Animals in Translation (15 page)

We know enough about fear, rage, and prey chase drive that these emotions deserve their own chapters: rage and prey chase drive in Chapter 4, fear in Chapter 5. For the rest of this chapter, I'm going to talk about curiosity/interest/anticipation and the social emotions.

C
URIOSITY
D
OESN'T
K
ILL
C
ATS OR
A
NY
O
THER
A
NIMAL

All mammals and birds are curious about and interested in their surroundings, and they
really
look forward to good things happening. You can see how much fun the state of anticipation is for an animal anytime you're getting a dog's food ready. All you have to do is start pouring dry kibble in a dog dish and your dog will break out in a huge doggy smile and begin wagging his tail at top speed. Getting-ready-to-eat is
always
a happy moment in a dog's life.

The dinnertime wag-and-smile come from one of the most basic emotions we have, an emotion that doesn't have a stand-alone name. You need at least two words to capture it, and even then you haven't completely got it. Dr. Panksepp says the best language he can come up with is
intense interest, engaged curiosity,
and
eager anticipation.

When this brain circuit is activated, a person or animal probably feels some mixture of all three—curiosity, interest, and anticipation—depending on the situation. Humans have trouble describing what it's like to have this part of the brain electrically stimulated but usually “report a feeling that something very interesting and exciting is going on.”
¹⁴
Animals who are having their curiosity-interest circuit stimulated act as if that's the way they feel, too. They get very animated and excited-acting and immediately start to run around like crazy, sniffing, exploring, and foraging.

Dr. Panksepp calls this part of the brain the SEEKING circuit.
¹⁵
Animals and humans share a powerful and primal urge to
seek
out
what they need in life. We depend on this emotion to stay alive, because curiosity and active interest in the environment help animals and people find good things, like food, shelter, and a mate, and it helps us stay away from bad things, like predators.

We know that curiosity/interest/anticipation, or SEEKING, is a positive emotion from a field of research called
electrical stimulation of the brain,
or ESB. In ESB studies surgeons implant electrodes in an animal's brain and then watch the animal's behavior when different parts of the brain are stimulated. The SEEKING part of the brain is located mostly in the
hypothalamus,
which is in the mammalian brain, and the most important chemical involved is
dopamine,
which goes up when the hypothalamus is stimulated. The hypothalamus regulates sex hormones and appetite, so it makes sense that the SEEKING emotions would originate from there, since all animals spend a great deal of their time seeking food and mates.

We know animals like being in the SEEKING state because of
self-stimulation
studies where the researcher gives his animals control over the electrodes, so the animal can choose to turn the electrodes on or off himself. When electrodes are implanted into the curiosity/interest/anticipation system, animals turn them on and keep them on until they're totally exhausted from all their frenzied racing around and sniffing.

Since a lot of people read about these experiments in college I want to point out that the interpretation of these studies has changed completely in recent years. Researchers used to think that this circuit was the brain's
pleasure center.
Sometimes they called it the
reward center.
The main neurotransmitter associated with the SEEKING circuit is dopamine, so they thought dopamine was the “pleasure” chemical. That's what I was taught in college. When I learned about these experiments, I thought the ESB animals must be experiencing something like a permanent orgasm.

The pleasure center idea fit in with the fact that dopamine is involved in a lot of drug addictions. Cocaine, nicotine, and all the stimulants raise dopamine levels in the brain. Researchers assumed people develop addictions to drugs because drugs make you feel good, so dopamine must be the feel-good chemical in the brain.

But now researchers see things differently. We have a lot of evidence that the
reason
a drug like cocaine feels good is that it's intensely stimulating to the SEEKING system in the brain, not to any pleasure center. What the self-stimulating rats were stimulating was their curiosity/interest/anticipation circuits.
That's
what feels good: being excited about things and intensely interested in what's going on—being what people used to call “high on life”!

There are at least three different lines of evidence for this new interpretation. One is the fact that animals who are having this part of the brain stimulated
act
intensely curious. The second is the fact that human beings who are having this part of the brain stimulated
say
they feel excited and interested.

The third is the clincher. This part of the brain
starts
firing when the animal sees a sign that food might be nearby but
stops
firing when the animal sees the actual food itself. The SEEKING circuit fires during the
search
for food, not during the final locating or eating of the food. It's the search that feels so good.

That's not as surprising as it sounds when you think about it. At the most basic level, animals and humans are wired to enjoy hunting for food. That's why hunters like to hunt even if they're not going to eat what they kill: they like the hunting part in and of itself. Depending on their personalities and interests, humans enjoy any kind of hunt: they like hunting through flea markets for hidden finds; they like hunting for answers to medical problems on the Internet; they like hunting for the ultimate meaning of life in church or in a philosophy seminar. All of those activities come out of the same system in the brain.

A
NIMALS
L
IKE
N
EW
T
OYS
, T
OO

In a natural setting, different animals have different levels of curiosity.

Rats, for instance, are super-explorers. They're very active and will explore every little nook and cranny of any environment you put them into.

Cattle are a lot less curious by nature, possibly because they're big enough, and have been domesticated for long enough, that they don't have quite so many dangers that need looking into.

Some cows are more curious than others. Holstein cows are very curious and do a lot of exploring with their tongues. If I lie down in the middle of a pasture filled with Holsteins they'll come up and start licking my boots. They'll go up to a horse, too, and lick him on his backside.

I wouldn't be surprised if we find out wild animals are more curious than domestic animals overall. My assistant, Mark Deesing, has a wild-type Carolina dog named Red Dog who is genetically closer to her wild ancestors than the AKC purebreds. Red Dog is
very
curious. If you take her to a new place she sniffs like crazy; she has to explore everything. One time we took her to a dog washing business that was next door to a McDonald's and she just went crazy sniffing and exploring. She wouldn't interact with us at all.

Mark's old dog, Annie, who was a little Australian blue heeler, was much more sociable. She was curious, too, but if we took her someplace like the dog washing business she would still interact with us. If domestic animals are less curious, it's probably the result of another difference in the selection pressures acting on domestic animals versus animals who fend for themselves in the wild. Domestic animals are taken care of by humans; they don't have to look for food or shelter. They don't have as much need for the emotion of curiosity as a wild animal does.

What I call
novelty seeking
—an animal's desire to touch and explore and interact with new things—is probably the same thing as curiosity. All animals like new things the same way people do. If you give an animal a bunch of nice toys to play with, and then a couple of weeks later you give him a brand-new, not-very-nice toy, he'll always prefer the new toy even if it's not as good as the old ones. That was true with my pigs at the University of Illinois. I gave them lots of good things to play with, like straw to root around in and telephone books for them to tear up. But if I brought in anything new they dropped everything and went for the new toy. All the pigs preferred a new, crummy toy, like a metal chain that you can't chew up, to an old, fun toy, like the straw and the telephone books.

That's why children always want new toys no matter how many toys they have already, and grown-ups always want new clothes and cars. It's the newness itself that's pleasurable.

So a liking for novelty probably comes out of the SEEKING system. It's curiosity for curiosity's sake, rather than curiosity for the sake of finding food or shelter. People and animals need to use their faculties, and curiosity is an important faculty. So people and animals need new things to stimulate their brains with. Parrots, for instance, need a huge amount of novelty to keep them from going stir-crazy. In one study of a single parrot, the more novel items the researchers put in the parrot's cage, the less likely the parrot was to develop feather-picking behavior, which is stress-related.
¹⁶
(Parrots also have to have lots of human companionship. They are highly social birds.)

For the time being, that's the best explanation I can come up with as to why novelty is both scary and fun. We need to know more about the SEEKING system in the brain. I do have one good story about this from a friend of mine, though. Her son is one of those children who hates change and transitions, so she's always working with him, trying to teach him to be more flexible. He loves new toys, but that's about it.

One day she was explaining to him that it was a little contradictory to be against new experiences while constantly bugging her to buy him new toys and he said, “I don't like new
things,
but I like new
stuff.”
That's exactly the way animals act.

A
NIMAL
S
UPERSTITIONS

Curiosity doesn't just help animals find the things they need; it also helps them learn. That sounds obvious, I know, but the details of how curiosity helps an animal learn aren't.

It turns out that all animals and humans have what researchers call a built-in
confirmation bias.
Animals and humans are wired to believe that when two things happen closely together in time it's not an accident; instead the first event
caused
the second thing to happen.

For instance, if you put a pigeon in a cage with a key that lights up right before a piece of food appears, pretty soon the pigeon will start pecking the lighted key to get food.
¹⁷
He does that because his confirmation bias leads him to believe that the first event (the key lighting up)
causes
the second event (the food appearing). The pigeon happens to peck the lighted key a couple of times, the food
appears (because food always appears when the key is lit), and
now
he concludes that
pecking
the key when it's lit causes food to appear.

The pigeon is acting like a person who thinks his team will win the baseball game if he's got his lucky rabbit's foot with him, which is why B. F. Skinner called this kind of behavior
animal superstition.
The pitcher has pitched a couple of good games while carrying his rabbit foot the same way the pigeon has gotten food a couple of times after pecking the lit-up key. In both cases, they've concluded that a correlation is a cause.

Confirmation bias is built in to animal and human brains, and it helps us learn. We learn because our default assumption is that if Event 1 is followed closely by Event 2, then Event 1 caused Event 2. Our default assumption
isn't
that Events 1 and 2 happened at the same time by coincidence. Coincidence is actually a fairly advanced concept both for animals and for people. That's why in statistics courses you have to formally teach students that a correlation isn't
automatically
a cause. Our brains are wired to see correlations as causes, period. Since in real life a lot of times Event 1 does cause Event 2, confirmation bias helps us make the connection.

The downside to having a built-in confirmation bias is that you also make a lot of unfounded causal connections. That's what a superstition is. Most superstitions probably start out as an accidental association between two things that aren't actually related to each other. You just so happened to wear your blue shirt the day you passed your math test; then maybe you just so happened to wear your blue shirt the day you won a prize at the fair; and after that you think your blue shirt is your lucky shirt.

Animals develop superstitions all the time thanks to confirmation bias. I've seen superstitious pigs. On farms, pigs get fed one at a time inside small electronically controlled feeding pens. Pigs can get into really nasty fights over food, so farmers use the pens to keep the peace. All the pigs wear electronic tags on their collars that work something like an electronic pass at a tollbooth. When a pig walks over to the feed pen a scanner reads the tag and opens the gate, then shuts the gate behind the pig so none of the other pigs can get in. The sides of the pen are solid, so the other pigs can't reach their snouts inside and bite the tail or rear end of the pig who's eating.

Once a pig is inside the pen she has to put her head up close to the feeding trough where another electronic scanner reads the ID, then measures out the exact amount of food that pig is supposed to eat.