ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE

  One of the easiest intelligence tests is the “Mirror self-recognition test”, it’s on a very intuitive level and has something to do with self-awareness. The test is to put a red mark on your face, you pass if you recognize that it’s on your own face. Children begin to pass at around 18 months old. Chimps, dolphins, elephants and magpies: all of them passed the test. However, some monkeys don’t pass the test, even though they’re widely seen as intelligent animals.

How do animals think?

Often when we’re thinking about intelligence in other animals, we tend to focus on the cognitive capacities that we’re super proud of in humans. Humans have tens of thousands of words at their disposal, but also animals have ways of communicating with each other: bee do it by dancing, whales sing, chimpanzees’ gesture and scream.

The first experiment to see if animals could communicate with us in human language was in 1940 with Viki, a chimp. It turned out chimp vocal cords aren’t built for speaking.

In 1966 two psychologist raised Washoe, another chimp, like a human child and tried to teach her American sign language, she learned about 150 signs.

A third experiment with Nim, concluded that chimps could imitate isolated words but couldn’t speak in spontaneous sentences or with grammar.

Why is our intelligence similar to that of animals?

Charles Darwin sketched the “Tree of life” and wrote about the “Theory of evolution”, where he talks about the “Origin of species”. He thought that all animals evolved from earlier life forms and all life is related, even if distantly.

“The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind”

·       We develop the ability to live in complicated social structures, so we’re socially smart, but chimps do too on a smaller scale. Researchers think chimps experience empathy because they have yawn contagion.

·       We used to believe we were unique in how we use tools to solve problems, but also chimps and birds use tools.

·       We learn from our memories and can plan for future problems, but crows remember all the seed they hide in the fall in 6,000 different locations.

·       We have culture: it’s the idea of shared responsibility for our children. Also, animals do this, taking care of their children

We’re kind of converging on the same abilities, not because we’re closely related, but because we’ve had similar problems we’ve faced and we come up with the same cognitive structures.

What is the Behaviorism?

Behaviorism was born in the 20’s when psychology began measuring behavior. At first, they just look at behavior, but then they argued that the mind didn’t really matter at all. Any sign of intelligence was just learned through a system of rewards and punishments.

The psychologist B.F. Skinner thought animals were stimulus-response machines and that you could teach them almost everything with the right rewards and punishment. He thought that both human and animal intelligence was just conditioning.

The linguist Noam Chomsky thought that humans don’t need to be conditioned to acquire language: we’re built for it. He thought animals were built for other things: “humans can fly about 30 feet. That’s what they do in the Olympics. Is that flying?”

Why are we intelligent?

One theory about  why the human brain is exceptional is that it just has more neurons: the human brain has roughly 100 billion of them, but elephants have close to 260 billion neurons… so that’s not why.

Scientist have tried to figure out if the kind of neurons we have are special. Human brains seem to have particular neurons that activate when we learn from others’ behavior: Mirror Neurons. But scientists have found similar neurons in the brains of other primates.

In a way many of our tests look for human qualities, using human measures based on a human perception of the world. We’re just missing a lot of the stuff that animals do that’s incredibly smart and clever, because we’re using human intelligence as the standard.

SILVIA