High-functioning autism, as evident in people like Temple Grandin, is also known as Asperger syndrome. People with this condition often can pass false-belief tests, such as the Sally–Anne test, but they apparently do so only through verbal reasoning and explicit instructions about the task. As I noted earlier, normal infants seem instinctively to demonstrate an understanding of false belief well before they can demonstrate it verbally, since they will look to where an actor mistakenly believes an object to be hidden. People with Asperger syndrome do not do this, suggesting that the spontaneous understanding of false belief is lacking.
People like Temple Grandin lie at one end of what is actually a continuum. Some have suggested that people at the opposite end of that continuum have an obsessive sensitivity to what others are thinking, perhaps leaning to paranoia and magical thinking, and even schizophrenia.
In his aptly titled book Knots, the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing illustrated something of the complex, recursive mentality that can arise when social relationships go wrong—or perhaps causes them to go wrong. Here is an excerpt:
JILL: I’m upset you are upset.
JACK: I’m not upset.
JILL: I’m upset that you’re not upset that I’m upset that you’re upset.
JACK: I’m upset that you’re upset that I’m not upset that you’re upset that I’m upset, when I’m not.
The evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton wrote of ‘people people’ and ‘things people’. People people are those who are obsessed with other people, who love gossip, read novels, perhaps think others are thinking about them. Among things people you have computer geeks, engineers, and many scientists—who probably don’t give a damn what others think. It’s hard to avoid the impression that women tend to be people people, and we unfeeling men tend to be things people—although I can think of many exceptions, including Temple Grandin. Well some, anyway, although as a male I probably wouldn’t notice. In any event, we need things people as much as we need people people, since the world is as full of complicated things as of complicated people.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett referred to mind-reading as the ‘intentional stance’, which means that we tend to treat people as having intentional states. The notion of intentional state is here used rather broadly, and not just the intention to act in a particular way. It includes other subjective states such as beliefs, desires, thoughts, hopes, fears, hang-ups. According to the intentional stance, we interact with people according to what we think is going on in their minds, rather than in terms of their physical attributes—although there is a bit of that too, as I recall from early days on the rugby field, or indeed from days of courtship. When you meet a stranger in a dark alley your reaction may be guided partly by the intentional stance, based perhaps on facial expression, but perhaps also by what might be termed the ‘physical stance’, based on just how big a hulk the stranger is.
Medical practitioners and even brain surgeons may generally treat people as things, to be fixed mechanically when something goes wrong—a bypass here, a removal of brain tissue there, or a medicine to grapple physically with some internal invader. Psychologists seem to vary. Behaviourists treat animals and humans as objects that simply ‘behave’, with no mention of the mind. Temple Grandin is a natural behaviourist. Social psychologists are more interested in personality, attitudes and beliefs. Clinical psychologists tend to see psychological problems as mental rather than physical, to be treated with talk rather than drugs. Architects and designers need to be a bit of both, understanding physical as well as aesthetic demands. It’s all very well having shoes that look elegant if you can’t get your feet comfortably into them.
Just as we may endow people with physical properties, so we sometimes endow physical objects with human-like personalities or subjective states. Perhaps because of their capacity for interior accommodation, cars, ships, airplanes and even houses are often given female characteristics or referred to as ‘she’. My father’s farm truck was called Lucy, although I once owned a car that answered to the name of Stanley. Throughout history, and perhaps prehis-tory, people have personified inanimate objects, such as the stars and planets, and have bestowed human properties on non-human animals. People treat their pet cats and dogs as though they were people. Children’s stories, in particular, are full of talking animals, from Winnie-the-Pooh to the Big Bad Wolf, from Donald Duck to Little Pig Robinson.
Do animals read minds?
In the quest to identify what might be unique to the human mind, one might well ask whether non-human animals have a theory of mind. In fiction, perhaps, they do. Eeyore, the morose donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh, at one point complains: ‘A little consideration, a little thought for others, makes all the difference.’ In real life, some animals do seem to show empathy toward others in distress. The primatologist Frans de Waal photographed a juvenile chimpanzee placing a consoling arm around an adult chimpanzee in distress after losing a fight, but suggests that monkeys do not do this. However, one study shows that monkeys won’t pull a chain to receive food if doing so causes a painful stimulus to be delivered to another monkey, evidently understanding that it will cause distress. Even mice, according to another study, react more intensely to pain if they perceive other mice in pain. It is often claimed that dogs show empathy toward their human owners, whereas cats do not. Cats don’t empathise—they exploit.
Understanding what others are thinking, or what they believe, can be complicated, but perceiving emotion in others is much more basic to survival, and no doubt has ancient roots in evolution. Different emotions usually give different outward signs. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the King recognises the signs of rage, urging his troops to
. . . imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect . . .
The human enemy will read the emotion of Henry’s troops, just as the antelope will read the emotion of the marauding tiger. Perhaps the best treatise on the outward signs of emotion is Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which details the way fear and anger are expressed in cats and dogs, although he does not neglect the positive emotions:
Under a transport of Joy or of vivid Pleasure, there is a strong tendency to various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds. We see this in our young children, in their loud laughter, clapping of hands, and jumping for joy; in the bounding and barking of a dog when going out to walk with his master; and in the frisking of a horse when turned out into an open field.
We might well wonder, though, whether animals do go beyond reading the expressions of emotions, and understand what others are thinking. A good deal of attention has been directed to chimpanzees, our closest non-human relatives. It seems fairly clear that chimps have some understanding of what another chimp can or cannot see. In one study, a chimpanzee approached food when a more dominant chimpanzee could not see it, but was reluctant to do so when the dominant one could see it. Again, a subordinate chimpanzee retrieved hidden food if a dominant chimpanzee was not watching while the food was being hidden, or if the food was moved to another location while the dominant chimp wasn’t watching. The subordinate also retrieved food if a dominant chimp watched it being hidden, but was then replaced by another dominant chimp who hadn’t watched, suggesting the subordinate could keep track of who knew what.
These are examples of tactical deception. Deception itself is widespread in nature, whether in the camouflage of a butterfly wing or the uncanny ability of the Australian lyrebird to imitate the sounds of other species—including, it is said, the sound of a beer can being opened. Tactical deception, though, is that in which the deception is based on an understanding of what the deceived animal is actually thinking, or what it can see. Two psychologists from St Andrews University in Scotland, Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne, once put out a general call to researchers studying primates in f
ield settings for anecdotes demonstrating tactical deception. They screened the reports to rule out cases in which the animals might have learned to deceive through trial and error, and concluded that only the four species of ape occasionally deceived on the basis of an understanding of what the deceived animal could see or know. Even so, there were relatively few instances. Chimpanzees were alone in meeting nine of thirteen different classes of deception, whereas gorillas met only two. Perhaps our primate cousins are exceptionally cooperative and trusting, or their capacity for theory of mind is limited compared with the human predilection for deception, from petty lies to downright fraud.
In 1978, psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff wrote a classic article with the beguiling title ‘Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?’ This led to a good deal of research, but the issue is still not entirely settled—it seems that we humans, even the experts, are quite good at reading the minds of other humans, but not so good at reading the mind of the chimpanzee. Nevertheless, two of the experts in the field, Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, concluded that 30 years of research had shown chimpanzees to have an understanding of the goals, intentions, perceptions and knowledge of other individuals, but no understanding of their beliefs or desires. No one has yet convincingly shown that chimpanzees can attribute a false belief to another chimp.
However, the champions of mind-reading among animals are probably not chimpanzees, but our best friends. Dogs seem to have an almost uncanny knack of understanding what’s going on in the minds of human beings. They readily understand pointing. For instance, if two containers are placed in front of a dog, and a person points to the one that contains food, a dog will understand that the gesture of pointing is designed to indicate the food. The food is hidden from the dog’s view, and experiments show that the choice is not based on smell. They will also go for the food if the person points to a container behind them. They will even choose the correct container if a person simply marks it by placing some object on top of it. Puppies without much human experience act in the same way. Chimpanzees, in contrast, are much worse at such tasks.
Dogs are descended from wolves, and wolves do not respond in the same way. The key to mind-reading in dogs is domestication. Surprisingly, though, the domestication of dogs seems not to have been driven by humans, at least initially. Brian Hare, who despite his name likes to be known as the ‘dog guy’, suggests that dogs evolved from packs of wolves who scavenged from the rubbish left by humans, and those most likely to survive were those who were least afraid of human contact, and became comfortable in the presence of humans. In Hare’s words, it was ‘survival of the friendliest’. At some point, though, humans seem to have capitalised on the friendliness of the dogs and embarked on further selective breeding, to produce the extraordinary variety of dogs we see today. (My favourite? The Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever,3 bred to wag its tail to attract ducks, luring them close to hunters.) Some of them have been bred back to a condition of unfriendliness, serving as guards ready to attack intruders. ‘Cave canem’, as they used to warn in Rome. Occasionally, we read of savage attacks on people by dogs, often followed by threats to have such breeds exterminated, but most dogs are wonderfully friendly and faithful, and experts at reading the human mind.
Another species to have become domesticated independently of human influence is the bonobo, close cousin of the chimpanzee, and sharing with the chimp the honour of being our closest non-human relative. In personality, though, chimps and bonobos are opposite. Chimpanzees are aggressive and competitive, with males often attacking females and the young, while bonobos are friendly, caring and sharing, and use sex rather than fighting to resolve conflicts. Sadly, they were almost exterminated in the Congo Basin in the bushmeat trade, until a sanctuary called Lola ya Bonobo, meaning Paradise of the Bonobos, was established. Curiously, increased domestication seems to be accompanied by a decrease in brain size. Dogs have smaller brains than wolves of equivalent body size, and bonobos have smaller brains than chimps. And we humans have slightly smaller brains than the now extinct Neanderthals, our closest non-living relatives. So beware of men with big heads, and take comfort from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem ‘The Village Schoolmaster’:
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.
The fundamental question that haunts research on the animal mind is whether there is a discontinuity between ourselves and other species. Much of religious teaching is built on the premise that we humans are indeed on a different plane, closer to angels than apes, even if our sins have caused us to fall a little lower. René Descartes, too, argued that humans are unique through the possession of a non-material mind, whereas animals are mere machines. Opposed to that, of course, is the Darwinian mantra I quoted in the previous chapter: ‘The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.’ My guess is that there is indeed a continuity between ourselves and other primates, at least in our ability to understand what’s going on in the minds of others, but with greater complexity in our own species.4 Indeed, as I illustrated earlier, we humans seem able to take that ability to depths of recursion well beyond that evident in chimpanzee society. This may well have been driven by increasing loops of deception, the product of the so-called Machiavellian mind—as Machiavelli himself put it in The Prince: ‘It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.’ The spiral of deception and intrigue has been cynically described by Nicholas Humphrey as a ‘self-winding watch to increase the general intellectual standing of the species’.
Whether to deceive or inform, we humans seem to delight in making mental journeys into the minds of others, and indeed create fictional characters for the purpose. Young children, especially in the preschool years, often create imaginary companions, invisible friends with whom they share confidences. Together with the ability to travel mentally in time, travelling mentally into the minds of others provides the platform for one characteristic that does seem to be distinctively and universally human—storytelling.
6.
STORIES
…
My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach, With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.
—Walt Whitman, from ‘Song of Myself’
We humans may not be entirely unique in taking mental journeys through time and space, and into the minds of others. Rats may well have a limited capacity for mental time travel, imagining past or future activity in a maze, and chimps may have some inkling of what’s in another’s mind. We may like to think that our own mind-wanderings are richer, more interesting, more personally invasive than those of other species, but what does seem to be special about humans is the capacity to share our mind-wanderings. We tell stories, taking others with us on our meanderings. The literary scholar John Niles suggested that our species should be renamed Homo narrans—the storytellers.
Although we seem to be the only species that tells stories, our capacity for narrative probably has evolutionary precedents. The writer and literary theorist Brian Boyd, among others, suggests that stories derive from play, an activity that goes far back in evolution. Playing means doing something for recreation or enjoyment rather than for a serious purpose, and often entails pretending to be something that one is not. Many animals play, from frolicking kittens to perky parrots, from bounding puppies to cheeky monkeys. I have read that reptiles have their playful moments. Social species play more than solitary ones do, and species that hunt play more than those that are hunted, perhaps because hunting requires more ingenuity than escaping does, and play is a way of trying out new strategies. It often takes the form of mock chasing or attacking, and serves to increase survival fitness by providing practice for the real thing. When the puppy makes a play bite, it is understood by the biter and the bitten that it is not for real. No blood is spilled, no flesh removed. Dogs announce the desire to play with a characteristic ‘play bow’, crouching on the f
orelimbs while leaving their hind limbs straight, and wagging their tails. My four-year-old granddaughter is more direct—she simply says ‘play with me’.
Play also takes place between species. People and dogs, in particular, seem to love to play together. The most common game is ‘fetch’, in which we throw sticks, balls or Frisbees for the dog to fetch, and this is often followed by the dog playfully refusing to let go after returning the object to the thrower. Jay Mechling quotes a report of a man playing a game of ‘banana cannon’ with his dog Shana:
Every morning at breakfast time when John peels his banana, Shana gets excited. She sits on the floor, approximately five feet away from John, and waits for John to play ‘banana cannon’. John: ‘I take a piece of banana and shoot it like a cannon out of my mouth. She’s real good. Gets it from way back.’
It’s not just people and their dogs. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson tells of a game played by a tame female gibbon and a tame female puppy. The gibbon would come down from the rafters of the porch and lightly attack the puppy, who would give chase. The gibbon would not retreat to the safety of the rafters, but would run down the corridor and into the bedroom. Since she would be cornered there, the game would reverse, and she would now chase the puppy back to the porch. She would then retreat to the rafters, and the whole game would start all over again. The sequence would sometimes be repeated seven or eight times.
The Wandering Mind Page 7
