On Dogs that Changed the World -- DVD

Laugh if you want. But they really did. I swear.

And what follows are some notes or thoughts about that.

They begin with a discussion of how wolves became dogs, and does this great cinematic thing where they say, "What made tame wolves?" Garbage. And they show a panoramic view of a modern-day landfill dump where dogs are everywhere, scavenging for food, alongside humans, under a dark cloudy sky. It's really quite lovely. And then Ray Coppinger talks about how the wolves with the lowest flight distance would have been at an advantage to picking up the meat bits and human waste that people had to dispose of once they decided to start living in settlements.

Ray Coppinger talks about the previous idea that maybe humans just kept wolf puppies and tried to domesticate them. The idea that humans just walked in and took wolf puppies. . . this is great. I mean if you really think about, this is absurd. Have you ever tried to steal a baby from its mother? You can't even get between a housecat and her kittens without sustaining injuries, and we're talking about a 180lb(?) killing machine with razor teeth? If early hominids knew anything, it was how to interpret the signals of nature. And even if there was one guy who thought it was a good idea to try and tame a wolf puppies, im pretty sure the whole rest of the community would have treated him like people today do when someone in their neighbhorhood keeps an alligator in a pen in their basement. They totally steer clear of that guy and speculate about when he's going to get eaten alive. And they won't let their kids go anywhere near that house. Keeping an exotic, danger pet would probably get someone ostracized for the safety of the community. Say you could manage to escape with both your arms with a wolf puppy; its mother will just track you down and kill you in your sleep in order to get it back. Maybe by some luck you stumbed upon a nest of orphan wolf pups whose entire pack perished in a freak cliff accident. If you managed to raise it to adulthood, it still might rip your face off in a vy for alpha male as soon as you showed signed of weakness. Even today, people who have wolves as pets are spontaneoulsy attacked after years of companionship without incident.

Looking back. Like so many outdated theories of science, the questions and suppositions seem ridiculous. "Why would humans have selected for that coat color" etc. "They were really very silly questions" says Raymond Coppinger.

They suggest that, without dogs, we would have never domesticated sheep or goats (because their native habitats are these really mountainous, dangerous places that humans totally couldn't go). There is a big difference between hunting these animals, and sheparding them, they said.

Inuit people talked about how the dogs make it possible for them to be there at all -- because they run the equivalent of 5 marathons a day, can sense unsafe places in the ice (where a human would die within seconds, but a dog can just hop out of and shake it off :)), sled dogs will fight a polar bear and run underneath of it, etc. and be fine.)

Part 2

The second part of this DVD takes a shift and talks about the profusion of dog breeds that accompanied the last century or so. They talked about how the Victorian era was the first time the dogs were really bred for what they looked like (well, they got these Pekenese dogs from China after the English stormed the Chinese royalty and took the last 5 of the royal dogs that were not slaughtered to protect them from falling into foreign hands home with them, where they became a sensation.) Victorians with too much time on their hands fiddled with breeding to try and get puppy-like toy dogs . . . "dog fancy" and lap dogs.

This is really a major shift, though, because as soon as we started picking characteristics soley on aesthetics, we run into all these problems with dogs that can't breathe and have hip displasia and bad backs . . .

Also it said that we went from 40 breed types to over 400 with the Victorian age.

Note: bull dogs were bred for butcher shops to "pin down wayward cattle" :)

I just understood something! So, I was saying to Melissa the other day that I thought it was amazing that all that variation in dogs could be in the dog genome. But its not! Or at least not all of it. The minute variations that developed into exaggerated breed differences often come from MUTATIONS in the genome, which are then expanded/exploited through inbreeding (or "line breeding" as breeders call it) in order to increase the liklihood of recessive traits.) This might be another classic example of "Maria, how did you not know this already?!" but there you have it.

This movie talked about one idea for the different sizes of dogs coming from their rate of maturation as regulated by a particular hormone, the patterns for which is determined by the mother's pituitary gland. so the giant dogs (great dane, for example) actually matures slower than a tiny dog.

Interesting note: rat terriers (all terriers) are bred to kill. that's what their job was. They have strong necks capable of shaking a thing to death in one shake, and they are little so poor farmers didn't have another huge mouth to feed.

Also, it talks about how the relationship between working dogs and humans is no longer the normal way it is, and that companionship or pets are more likely . . . says it in sort of a wistful way and that we have forgotten what these dogs really are and what their purpoes might have been, or what's in their make-up (herding, hunting, killing). This makes me a little sad too and makes me think about the dignity of work for humans if there is somthing akin to that for dogs -- that they are bred to work or to be our working companions and they mght not feel satisfied in their lives without fullfilling those genetic fates. Hmmm.

A bit more information about foxes

Quest: To find images of dog breeds for the painting that I started and am waiting for to be dry.
Surprise joy: Also found a book specifically on foxes.

From this book (The World of Foxes by Rebeca L. Grambo - A Sierra Club book), in addition to finding a bunch of crazy cute photos of foxes playing, I have learned a few neat things about foxes.

One thing I hadn't noticed, but which now seems bluntly obvious, is that foxes look a lot like cats. ! Why might this be? an astute studier of evolution might ask, when they are supposed to be more related to dogs? (This reminds me of a photo I took in the mall where there are all these dog and cat stuffed animals together, that I think might apply to this painting idea I have too . . . Hmmm.) Well, as it turns out, foxes and cats are an example of convergent evolution, which is something I forgot existed, whereupon two relatively-genetically-unrelated animals begin to look like one another because of behavioral/lifestyle factors. In other words, the last ancestor cats and foxes shared was way a long time ago, and foxes branched off since then, but because they both pounce on small mammals and hunt at night etc. they ended up having similar physiological features.

For instance: Foxes have slightly longer back legs than front ones, so they maintain contact with the ground longer for jumping purposes. They have light, thin bones, and tufts of fur between their toes to make their footsteps extra soft (for sneaking purposes). They have vertical slits for pupils (like cats) which allows for them to more tightly close their pupils during the day, protecting their very sensitive retinas (optimized for night viewing).

Other interesting things about foxes is that they are solitary hunters (which you'd have to be if you are going to eat a mole . . . because you just can't group-kill a mole and then share it with 5 other foxes). However, they are very social in their family groups -- male and female will mate for at least a season, maybe longer, and stay together during that time, and then when kits are born, female foxes will nest together (usually related by kinship, like mothers and daughters or sisters or something) and help raise each others pups. The male will bring food for the female when the babies are very small, and then they will hunt together to bring back enough food for the kits, leaving it progressively further and further from the den to get them to venture out.

Also, foxes don't dig their own dens (though they do dig small holes to cache food). Instead, they use existing holes, from say a badger or groundhog.

On foxes, domestication, dogs, and people with crazy hair

So, some important overview, gleaned from a bunch of different articles, about this rather famous and really interesting thing.

It's the 1950's, Siberia. Fox farmers wanted to develop foxes that were easier to handle, for fur production. The long story short is that the results of this experiment were entirely useless to the fur industry, for reasons that shall become known by the end. But what was discovered in terms of genetics, domestication, and human slash dog history is really pretty fantastic. Dmitri Belyaev, whose brother had gone to concentration camps and died there, managed to survive and was given this task (though apparently, Darwinian or Mendelian genetics was "out of favor" in Russia at the time since "Lysenkoism" was the official state position so he had lost a previous research position, and this continued study of genetics was somewhat disguised as physiological research). Side note: I think it is a very sad and odd coincidence that this research, dealing with selective breeding and Darwinism, is undertaken by a man whose brother died in concentration camps, what with the very disturbing extremes of social Darwinism . . . yeah.

The method for choosing the right foxes to breed, by the way, was as simple as Belyaev sticking his gloved hand out in front of the foxes and seeing which ones snapped at him and which ones exhibited curiosity or cowering. The docile ones were bred together, and so on. Surprisingly, behavioral changes were noted in only 10 generations (which differed, I think, from the prevailing idea of how long domestication would really take. In fact, Ray Coppinger also points out the significance of these studies in their break with Darwinism's insistence that change is gradual and incremental, since a constellation of traits has been more or less selected for all at once, in a relatively short amount of time.) (Soviet Scientist Turns Foxes Into Puppies)

Belyaev's rationale is described this way: "Belyaev believed that the key factor selected for domestication of dogs was not size or reproduction, but behavior; specifically, amenability to domestication, or tameability. He selected for low flight distance, that is, the distance one can approach the animal before it runs away." (Silver foxes - Wikipedia). Me: I love that it's called "flight distance" . . . it sounds so scientific.

Over the course of 60 years and 45,000 foxes, strikingly different animals emerged . . . playful foxes with floppy ears, white patches on their fur, smaller bodies, wider skulls, blue eyes, and the tendency to bark, whine, and wag their tails. "Some of the foxes even began to answer to their names," says the narrator in an unattributed Nova special. The tail-lengths became "unpredictable" and some were curly. The significance of this is underscored by a little comment made by Ray Coppinger from Hampshire college in a PBS Nova episode called "Dogs and More Dogs (2004)" (narrated by John Lithgow, by the way):

"It's not a matter of selecting for them because they're not there to be selected for. That variation isn't there [in the wild type]."

(The article where I found these embedded youtube videos can be found here.)

The significance of these findings were amazing. First, it sort of solves this mystery of where all these traits came from if we can't find them in wild wolves. I also learned, from a Discovery channel special, that since then, they have done experiments where they get a tame mother to raise kits from the aggressive pool, and vice-versa. Apparently, the mother's disposition has no effect on the young, and genetics overrides their behavior. Still, the mystery of how all these traits are related was unclear.

They found that adrenaline levels were far lower than normal in the more tame foxes, and realized that adrenaline is also related to a whole host of other hormones, including the production of melanin (coloring).

Anthropologist Brian Hare (mentioned in a few articles, and below, and who, as is the wonderful tradition of people with evocative last names, has the kind of hair style that would warrant mentioning -- see right) says in a Horizon episode called "The Secret Life of the Dog" that when selecting for tameness, we are essentially selecting for juvenile behavior. Infants and juveniles are far less aggressive than adults, he says, and we are sort of freezing them in time.

The curious notion of pointing
More recently, these foxes were used to investigate the unique ability of dogs to follow human gestures, like pointing (talked about in some previous posts and articles).

In a recent visit to Novosibirsk, Dr. Brian Hare of the Planck Institute used the silver foxes to probe the unusual ability of dogs to understand human gestures.

If a person hides food and then points to the location with a steady gaze, dogs will instantly pick up on the cue, while animals like chimpanzees, with considerably larger brains, will not. Dr. Hare wanted to know if dogs’ powerful rapport with humans was a quality that the original domesticators of the dog had selected for, or whether it had just come along with the tameness, as implied by Belyaev’s hypothesis.

He found that the fox kits from Belyaev’s domesticated stock did just as well as puppies in picking up cues from people about hidden food, even though they had almost no previous experience with humans. The tame kits performed much better at this task than the wild kits did. When dogs were developed from wolves, selection against fear and aggression “may have been sufficient to produce the unusual ability of dogs to use human communicative gestures," Dr. Hare wrote last year in the journal Current Biology.

Dr. Hare believes that wolves probably have the same cognitive powers as dogs, but their ability to solve social problems, like picking up human cues to hidden food, is masked by their fear. Dogs, after their fear is removed by domestication, see humans as potential social partners, not as predators, and are ready to interact with them.

(From Nice Rats, Nasty Rats: Maybe it's all in the genes from the New York Times).

The same Horizon episode, "The Secret Life of the Dog" from which Dr. Hare's comments about selecting for juvenile traits comes goes on to explain that the enormous amount of variation we get in dog breeds today probably did come from direct human selection, of course, but that the initial domestication from wolves to dogs was probably the result of this selection for tameness. In other words, he said, at some point people were like "I like the one with the curly tail" and then they tried to get more. So probably at first, we were not interested in "morphological" traits but behavioral ones. I felt like that was a good clarification to make -- that it wasn't that selective breeding was NEVER for physiological or morphological traits, but just not at first.

This is some really old, pixelated video from Cornell (http://cbsu.tc.cornell.edu/) that shows the foxes doing amazingly cute and wonderful things. I saw this video in higher res as part of another documentary/special on the foxes, but can't seem to find it alone in any better quality. This is exactly what I'd want to show on a little video screen next to or on top of a drawing. :)

Here's another video, I think from Cornell, which simply shows a fox in a cage being very friendly and tail-wagging. Maybe it would make more sense to use something like this.

And one that is essentially the same, but showing a lady happily getting the fox out of the cage (and also, this fox turns around on its feet, which is great.)

And then this video, which is part of a Discovery channel show, which is kind of fantastic. Something that i love about this video is the music, especially this sort of magical music that they play when the foxes are being kind and friendly. I love this sort of enchanting thing. I wonder if I could find some music that is similarly enchanting, put it with no-sound video . . . or use other enchanting music with my proposed Sesame-street puppet things.

Vast and more sinister applications

One article in the Guardian said, "It's eugenics, but with foxes, which is less bad. "

(From Nice Rats, Nasty Rats: Maybe it's all in the genes from the New York Times).

People's comments on blog articles reveal how quickly the conversation can move to, often unintentional or unwitting, dangerously racist comments. On one blog, the relationship between melanin and aggression (and thus skin color) comes up, though after a bit of arguing, someone comes up with a rational, level-headed response the nips further master-race talk.

Pets

Another interesting aspect of this story is the fact that these foxes are now sold as pets (expensive ones, I guess). At first, the idea of taking a wild animal and trying to make it a pet seems to have very negative connotations. However, it's interesting to note a couple of things in this case. One is that, given the issue of diminishing funds for research in Russia, the sale of these foxes is actually a good way to support continued research. Scientists from around the globe have expressed concern that, should disease or a disaster befall the Russian population, these animals could all be wiped out in one fell swoop. Many have tried to get some of the foxes for their own research in other countries, arguing it as a way to protect the genetic material for future study. And finally, I was thinking to myself that really, these animals have been bred to enjoy human contact, are especially social, playful, and active. So they are probably happiest as pets, and what else would you do with them all?

There is a great video from the Discovery Channel show (The Ultimate Guide: Dogs) that shows a silver fox as a pet, playing with a dog (which is great on so many levels)

Various side-notes

The same experiments have been undertaken in Siberia with rats, otters, and mink.

And, someone in the comments section of one of these articles suggested the following: "What I don’t understand is why they called it a ’silver fox’ instead of a ‘fog’ which would have been much funnier I think you have to agree." Kind of great.

Some references and links

The article which re-brought all of this research to attention can be found online at American Scienctist: "Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment", which was written by the mentee of the original researcher. I also have it in PDF form . . . with lots of nice photos.

And then, of course, the Radiolab episode New Nice that, as usual, probably started me thinking about this in the first place. Way to go, Radiolab! :)

Here are some videos of the different fox behaviors: Videos.

Here is a transcript of the Nova show about dogs, which hopefully someday I will actually watch if I can find it online. :)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=evolving-bigger-brains-th

"Let's make puppets!"

Ok. New plan. Maybe I should make puppets.

There are a lot of amazing, different configurations for puppets and the way to use them, including hand puppets, finger puppets, stick puppets, marionettes, and shadow puppets (which I forgot existed). Also, there are black-light puppets:

Black light puppet - A form of puppetry where the puppets are operated on a stage lit only with ultraviolet lighting, which both hides the puppeteer and accentuates the colours of the puppet. The puppeteers perform dressed in black against a black background, with the background and costume normally made of black velvet. The puppeteers manipulate the puppets into the light, while they position themselves unseen against the black unlit background. Controlling what the audience sees is a major responsibility of any puppeteer, and blacklight lighting provides a new way of accomplishing this. Puppets of all sizes and types are able to be used, and glow in a powerful and magical way. The original concept of this form of puppetry can be traced to Bunraku puppetry.

(From Wikipedia article on Puppet)

I found some examples of puppet versions of the "smartest animals" that I might want to consider either buying, or making myself.

Here is a random quote relating puppets and animals:

Aristotle discusses puppets in On the Motion of Animals.
"The movements of animals may be compared with those of automatic puppets, which are set going on the occasion of a tiny movement; the levers are released, and strike the twisted strings against one another ...."[1]

(From Wikipedia article on Puppet)

A related word, Poppet, had this definition in Wikipedia:

Poppet, a word that sounds similar, is sometimes a term of endearment, similar to "love", "pet", "doll" or "dear". It alludes to folk-magic and witchcraft, where a poppet is a special doll created to represent a person for the purpose of casting healing, fertility, or binding spells.

Of course, there is the question of what it means to make animals puppets, when puppets are thing that are controlled by humans (or really, even a human can be a "puppet" of sorts if they are being controlled by an unseen operator). Maybe there is something about unseen operator? The magic of making something alive? The ability of kids to interact with a puppet even if its clear that the voice it makes is coming from a grown up and not the puppet hand . . . How do animals react to that? I mean, if you show a chimp a puppet and talk through the puppet, like people do with kids, do they look at you or the puppet? Hmmm.

For some reason, this video is going around the internet right now because several people told me about it, most notably my friend Jonathan, who, out of the blue, sent it to me unaware that I had just spent the day looking up puppet-making online. I asked him if he was google.

Anyway, this is pretty delightful and reminds me of all kinds of good feelings I used to have towards making things. :)

Puppet links

Here are some puppet-related links that I should come back to:

Puppet.org

Puppet Buzz

Puppets Inc

Scottish mask and puppet center

Project Puppet

Shadow Puppets

Also, I love the word puppet. the more i read about this, the more i envision a sesame-street like home for everyone - a long street where all the friendly, compassionate researchers live in brownstone houses and where all the talking animal puppets are't puppets at all. You could walk down the street and see pigeons solving puzzles, parrots spelling words with brightly colored refrigrator magnets, a gorilla using sign-language to talk about her favorite pets, dolphins learning how sentences work, and everyone's favorite bonobo driving a golf-cart down the street waving hello. Children could play along with the TV screen to see if they can figre out how to get the bucket out the well before the crows can. The thing is, this pleasant neighbhorhood exisits in our own world as we speak.

Time for some more gushing and praise for DFW

It's been awhile since I obsessed about DFW, so I figured now is a good time to check in. :) I'm working on reading The Broom of the System right now . . . though I don't have anything to say about that just yet. But I figured I'd clean out some of my old notes and ramblings . . . so here goes.

Just some things I love.

Really really incredible, moving essay on "The View from Mrs. Thompson's"
"LOCATION: BLOOMINGTON< ILLINOIS
DATES: 11-13 SEPTEMBER, 2001

SUBJECT: OBVIOUS"

I love this short essay. I want it.


Quote in Up, Simba (which was overall fantastic) . . . ."'catered lunches' which today are strange bright red ham on Wonder Bread, Fritos, and coffee that tastes like hot water with a brown crayon in it. . ." this made me laugh out loud

and this wonderful description

"Even the network techs, practically Zen masters at waiting around and killing time, are bored out of their minds at today's F&F, where after racing back and forth to get all their gear off the bus in the bad neighborhood and making a chaise of it (the gear) here in the back there's nothing to do but they also can't really go anywhere because their field producer might suddenly need help feeding tape. Te way the techs handle deep boredom is to become extremely sluggish and torpid, so that lined up on the ottoman they look like an exhibit of lizards whose tank isn't hot enough."

!!! :)

And now a long one.

david Foster Wallace p 95 in "Authority and American Usage" about words. I LOVE HIM.

"Take, for example, the Descriptivism claim that so-called correct English usages such as brought rather than brung and felt rather than feeled are arbitrary and restrictive and unfair and are supported only by custom and are (like irregular verbs in general) archaic and incommodious and an all-around pain in the ass. Let us concede for the moment that these objections are 100 percent reasonable. Then let's talk about pants. Trousers, slacks. I suggest to you that having the "correct" subthoracic clothing for U.S. males be pants instead of skirts is arbitrary (lots of other cultures let men wear skirts), restrictive and unfair (U.S. females get to wear pants), based solely on archaic custom (I think it's got something to do with certain traditions about gender and leg position, the same reasons girls' bikes don't have a crossbar), and in certain ways not only incommodious but illogical (skirts are more comfortable than pants; pants ride up; pants are hot; pants can squish the genitals and reduce fertility; over time pants chafe and erode irregular sections of men's leg hair and give older men hideous half-denuded legs, etc. etc.). Let us grant — as a thought experiment if nothing else — that these are all reasonable and compelling objections to pants as an androsartorial norm. Let us in fact in our minds and hearts say yes — shout yes — to the skirt, the kilt, the toga, the sarong, the jupe. Let us dream of or even in our spare time work toward an America where nobody lays any arbitrary sumptuary prescriptions on anyone else and we can all go around as comfortable and aerated and unchafed and unsquished and motile as we want.

And yet the fact remains that, in the broad cultural mainstream of millennial America, men do not wear skirts. If you, the reader, are a U.S. male, and even if you share my personal objections to pants and dream as I do of a cool and genitally unsquishy American Tomorrow, the odds are still 99.9 percent that in 100 percent of public situations you wear pants/slacks/shorts/trunks. More to the point, if you are a U.S. male and also have a U.S. male child, and if that child were to come to you one evening and announce his desire/intention to wear a skirt rather than pants to school the next day, I am 100-percent confident that you are going to discourage him from doing so. Strongly discourage him. You could be a Molotov-tossing anti-pants radical or a kilt manufacturer or Steven Pinker himself — you're going to stand over your kid and be prescriptive about an arbitrary, archaic, uncomfortable, and inconsequentially decorative piece of clothing. Why? Well, because in modern America any little boy who comes to school in a skirt (even, say, a modest all-season midi) is going to get stared at and shunned and beaten up and called a Total Geekoid by a whole lot of people whose approval and acceptance are important to him. In our culture, in other words, a boy who wears a skirt is Making a Statement that is going to have all kinds of gruesome social and emotional consequences."

Anyway, I guess I was pretty focused on the fact that he is dead when I was writing all these thoughts below . . .

For most people who die when they still have loved ones left to mourn them, people are sad for the loss of that human being. But there is another kind of mouring which comes for people whose life work is so significant that we must also mourn what we will all miss by them not being alive anymore to contribute. David Foster Wallace is such a person. I am genuinely sad at what we will never hear.

When I read Shakespeare, I don't think "God, I cant' beleive he's dead," nor do I think "When I finish Midsummer Night's Dream, there will no more Shakespeare left to read!", but for people who might ostensibly be comfortably alive at this moment (John Lennon, for example, who could still have been writing music and touring even today) there is a certian kind of tragedy to their non-existence. What MORE could they have done during this time? What will we never hear. What books are not written, essays not published, opinions not shared. And it occurs to me that this is perhaps a sign of real artistic success -- that if you were to stop making what you make, there would be peole who would deeply mourn the loss of your contribution. To have a contribution that is so meaningful, and so unique, and so singular that it must come from you alone, and that what you gave people is something they will miss when there is no more of it, seems like the highest compliment that you can pay to a creative person. It is not the kind of success that means you are necessarily famous, or wealthy, or in history books, though the people that come to mind mostly were, at least famous. But it is more that the person you are and the work you did were so . . . unique and individual and dare I say personal that people will miss what you made, because it means that they cared about what you did, they loved it in a much more personal way that left them wishing for more, for the next thing. To never run out of new essays to read or new songs to listen to. I imagine what it might be like for someone (not even a lot of someones, but just some stranger who doesn't know the full you, but just your work) to await my paintings because they are in love with what they do or what they say. This is how I have felt about so many others (though mostly writers, comedians, etc.) that it seems like a fairly decent goal. It sounds like I'm aspiring to something really . . .I don't know . . . cheesy maybe . . . but I think I like this marker of success more than others because even though it sounds like a very very self-aggrandizing aspiration, but I think its actually kind of a humble thing, or at least I'd like to think it is, because it's about being so genuine and so real to who you are and making some kind of connection with another human being through your work.

---

On Radiolab: Words

These people are amazing. How do they always come up with just the kinds of things I want to hear?

They had a section that I think relates to theory of mind (the same kind of test they use to demonstrate theory of mind in kids, actually) which is really interesting in that it extends the relationship of language to theory of mind and development.

Basically, they had a whole bunch of deaf kids in Columbia (CHECK ON THAT) who never learned language and then one day got sent to a brand-new special-needs type school. With 50 deaf kids together, they began to develop their own set of gestures in order to communicate. Years go by, and some of the early students have graduated while new crops of younger kids have arrived, with more and more sophisticated and complex ways of communicating. They decide to do a test, and show both groups of students a cartoon in which a little boy and his older brother are playing with a train. The older brother goes to get a snack and puts the train under the bed, telling his little brother not to touch it. The little brother, of course, hides the train in the toybox. They ask the groups - when the older brother comes back, where will he look for the train? Any child over the age of 5 will say "under the bed" because that's where he would think it was. But children below age 5 think that because they know the train is in the toybox, somehow the older brother does too. And amazingly, the older deaf students (keep in mind, these people are in their late 20's or 30's) say the same thing "He'll look in the toybox." The researchers posit that this has something to do with their lack of language to describe inner mental states-- that the younger kids, who have like 12 different words for thinking, are more poised to consider the inner thoughts of the brother than the student's whose vocabulary limits them to less invisible things. So they are essentially saying that they think the language ITSELF allows for development of "theory of mind" and without it, that kind of understanding does not develop. !! That's kind of amazing!

[ random quote about this phenomena from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112524209:
"Dogs and babies both make the same famous mistake (babies at 10 mo.) involving trusting a human about the location of a toy when they have seen it moved somewhere else." ]

"everything has a name" - the guy who, until 27, had no concept of language, because he was deaf, . . . and this woman taught him sign language by modeling teaching and learning behavior through pretending to teach to an invisible student, and then pretending to BE the invislbe studnet. (SO much like the way they taught Alex!) and finally, she said it was as though he had just landed on earth, and he looked around the room, and clearly understood, and pointed at things so she would tell him their name (sign) . . . and then he started to cry. "OH! Everything has a name!" she said.

second thing is the story of the rats -- "left of the blue wall" story, where the rats, placed in an all-white rectangular room, shown food in a corner, then picked up and spun around, food hidden under the ground in one corner (digging?) and then left to figure out where the food is (right 50% of the time) . .. paint one wall blue, still only right 50% of them tiem. they can see color, so what's going on? babies up until the age of 6 !! behave the same way. one idea is that it is language - specifically spatial language -- that allows for the connection between "left" and "blue wall" to create "left OF the blue wall" and allow them to behave as any adult would -- to find the buried treat. so this owman says that though language is olften talked aobut in terms of how it allows us to communicate to other beings, it also might be an extremely powerful way of communicating WITHIN OUR OWN SYSTEM -- communicating to ourselves. AHH.

then they talk about knocking out language (by making peole repeat back things over and over and over again listening to an ipod, and doing the same experiment) and when you repeat back things that someone else is saying, you can't use that language for yourself, and so they return to the 50% accuracy again.

what if you tried to renenact these things, made people dispell their use of language, to know how much it creates who we are?

OK. so there are these cartoons shown to the deaf commuinity in Venezueal? DANG. the one of this man trying to fly and then failing - and how they all describe his flying different (the early-learners -- old student) use a LOT of movement to describe what happens while the younger speakers motion is all in the wrist - they use the ideas like "he wants to fly, but he fails" or "he is trying to fly", etc.

CAN I USE TRANSCRIPTS FROM THOSE TO SHOW DIFFERENCES in how language creats different kinds of thinking? on my bird drawings perhaps? :) or can i do something with these cartoons, make movies, desciibe them, etc. ?? hmm.

On ALEX, the extremely famous parrot

Alex and Me. Irene Pepperberg. 2008.

The book is just as much a biography of Irene Pepperberg as it is her relationship to Alex and the breathroughs made for animal cognition. It chronicles a sometimes tiresome series of disappointments, rejections, and failures (getting fired, not getting published, loosing grant funds, not being given tenure, having a tiny lab, moving to a tinier lab) told in a sort of up-and-down, manic-depressive way that goes from "couldn't be happier" to "another devasting blow." Even so, by the time I got done reading the book, I was willing to give her a pass for being a little self-indulgent . . . and, in spite of myself, to basically fall in love with Alex the parrot just as much as she (and everyone else who knew him) did. I didn't even want to read the book in the first place, as some kind of resistance to over-hype (really the first several pages are just a tallying up of all the emails, letters, phonecalls, and children's drawings that flooded Irene after Alex's death), but his charm sort of comes through anyway and it's pretty hard not to be truly disappointed that he's not around anymore.

Anyway, on to the book . . .

One thing mentioned early on regards the way that Alex was trained or taught. They used a particular method called . . . I don't remember . . . which meant that he always had two trainers, demonstrating what Alex was supposed to learn (one playing the teacher, one the student, and then sometimes reversing roles). I think this method was known to work in other animals. I don't remember. But it proved to be a much faster way of teaching. (Side note, this was also how this woman ended up teaching a deaf man who had never known any language how to label things . . . by modeling both teacher and student . . . as described in the Radiolab episode called Words).

I wonder if that's actually a faster way of teaching other things in the rest of life (drawing? :)) I wonder what that looks like in an art context?

Mirror test and Alex

She says that it became impossible to leave Alex alone in the lab for even a few minutes, because he'd break things and chew on stuff and generally destroy things, so the lab assistants would take him with them when they went to the "washroom".

p. 96 of Alex and Me

"Now, these trips to the washroom brought up another issue --but first I must digress. Fairly early on I had palnned to use a two-way mirror in the lab for observing Alex unseen by him. Alex's cage was supposedly angled so that he would not see himself. But such was not to be. "Introduced Alex to the 'bird in the mirror' today,' I wrote in my journal. "What a flaky parrot--he's truly scared of himself.' We obviously can't know what he was thinking. But when I pulled back the screen that had until this time covered the mirror, all of a sudden there appeared to be a window in the room. Alex looked, saw "another bird," and was visibly scared. "He actually crawled to me for comfort," I wrote, "which shows how created out he was." I doubt that, from his viewing angle, he could really have made any connection between himself and this other creature; even to me, it looked like another room with another bird.

As time passed Alex grew less timid with the situation. That was a good thing, because the washroom where our students occassionally took him had a very large mirror above the sinks. Alex used to march up and down the shelf in front of the mirror, making noise, looking around, demanding things. Then one day in December 1980 when Kathy Davidson took him to the washroom, Alex seemed to really notice the mirror for the first time. He turned to look right into it, cocked his head back and forth a few times to get a fuller look, and said, "What's that?"

"That's you," Kathy answered. "You're a parrot."

Alex looked some more and then said, "What color?"

Kathy said, "Gray. You're a gray parrot, Alex." The two of them went through that sequence a couple more times. And that's how Alex learned the color gray.

We don't know what else Alex learned from the mirror that day, what thoughts were in his mind as he saw his reflection in the mirror. But it did mean that formal mirror tests were now impossible."
97

I think we passed that bridge a long time before that. :\

115
Here, she talks about how, at night, they recorded Alex "babbling, when he was free to 'practice' sounds and new labels before going to sleep, just as children do." (Mentioning the classic book "Crib Talk" about babies). This is a really interesting similarity. She also mentions how there are aspects of parrot's mimicry of other bird songs that are very similar to second-language acquisition in humans.

124
Cute anecdote: When Alex was at the vet's office next to an accountant working late one evening.

"You want a nut?" Alex asked her.
"No, Alex."
He persisted. "You want corn?"
"No, thank you, Alex, I don't want corn."
This went on for a little while, and the accountant did her best to ignore him. Finally, Alex apparently became exasperated and said in a petulant voice, "Well, what do you want?" The accountant cracked up laughing, and gave Alex the attention he was demanding.

Here is a part about language and its relationship to thought:

"Norman Malcom's 1973 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association said essentially the same thing: 'The relationship between language and thought must be . . . so close that it is really senseless to conjecture that people may not have thoughts, and also really senseless to conjecture that animals may have thoughts." p. 247

220
"Although language is no longer widely held to be a prerequisite for thinking--I often think visually, for instance, as many people do, and nonhuman animals might do this, too--language is necessary to prove another individual is conscious. Language allows us to explore the workings of another individual's mind as nothing else can."

And earlier, something about this whole human uniqueness thing that comes up all the time.

"Nevertheless, the fortress of human uniqueness came under attack in the 1980s and began to crumble. We once thought only humans used tools; not so, as Jane Goodall discovered her chimps using sticks and leaves as tools. OK, only humans make tools; again, not so, as Goodall and later others discovered. Only humans had languge; yes, but elements of language had been discovered in nonhuman mammals. Each time nonhuman mammals were found doing what was the supposed province of humans, defenders of the 'humans are unique' doctrine moved the goalposts."
246

149
And now a super-cute story about Alex tickling:

"After about a week, one day he looked intently at the suspended parrot [toy], walked up to it, and said, 'you tickle.' He then bent his head over toward the toy, the way he would to a student, who would then dutifully tickle Alex's neck. Nothing happened, of course. After a few seconds, he looked up at the toy, said, "You turkey," and stalked off in a huff. The students sometimes said, "You turkey" to Alex when he did dumb things. He had apparently learned how to use that stinging epithet without any training."

previous page, talks about a toy parrot that looked and sounded like a grey -- Alex was aggressive toward the toy, other one he just ignored, until he asked it to tickle him.

And finally, some stuff about language patterns that is kind of interesting.
on 142, talks about "anticipatory co-articulation" which is the term the fact that we pronouce letters differently based on what follows them, so that if we say "corn" and "key" we say the "kuh" differently . . . which shows that we learn these things as separate sounds, not just one sound. The fact that Alex (upon slowing his speech down and using fancy machinery) does the same thing that humans do (not just repeating "corn" and "key" as one sound) it shows that he demonstrates the kind of speech patterns that only humans were thought ot be able to have? --- she explains this whole thing alot more in the book "The Alex Studies" so if i need more info . . . yeah.