A handy guide to the words you need to know to talk about the ways animals think and feel. Try to discuss non-human animals’ thoughts or emotions, and you quickly run into trouble. The main problem: there are no widely agreed-to definitions of things like consciousness or sentience. So people talk past each other. Often, people […]
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The Social Brain
Why the social brain is the most intelligent brain Dolphins and humans have not shared a common ancestor for tens of millions of years. Yet for all the seeming estrangement of lives lived in liquid, when they see us they often come to play, and we can recognize in those eyes that someone very special is […]
Woo-woo; Whale Magic?
“When you lock eyes with them, Ken Balcomb says, “you get the sense that they’re looking at you.It’s a steady gaze. And you feel it. Much more powerful than a dog looking at you. A dog might want your attention. The whales, it’s a different feeling. It’s more like they’re searching inside you. There’s a […]
Personality; Not Just for People Anymore
We are watching “elephants,” true enough. But I realize, embarrassed, that I know nothing of how these beings live, of who they are. I scarcely know what it means to be “watching elephants.” Cynthia Moss knows, because she’s been here, watching, for forty years—more time than any other human has ever watched elephants. “When you […]
Why Anthropomorphism Helps Us Understand Animals’ Behavior
Animal awareness: The Big Question of our time? “Is a whale conscious?” As far as I can determine as a scientist, all the evidence indicates that all vertebrates — fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals — appear almost certainly to be capable of sensory experience. In a word, they are conscious. And beyond vertebrates to squid and octopuses and bees […]
What is Intelligence?
Comparing cognition in humans and other animals “When a worm is suddenly illuminated,” Charles Darwin wrote, it “dashes like a rabbit into its burrow.” But if you keep scaring it, the worm stops withdrawing. Such apparent learning suggested to Darwin “the presence of a mind of some kind.” Watching as worms evaluated the suitability of […]