One World, Many Minds

[Ian Carmichael]

It's not quite neuroscience and learning - but here's a recent Scientific American article of the development(s) of intelligence(s). One world, many minds.

[Skip Zilla]

Thanks, Ian, for providing a link to this interesting Scientific American article. The article very clearly conveys how comparative neuroanatomists now theorize the evolutionary development of natural intelligences from experiments which have recently tested the cognitive abilities of a wide variety of animals from mollusks to human beings. The long accepted scientific view saw a sequential, one-track development culminating in human intelligence has been replaced by a multilinear, phyla-independent development of separate animal intelligences. In my estimation, this transformed thinking has theoretical implications for work being done in a variety of disciplines beyond biology in which a historical, evolutionary development perspective is taken of the subject matter.

I lived in Tampa, Florida, for a number of years, Ian, and crossed paths with scrub jays occasionally. A high point for me in the article was an account of the demonstrated and remarkable ability of this species of bird to "time travel" cognitively. I knew the scrub jays as very clever creatures, but I wasn't aware until now just how cleverly intelligent they are!

[Ian Carmichael]

What I'm impressed by is modern the (grudging?) admission that conciousness and intention appears possible in very small brain space. As youth we were so often chastised for recognising intelligence, fun, and insight with our pets and other animals. ('Anthropomorphic thinking', they'd say.)
And then there were the more modern wiseheads who'd decided that if you had no symbolic language, there wasn't the capacity for thought. Other than the doctrinaire statements of both groups, I couldn't see why then. It appears not so now! (Witness, in the above article, the octopus learning from the actions of another octopus - somehow that suggests a sense of identity, besides anything else.)

[Skip Zilla]

Yes, one octopus learning how to accomplish an action by watching its accomplishment by another octopus was an astounding experimental finding to me. Were I a youth today, I'd want to be a neuroethologist, I think.

When I lived closely with two wonderful canines for over a decade, I was struck often that there had to be marvelous cognitive/emotional systems at play behind their remarkably changeable visages and behaviors. Long before I knew anything about modern neuroscientific discoveries, I knew by observing the world of animals I encountered that intelligence of various cognitive capacities was ubiquitous in nature; that's why these scientific findings are a thrilling confirmation for me of what I suspected was true about life.

[Ellen Pham]

From the article:

Behavioral studies show that octopuses can distinguish and classify objects based on size and shape, much as rats do. They can learn to navigate simple mazes and to solve problems, such as removing a tasty food item from a sealed container. In 1992 two Italian neuroscientists, Graziano Fiorito of the Dohrn Zoological Station in Naples and Pietro Scotto, then at the University of Reggio Calabria in Catanzaro, published surprising evidence that an octopus can learn to accomplish a task by watching another octopus perform it. They trained octopuses to choose between a red ball and a white ball. If the octopus opted for the correct ball, it got a piece of fish as reward. If it selected incorrectly, it received a mild electric shock as punishment.

Once the training was completed, the investigators let an untrained octopus watch a trained animal perform the task from behind a glass barrier. The untrained animals did monitor the trained animals, as indicated by movements of their head and eyes. When allowed to select between the two balls themselves, the observer octopuses then made correct choices, which they could only have learned by watching. The ability to learn by studying others has been regarded as closely related to conceptual thought.

I am sure I have seen a video of this experiment somewhere, but I couldn't find it in the usual places. So I offer this one instead- it is not as profound in its implications, but still, beautiful : )