Animals in Translation (2 page)

But I've come to realize that the little old ladies are right. People who love animals, and who spend a lot of time with animals, often start to feel intuitively that there's more to animals than meets the eye. They just don't know what it is, or how to describe it.

I stumbled across the answer, or what I think is part of the answer, almost by accident. Because of my own problems, I've always followed neuroscientific research on the human brain as closely as I've followed my own field. I had to; I'm always looking for answers about how to manage my own life, not just animals' lives. Following both fields at the same time led me to see a connection between human intelligence and animal intelligence the animal sciences have missed.

The literature on autistic savants sparked my discovery. Autistic savants are people who can do things like tell you what day of the week you were born based on your birth date, or calculate in their heads whether your street address is a prime number or not. They usually have IQs in the mentally retarded range, though not always, yet they can
naturally
do things no normal human being can even be
taught
to do, no matter how hard he tries to learn or how much time he spends practicing.

Animals are like autistic savants. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that animals might actually
be
autistic savants. Animals have special talents normal people don't, the same way autistic people have special talents normal people don't; and at least some animals have special forms of genius normal people don't, the same way some autistic savants have special forms of genius. I think most of the time animal genius probably happens for the same reason autistic genius does: a difference in the brain autistic people share with animals.

The reason we've managed to live with animals all these years without noticing many of their special talents is simple: we can't see those talents. Normal people never have the special talents animals have, so normal people don't know what to look for. Normal people can stare straight at an animal doing something brilliant and have no idea what they're seeing. Animal genius is invisible to the naked eye.

I'm sure I don't know all the talents animals have, either, let alone all the things they could use their talents to do if we gave them the chance. But now that I've seen the connection between autistic savantry and animal genius at least I have an idea what I'm looking for: I'm looking for ways animals can use their amazing ability to
perceive things humans can't perceive,
and to
remember highly detailed information we can't remember,
to make life better for everyone, animals and people alike. Just off the top of my head, here's a thought: we have service dogs for the blind—how about service dogs for the middle-aged whose memories are going? I'm willing to bet that just about any dog can remember where you put your car keys better than you can if you're over forty, and probably if you're under forty, too.

Or how about service dogs who remember where your kids left the remote control? I bet a dog could do this if you gave him the training.

Of course, I don't know this for a fact. I could be wrong. But for me, predicting animal talents is getting to be a little like astronomers predicting the existence of a planet nobody can see based on their understanding of gravity. I'm starting to be able to accurately predict animal talents nobody can see based on what I know about autistic talent.

 

A
NIMALS FROM THE
O
UTSIDE
I
N

By the time I got to college I knew I wanted to learn about animals.

That was the 1960s, and the whole field of psychology was B. F. Skinner and behaviorism. Dr. Skinner was so famous that just about every college kid in the country had a copy of
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
on his bookshelf. He taught that all you needed to study was behavior. You weren't supposed to speculate about what was inside a person's or an animal's head because you couldn't measure all the stuff inside the
black box
—intelligence, emotions, motives. The black box was off-limits; you couldn't talk about it. You could measure only behavior, therefore you could study only behavior.
¹

For the behaviorists this was no great loss, since, according to them, environment was the only thing that mattered.

Some animal behaviorists took this idea to the extreme by teaching that animals didn't even
have
emotions or intelligence. Animals only had behavior, which was
shaped
by rewards, punishments, and positive and negative reinforcements from the environment.

Rewards
and
positive reinforcers
are the same thing: something good happens to you because of something you did.
Punishment
and
negative reinforcement
are opposites. Punishment is when something bad happens to you because of something you did; negative reinforcement is when something bad
stops
happening to you, or doesn't
start
happening to you in the first place, because of something you did. Punishment is bad, and negative reinforcement is good. Punishment makes you stop doing what you're doing, although a lot of behaviorists believe that punishing a bad behavior isn't as effective as rewarding a good behavior when it comes to getting an animal to do what you want him to do.

Negative reinforcement is the hardest to understand. Negative reinforcement isn't a punishment; it's a reward. But the reward is
negative
in the sense that something you don't like either stops or doesn't start in the first place. Say your four-year-old is screaming and crying and giving you a headache. Finally you lose your patience and blow up at him, and he's shocked into silence. That's negative reinforcement, because you've made the crying go away, which is what you wanted. Now you're probably more likely to blow up at
him the next time he starts a tantrum, because you've been negatively reinforced for blowing up at him during this tantrum.

Behaviorists thought these basic concepts explained everything about animals, who were basically just stimulus-response machines. It's probably hard for people to imagine the power this idea had back then. It was almost a religion. To me—to lots of people—B. F. Skinner was a god. He was the god of psychology.

It turned out he wasn't much of a god in person. I met B. F. Skinner once. I was probably eighteen years old at the time. I'd written him a letter about my squeeze machine, and he'd written me back saying what impressed him was my motivation. Which is kind of funny when you think about it. Here was the god of behaviorism talking about my internal motivation instead of my behavior. I guess he was ahead of his time, since motivation is a hot topic in autism research today.

After I got his letter I called up his office and asked if I could come see him. I wanted to talk to him about some of the research I had done.

His office called and invited me down to Harvard for a visit. It was like going to see the Pope at the Vatican. Dr. Skinner was the most famous professor in all of psychology; he'd been on the cover of
Time
magazine.
²
I was very nervous just about walking up to see him. I remember walking to William James Hall and looking up at the building feeling like “This is the temple of Psychology.”

But when I went into his office, it was a big letdown. He was just a normal-looking man. I remember he had this plant wired up around his office, growing all around the room. We were sitting there talking, and he started asking really personal questions. I don't remember what they were, because I almost never remember specific words and sentences from conversations. That's because autistic people think in pictures; we have almost no words running through our heads at all. Just a stream of images. So I don't remember the verbal details of the questions; I just remember that he asked them.

Then he tried to touch my legs. I was shocked. I wasn't in a sexy dress, I was in a conservative dress, and that was the last thing I expected. So I said, “You may look at them, but you may not touch them.” I do remember saying that.

We did get to talk about animals and behavior, though, and finally I said to him, “Dr. Skinner, if we could just learn how the brain works.” That's the other part of the conversation I remember specifically.

He said, “We don't need to learn about the brain, we have operant conditioning.”

I remember driving back to school going over this in my mind, and finally saying to myself, “I don't think I believe that.”

I didn't believe it because I had problems that sure didn't seem to be coming from my environment. Also, I'd taken an animal ethology class at college—ethologists study animals in their natural environments—and Thomas Evans, the teacher, had taught us about animal instincts, which were hardwired behavior patterns the animal was born with. Instincts had nothing to do with the environment, they came with the animal.

Dr. Skinner changed his mind when he got old. My friend John Ratey, a psychiatrist at Harvard who wrote the books
Shadow Syndromes
(with my co-author on this book, Catherine Johnson) and
A User's Guide to the Brain,
told me a story about a lunch he had with Dr. Skinner near the end of his life.
³
While they were talking John asked him, “Don't you think it's time we got inside the black box?”

Dr. Skinner said, “Ever since my stroke I've thought so.”

The brain is pretty powerful, and a person whose brain isn't working right knows just how powerful. Dr. Skinner had to learn the hard way. His stroke showed him not everything is controlled by the environment. But back in the 1970s, when I was getting started, behaviorism was the law.

I don't want to sound like the enemy of behaviorism, though, because I'm not. In one way behaviorists weren't that different from ethologists, because neither group looked inside the animal's head. Behaviorists looked at animals in laboratory environments; ethologists looked at animals in their natural environment. But both were looking at animals from the outside.

Behaviorists made a big mistake declaring the brain off-limits, but their focus on the environment was a huge step forward and is to this day. Until behaviorism came along, probably no one understood how important the environment is. People still don't. In the meat
packing industry, where I've worked for thirty years designing humane handling systems, a lot of plant owners don't think twice about their cattle's environment. If there's a problem with the herd, it doesn't even occur to them to look at the animals' surroundings to see what's going on. People want the equipment that I install, but they don't realize that
the equipment won't work if the environment is bad.

In a plant, the environment means the physical environment, and it also means the way the employees handle the animals. If the animal handling is bad, no amount of top-notch, well-maintained equipment is going to work.

The
center-track restraining system
I designed, which has been installed in half of all the plants in North America, works only when you have good animal handling. My restraining system is a conveyor belt that goes under the animal's chest and belly. The animals straddle it lengthwise the same way they would straddle a sawhorse.

The reason plants have adopted my design is that animals are much more willing to walk onto it than they are the old V-shaped restraining systems, so it's a lot more efficient. That was the only thing wrong with the old restraining systems: the animals didn't like walking onto them. The
V-restrainers
work fine, and they don't hurt the animals, but they squeeze the animal's feet together, and animals don't like to walk into a space where they feel like there isn't enough space for their feet. My design innovation wasn't technological, it was behavioral. It works better because it respects the animal's behavior.

But the plants don't seem to realize that, so naturally they also don't realize that if they have poor handling of their animals my equipment won't work. They focus on the equipment.

The other thing I like about behaviorists is that a lot of the time they're natural-born optimists. In the beginning, behaviorists thought the laws of learning were simple and universal, and all creatures followed them. That's why B. F. Skinner thought laboratory rats were the only animals anybody needed to look at, because all animals and people learned the same way.

Dr. Skinner's whole concept of learning was
associationist,
which meant that positive associations (or rewards) increased behavior, and
negative associations (or punishment) decreased behavior. If you wanted to teach a really complex behavior, all you had to do was break it down into its component parts and teach each little, tiny step separately, giving rewards along the way. That was called
task analysis,
and it was a huge help not only for animal training (though animal trainers had always done this to some extent), but also for anybody trying to teach children or adults with disabilities. I've seen behavioral books for parents that take all the different things a child or adult has to do during the day, like get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, and so on, and break each activity down into its component parts. A supposedly simple thing like getting your clothes on in the morning might involve twenty or thirty different steps or more, and a task analysis lists each one, and you teach each one separately.

Doing a task analysis isn't as easy as it sounds, because nonhandicapped people aren't really aware of the very small, separate movements that go into an action like tying your shoe or buttoning your shirt. Typical kids pick these things up pretty easily, so parents don't have to be especially skilled to teach them how to put their clothes on or tie their shoes. If you've ever tried to teach shirt buttoning to a person who has absolutely no clue how to do it, you soon realize that you don't really know how to do it, either—not in the sense of knowing the sequence of tiny, separate motions that go into successfully buttoning a button. You just do it.