some of the paint with the tip of his trunk and brought it to his mouth, tasting it. Since he could know its location only via his reflection, he must have connected his mirror image with himself. As if to make the point that the mark test isn’t the only way to do so, Pepsi took one step back at the end of testing to open his mouth wide. With the mirror’s help, he peered deeply inside. This move, also common in apes, makes perfect sense given that one never gets to see one’s own tongue and teeth without a mirror.1