Answer:
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Explanation:
Do animals think?
“Of course they do,” answers Marc Hauser, a Harvard professor of psychology. “How could they not think and manage to survive in the world?”
Hauser has been studying animal cognition since 1980, when a female spider monkey reached through the bars of her cage at Florida’s Monkey Jungle and gave him a hug. He was 19 years old at the time. “She looked into my eyes and cooed several times,” he remembers. “The experience got me to thinking about what animals are thinking and how to find out.”
He now believes that animals conceive the world in ways similar to humans, especially species like chimpanzees who live a rich social life. His field and laboratory experiments suggest that humans got their mechanisms for perception from animals. “Those mechanisms came free, courtesy of evolution,” he says.
Hauser and his colleagues are trying to determine what sorts of thinking processes are unique to humans and what processes we share with animals. The one that comes immediately to mind is language.
“Animals have interesting thoughts, but the only way they can convey them is by grunts, shrieks, and other vocalizations, and by gestures,” Hauser points out. “When humans evolved speech, they liberated the kinds of thoughts nonhumans have. Feedback between language and thinking then boosted human self-awareness and other cognitive functions.”
Can your pet think?
Most pet owners fervently believe that Fido or Fluffy has superior intelligence. One of the markers of intelligence is self-awareness, so here is a quick test to see if the animal has that ability.
Position a mirror by your pet’s food dish, so it can see its face and head. Whenever you feed it pat the dog, cat, or whatever on the head. Repeat this routine for three to four days.
When you’re ready, put some odorless light or dark powder in your hand and pat it onto your pet’s head. You can use baking soda or carbon black. Make sure you create a clearly visible spot on its head.
Watch the animal closely to see if it stares at itself, or tries to rub the spot. If it does, congratulations, your pet has some sense of self.
For more pet intelligence tests, consult “Wild Minds” by Marc Hauser (Henry Holt, 2000).
MONKEYS GET THE RHYTHMS
Clever experiments with monkeys and human infants show that they share thinking processes once thought to be in the minds of humans alone. Babies only 3-4 days old can tell the difference between two languages such as Dutch and Japanese. When the infants hear someone saying sentences in Dutch, they express their interest by sucking rapidly on the nipples of pacifiers. After a while they get bored with the Dutch talk and stop sucking enthusiastically. If someone then starts speaking Japanese, they will show increased interest by upping their sucking rate.
The babies don’t know what the speakers are talking about, of course, but they can discriminate between languages by the change in rhythms. They don’t respond to languages with similar rhythms, such as Dutch and English or French and Spanish. Also, if you play the same sentences backward, the infants fail to react. “One explanation for this behavior is that they intuitively know that no human vocal tract can produce such sounds,” Hauser explains.
If this is true, monkeys should not be able to make the same distinctions because they don’t know what rhythms and sounds human vocal tracts can produce. But cotton-top tamarin monkeys easily distinguish between Dutch and Japanese. They look at a speaker broadcasting sentences of Dutch, look away when they’re bored, then look back when someone starts speaking Japanese. And they cannot make that distinction when the sentences are spoken backward.
“The monkeys have the same perceptual abilities as us,” Hauser concludes. “That means such perception did not evolve with human speech; it existed before humans and speech evolved.”
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