Author's Introduction
- How do animals think? When we attempt to understand other species, we often forget to ask ourselves this question. We rarely consider the nuts and bolts of how animals perceive their worlds, or what their experience of life might be like. Instead, our approach is observational and human-centred: we interpret their behaviour through the lens of our own lives. Even the experts – the scientists who concern themselves with nonhuman animal cognition, such as animal behaviourists or behavioural ecologists – often fail to envisage how animals think. I am one of them.
- For more than 20 years, I have been a researcher and lecturer in the field of behavioural ecology for wildlife management and conservation. My job involves acquiring knowledge about the motivations of other species and making predictions about their behaviour – how they move, hunt, reproduce, eat and sleep. In the backyards of UK homes, I studied how foxes, badgers and hedgehogs compete for the scraps people throw out, and discovered why some human dwellings are more desirable for certain animals. On the leafy floor of a South American cloud-forest, I caught rare lizards, which exist on only two mountains in the world, to find out how they were affected by human-led changes to their habitats. And in Africa, I threw minced meat to hyaenas and lions to track their movements using indigestible pellets that resurface in their faeces, revealing their territory boundaries and interactions with one another.
- Through my work with these and other species, I’ve tried to understand how and why certain animals do what they do. But my understanding was never based on how animals think. When I interpreted ‘behaviour’ – an animal’s response to a stimulus – it was always from a human perspective. It involved posing questions, recording data, offering answers based on statistical probabilities and then making management or policy recommendations designed to improve the lives of other species or our interactions with them. But recently, I have begun to feel there is something missing in this approach: it seems phenomenally insufficient for making sense of or empathising with nonhumans. It cannot help us fully co-exist with them. How can I ever hope to properly understand the behaviour of other species if I don’t understand how they think? Increasingly, I want to understand what it is like, to paraphrase the writer and polymath Charles Foster, to ‘be a beast’.
Author's Conclusion
Indeed, our brain circuitry contains a particularly important set of structures from which these internal narratives arise. It is called the default mode network (DMN). This collection of brain regions becomes more active when we stop focusing on specific tasks or the outside world. It activates when we daydream, allow our minds to wander, reflect on the past, or imagine the future. It helps us make sense of ourselves as individuals, and it does this, for most of us, through words. We imagine hypothetical scenarios, plan, and contemplate our experiences by talking to ourselves in our minds. Linked brain structures broadly comparable to the DMN have been found in rats, mice and nonhuman primates, but there are fewer connections between the brain regions of these animals. In other words, even though they have the substrate for consciousness, and perhaps think in pictures or in a rudimentary language constructed from their particular mode of communication, their DMNs are relatively basic. For many species, it’s possible that the DMN is functionally nonexistent.
- Perhaps then, we can mimic aspects of animal thought by quieting the DMN in our own minds. But how can we silence brain regions that activate almost unconsciously? Luckily, a suite of techniques exist – in the form of meditation and other mindfulness practices – that humans have used for centuries to calm the chattering of our minds.
- Through meditation, I have caught the tendrils of this thought-consciousness without language. And I believe this experience may be similar – perhaps only for a few seconds – to the thinking of my feline friend Fred or that foraging otter I once watched on the Scottish coastline. Learning to focus on how we inhabit our human bodies in the present moment may be a way of glimpsing what it is like to experience the world as a badger, a swift or even a praying mantis.
- But this is not easily achieved. Quieting the DMN requires practice. The long tradition of meditation teaches techniques for body awareness, mindfulness and focused affect, which can all temper the noise of the DMN. Mindfulness of breathing and mindfulness of body sensations are just two examples, but there are many others.
- In ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Nagel concluded that it is impossible to fully know the consciousness of other species, so we should leave their ‘thoughts’ well alone. I disagree. I say we keep trying – I say we keep finding new ways of becoming more empathic towards animals and understanding their needs better. Perhaps by learning to quieten the wordy chattering of our DMN, even for a brief moment, we can enter an unfamiliar sensory world and begin to experience what it is like to be another species.
Author Narrative
- Bryony Tolhurst is a consultant wildlife biologist, with particular expertise in behavioural ecology. She works for conservation charities, universities and ecological consultancies. She is an honorary research fellow at the University of Brighton and a panel tutor at the University of Cambridge.
Notes
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