Animal Minds

There are many books that address animal behavior and attempt to explain them. I was disappointed by many of them, because they didn't seem rigorous in their approach to the explanation and many other explanations seemed possible. Some others were not as well written and easy to put down. The one book that illuminated the landscape brilliantly, was well written and consequently is the one that I highly recommend to anyone interested in animal minds (and baby minds) is Marc Hauser's "Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think". While I think the book seems a tad too certain about the results analyzed and I remain skeptical of some of the conclusions drawn, it nevertheless remains a book I deem worthy of curling up with.

I had read the book a while back and I remembered it again when I was writing the entry "Birdbrain" on my blog. I stopped at the local library to jot these few passages from the book that will hopefully be tantalizing enough for a reader of this blog to get the book. If nothing else, the few passages I've selected will hopefully illuminate the kind of thinking that is required to attempt an answer to what animals think.

"I will show how insights from evolutionary theory and cognitive science have begun to revolutionize our understanding of animal minds. Animals do have thoughts and emotions. To understand what animals think and feel (italics are the authors), however, we must look at the environments in which they evolved. All animals are equipped with a set of mental tools for solving ecological and social problems. Some of the tools for thinking are universal, shared by insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, including humans. The universal toolkit provides animals with a basic capacity to recognize objects, count and navigate. Divergence from the universal toolkit occurs when species confront unique ecological or social problems".
...
The only way to understand how and what animals think is to evaluate their behavior in light of both universal and specialized toolkits, mechanisms of the mind designed to solve problems. And the only way to evaluate the validity of this approach is to test our intuitions about animal minds with systematic observations and well-controlled experiments".

Later in the book, he provides an example of such evaluation. He mentions an observation that he made back in 1987, in a forest in Uganda, while observing three chimps, a mother, a son and her one year old infant daughter. The son departed after feeding on a tree, leaping onto a tree some distance away. The mother followed, but the daughter did not, staying back, screaming. After waiting a while, the mother went back to the daughter and swinging the tree back and forth, managed to reach the tree the son had jumped on to. She then made herself a bridge between the tree where her daughter was and the one where her son was. The daughter felt safe crawling on her mother to reach the other tree. Hauser writes after describing this scene:

"What I witnessed was magical and immediately invoked a suite of questions concerning maternal care. How often do chimpanzees create natural bridges ? Do they create a mental image of their body bridging a gap in the trees before actually stretching across the canopy ? Do they create bridges for any yearling, juvenile, or adult in need ? How does an individual recognize another in need ? Does a mother empathize with her daughter when she is stuck behind, screaming ? Would she empathize with an unrelated yearling frozen in the same position ? To address these questions, we would need to make additional observations. The insistence on replication is not a silly scientific ritual, performed by priests in white lab coats. It is a tool for understanding whether an event is common or rare, and why it occurred."

The book is filled with such interesting anecdotes, questions raised by these anecdotes, further studies designed to answer these questions and conclusions. He writes in the prologue:

"The following series of questions and answers will inform our discussion.

• Do animals think ? Are animals conscious ? Are some animals more intelligent than others ?

I think these are unhelpful questions because they are vague, relying on general concepts that are often defined on the basis of what humans do. In this spirit, I will generally avoid using the words, "think", "conscious" and "intelligent". Instead, I will ask about mental phenomena that are more precisely specified.
......

• Do animals have emotions ?
• Do animals communicate ?
• Are animals guided by instinct ?
• Do animals have rules by which they abide, and sometimes break ?"

And finally, here is why this book may be of interest to people interested in baby minds:

"In contrast to most books on animal thought and emotion, the ideas I develop here depend critically on recent findings in the neurosciences and studies of human infant development. Studies of the brain, which can be explained without technical jargon, are critical for our exploration of the animal mind and its evolution. Several authors claim that animal thought is limited or nonexistent because animals lack language. ... I argue that language is not necessary for certain kinds of thought, and that the most profitable comparison among species is between animals and human infants."