"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.

More notes from Readings in Animal Cognition: Language comprehension vs. production

Knowledge Acquisition and Asymmetry between Language Comprehension and Production: Louis M. Herman and Palmer Morrel-Samuels

"Studies with young children have generally shown that language comprehension precedes and exceeds language production (Fraser et al. 1963; Ingram 1974, Benedict 1979) and that production may involve more complex processes than does comprehension (Bloom 1974; Schiefelbusch 1974). Findings with adults show that receptive vocabularies typically greatly exceed expressive vocabularies, and then when learning a second language adults generally experience greater speed and success in understanding the new language than in speaking it (e.g. Winitz 1981). " 292

They make the general point that these two aspects of language are somewhat distinct, housed in separate portions of the brain (as indicated by specific brain lesions that can knock out comprehension but not fluent grammatical sentence production, or vis versa) that are integrated conceptually.

So this whole discussion about animals being capable (most likely) of receptive skills rather than generative, as is described by Herman and Morrel-Samuels in their paper (NOT THIS ONE) (or more generally language comprehension vs. language production discussion) . . .

On Animal Language by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

Animal Language: Methodological and Interpretive Issues: Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Karen E. Brakke

Let me first say that this article is excellent. Savage-Rumbaugh is a great writer, at least compared to the other extremely dry and uninteresting things written by her colleagues. She begins the article with an intriguing introduction:

A sea lion takes a frisbee to a hoop after watching a person wave her hands in a certain way. A chimpanzee waves its hands and someone then unlocks a door for it. A parrot looks at a clothespin and says "pegwood." A dolphin touches a paddle after searching its tank when someone makes particular arm movements.Each of the behaviors performed by the animals above is in some way similar to the linguistic skills of the human child. Yet science has been reluctant to conclude that a sea mammal has syntax or that a parrot can name things or answer questions. The chimpanzee shares much of our phylogenetic history, but even its ability to grasp basic linguistic functions has repeatedly come under question (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1980; Terrace et al. 1979). Language, as opposed to most human characteristics, is believed by many to set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Scientists and lay persons alike maintain that homo sapiens is the only species capable of true language, in spit of increasingly convincing evidence that the bio-linguistic substratum for language exists in other primates.

I like this introduction a lot because its kind of how I would have liked to have started an essay on this topic, if I were to write one. So she beat me to it. :) I record it here so I don't inadvertently copy her later on when I want to write something. :)

So the long and short of it is that I will probably photocopy the whole essay because this was one of the best overall reviews and commentaries on the field that I have seen so far . . . very balanced, I think, with insightful considerations on many of the studies that I have read about, comparing and contrasting their methods and what can be reasonably claimed by their results. I feel like one can trust Savage-Rumbaugh's opinions since she does seem so open to criticism and so careful in making statements about the abilities of animals, even given her successes.

Because nonhumans do not normally learn language, they must be taught the skills they acquire. And because they do not usually speak, they must be taught communication systems that do not utilize the primary channel of human language, speech."

She talks about the development of language in children, the way it is acquired, and talks about how it is a "social motivation" to communicate using share reference to "external objects" (270, quoting someone else actually) and that, at first, an infants' communications don't seem very directed at all, or very intentional, but that at some point, the communications become directed at the people they want to communicate to (looking at adults). This is a significant change, and one that she says is instigated, maybe, or at least reinforced by the adults treating these communications as intentional even if they are not. For instance, if a baby reaches up and looks like she wants to be picked up, the adult responds as though she meant she wanted to be picked up, even if that isn't really accurate. Eventually, the baby learns that the reaching gesture is interpreted that way, and can use it if she does want to be picked up.

That is, 'meaning' is imparted to the infant's actions by a caregiver who is already familiar with the communicative and linaguistic conventions of the culture. [ . . . ] Note that not only is the action interpreted by the adult but an intention is attributed to the infant by the adult, regardless of whether or not that intention is initially present in the mind of the infant.

On Inside the Minds of Animals: Response and notes from a Time magazine article

Inside the Minds of Animals - by Jeffrey Kluger in the Science section of Time Magazine, August 16 2010 issue with photos by Finlay MacKay (you can see a small slide show here.)

The article makes me a little sad because it kinds of covers basically everything - from "eroding the ways humans like to distinguish themselves from animals" to the mirror test, and has a big portrait of Kanzi on the front page (the author got to have coffee with Kanzi. :|) He goes into brain size and the cerebral cortex, recent studies with corvids, makes mention of Christopher Bird and his "apt" last name (no one can resist saying this), and talks about consciousness. The article even has a little contiuum of animal intelligence graphic (though at least its not numerical) showing Great Apes and Cretaceans at the top, followed by corvids, social carnivores, herd animals, and bivalves at the bottom. I think it makes me a little sad because it touches on like everything I have read in the past months that I took forever to read and process and take notes about, that i was excited about and seemed novel and cool, and then to see it all published in a neat, easy to read article for mass public . . . it's like. . . "yeah, everyone knows that stuff, Maria. What's so interesting about that?" and makes me feel even less original than I would like to be.

Even so, the article also poses a few new thoughts or at least very well said ones that I like.

One is the description of varying capacities in the chain of organisms.

"Still, most scientists agree that awareness is probably controlled by a sort of cognitive rheostat, with the consciousness burning brightest in humans and other high animals and fading into a flicker--and finally blackness--in lower ones." 38

He also mentions two studies that I hadn't heard of yet -- one that shows how crows will fill a bucket of water that's too low to reach with stones, thus raising the water level so they can drink from it; and another recent (last month) study showing that pigs raised in a "comfortable environments exhibit optimism, moving expectantly toward a new sound instead of retreating warily from it. . . " 38 And he fleshes out the discussion of just why it is that corvids, who lack a cerebral cortex (?) or at least have less of one than higher primates etc., are phenomenally better at tool use than all other nonhumans. He explains that they have a different structure in their brains which very effiently multitask and coordinate so that they can process the same information as higher mammals. (40).

The part about "self and other" (which goes into the mirror tests) actually explains the concept of "theory of mind" incredibly well, at least to me, since I've been fuzzy on what that meant this whole time. He says

"It's easy enough to study the brain and behavior of an animal, but subtler cognitive abilities are harder to map. One of the most important skills human children must learn is something called the theory of mind: the idea that not all knowledge is universal knowledge. A toddler who watches a babysitter hide a toy in a room will assume that anyone who walks in afterward knows where the toy is too. It's not until about age 3 that kids realize that just because they know something, it doesn't mean somebody else knows it also." 41

This is a huge thing to me, because this definition based around possession of knowledge relates to one definition of communication which says that communication is sharing knowledge that the sender posses which is not available to the receiver. (Like. . . I have a sandwich hidden under that chair, as opposed to just pointing at something and labeling it, which the other person knows already). They also talk about how an important aspect of language, which comes naturally to children, is that kids will initiate language in order to tell an adult something the adult doesn't already know, which is different than say Alex the parrot correctly labeling things . . . or even, I think, maybe asking for things. That there is a difference between wanting to tell someone else what is in your mind, and merely responding to stimuli as one is trained to do, and this definition of theory of mind sounds to me like it makes theory of mind a prerequisite for real communication (or language I guess). Which is, actually, what he says in the next paragraph:

"The theory of mind is central to communication and self-awareness, and it's the rare animal that exhibits it, though some do. Dogs understand innately what pointing means: that someone has information to share and that your attention is being drawn to it so you can lear too." I don't know that I agree with the dog pointing thing since I've heard other things about that. They do say, though, that even though apes and other primates don't seem to come "preloaded" with the pointing convention (as was mentioned before), Kanzi started doing it on his own by 9 months, and they suggest its partly b/c he was carried like a human baby, with his arms free, as opposed to in the wild, where he would have grasped onto his mother's fur to hold on at all times and therefore wouldn't even be able to point. Interesting note. 41 Anyway, the author suggests that pointing is one indicator of a "species that grasps theory of mind."

He says that another indicator of theory of mind (which I hadn't heard as such an indicator even though I'm familiar with the studies) is that crows will hide food, watch other crows, move the food, fake-out hide food, etc., indicating that they know that others are distinct from themselves and that they possess knowledge the others do not. Understanding that "another creature has a mind."

Mirror test

Ok, and now for his business on the mirror test.

"The gold standard for demonstrating an understanding of the self-other distinction is the mirror test: whether an animal can see its reflection and recognize what it is. It may be adorable when a kitten sees itself in a full-length mirror and runs around to the other side of the door looking for what it thought was a playmate, but its not head-of-the-class-stuff. Elephants, apes and dolphins are among the few creatures that can pass the mirror test. All three respond appropriately when they look into a mirror after a spot of paint is applied to their forehead or another part of their body." 41

This is a pretty simple way of describing the test, incidentally, which leaves off some of the interesting controls like how they have to be sedated when the mark is applied or have to have a dummy mark without odor, etc. that at least I thought was insightful into the experimental process . . . but probably not necessary.

And also, there is another interesting note regarding language and concepts. The article talks about how the relations-between-relations issue (apple and apple next to a picture of an apple and orange and a banana and banana, which two have the same relationship . . . kind of thing) and apparently "baboons and--surprisingly--pigeons got the relations-between-relations idea" in a study by Ed Wasserman at University of Iowa. "Significantly, just as humans better understand an idea when they have a term to describe it (imagine explaining, say satisfaction if the word didn't exist), so do animals benefit from such labels. Psychologist David Premack of the University of Pennsylvania found that when chimps were taught symbols for same and different, they later performed better on analogy tests." 41

Related to this article was a Time magazine article about animal suicide, regarding that "Cove" movie,

"Jonathan Safran Foer, whose new book, Eating Animals, says [ . . . ] says he recently watched The Cove and, like others, found the references to animal suicide fishy. "We don't need to make animals like humans in order to treat them with decency," he says. "If we just treated pigs like pigs and cows like cows, that would be sufficient.""

I agree with that.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1973486,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-bottom#ixzz0wQWmmU1Q

In the comments section, DavidLaFerney:
The print story seems to ask what it is that sets humans apart from animals.  I think we have a need and a desire to send a message into the future.  Because of that desire we create.  We create language, art, literature, archetecture, empires, fortunes, and families.  We spend our mortal lives sending the message that we exist, we matter - please remember us.

Animals don't seem to have that need."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2008759,00.html#ixzz0wQRRMb1a

And then a bunch of people get mad that Alex the parrot wasn't included, which frankly makes me happy. I don't like Alex that much anyway. :)

Future reading

The article mentions Peter Singer's 1975 "Animal Liberation" which is probably something I should read.

It also suggests reading "Bonobo Handshake" by Vanessa Woods - Insights from a researcher and journalist who lived with bonobos in Africa

and "Comparative Cognition" by Edward Wasserman and Thomas Zentall, eds. "A heavy lift for casual readers, but covers much of the animal world."