Animals in Translation (39 page)

Even though Ildefonso was an innocent, a lot of the abstract “reality” people express through language was still there. Religion is a good example. Ildefonso had gone to church when he was little, but he didn't know what any of it meant, although he instantly figured out that the baby Jesus in a crèche in his adult classroom was the same as the grown-up Jesus he had seen on crucifixes, which I think is pretty amazing.

Although he didn't know anything about the Christian religion his family practiced, he still had a religious sense. This is obvious to me from the fact that he picked up the word “God” within three weeks of first discovering language, and understood that “God” meant “unseen greatness.”

I think some of the other language-less Mexicans Susan met years later probably also had a religious sense. She says that Ildefonso's language-less friends, some of whom were living together, treated their precious collection of Green Cards like they were “gold.” To me it sounded as if they were treating them like magic, not gold. They had a special place in their house where they kept the cards, like a shrine. The cards were like a religious idol or talisman that could protect them from the evil green men, and their “religion” was like the pagan religions indigenous populations have. The cards were also their savior, the way to get into the Promised Land where there was more food and jobs.

The men didn't know the difference between valid Green Cards and fake ones, and they probably didn't even have the abstract categories for
fake
and
real.
But over time they would have realized that some of the Green Cards had more magic than others, because if you get caught by a green man and you show him one of the Green Cards, sometimes it works but other times he takes it away from you. So some cards are more powerful than others. In religion, you don't test God; you don't stand in front of a train and say God should save you. That's how the language-less men would have felt about the cards. You don't test the cards; it's not right. So you stay away from the green men.

Religion is probably hardwired into the human brain, so it doesn't surprise me that a religious feeling or sense managed to shine through in Ildefonso even without words.
¹⁶
By the same token, it wouldn't surprise me if animals have religious feelings like Ildefonso's or a sense of some higher reality or unseen world they can't express. Do some animals have religious feelings and perceptions? Do animals believe in magic? I don't think anyone can rule it out.

The lesson from Ildefonso is that although language does make thought more abstract, without language you can think more abstract thoughts than probably anyone has believed possible. Dr. Pepperberg says the real question about language and animals should be:
at what point
do concepts get so complex that you
have
to have language to form them?

W
ORDS
G
ET IN THE
W
AY

One aspect of Ildefonso's mental life that Susan Schaller doesn't mention is his memory for visual detail. I wonder whether his visual memory was superior to a normal person's visual memory before he learned sign. Research shows that language suppresses visual memory. This is called
verbal overshadowing
and is a well-established phenomenon, which I mentioned in Chapter 3. For example, in one study people watched a short videotape of a bank robbery, then spent twenty minutes doing something unrelated.
¹⁷
Then one group spent five minutes writing down everything they could remember about the bank robber's face, while the other group did an unrelated task.

Two thirds
of the people who wrote nothing down and did unrelated tasks could identify a photograph of the robber, while only
one third
of the people who wrote verbal descriptions could pick him out. This is a well-established effect; many studies have found exactly the same thing, and some studies have extended the effect to auditory memory as well. People who write down a description of a voice are less able to pick it out from other voices than people who didn't describe the voice in words.

These studies have also found that language doesn't erase visual memories for good; it just suppresses them. When the researchers asked the people who wrote descriptions to do something nonverbal for a while, like work a puzzle or listen to music, their visual memories came back, and they could identify the bank robber's face as well as the people who hadn't written descriptions in the first place.

I think for normal people language is probably a kind of filter. One of the biggest challenges for an animal or an autistic person is dealing with the barrage of details from the environment. Normal people with language don't have to see all those details consciously. But I see them, and animals do, too. The details never go away, either. If I think of the word “bowl,” I instantly see many different bowls in my imagination, such as a ceramic bowl on my desk, a soup bowl at a restaurant I ate at last Sunday, my aunt's salad bowl with her cat sleeping in it, and the Super Bowl football game.

I think that probably happens to animals, too, and I wonder what Ildefonso's visual memory was like while he was still a language-less person.

A
WAKE AND
A
WARE
—A
NIMALS ON THE
I
NSIDE

One last thing about Ildefonso: there's no question he was conscious. Many people over the years have argued that if you don't have language you don't have consciousness. I remember in college when one of my professors told the class that animals weren't conscious because they didn't have words to think in. Since I didn't think in words myself, I was shocked when he said that. If an animal isn't conscious, I remember saying to myself, then I'm going to have to assume I'm not conscious, either.

Obviously I
am
conscious, even though I don't think in words, so there's nothing to say an animal can't be conscious just because an animal doesn't think in words. Ildefonso was conscious, and he had no language at all.

I think animals are conscious, too. My question is: does the horse who's scared to death of black hats see mental images of whatever happened to him over and over again inside his head the same way a person with post-traumatic stress syndrome does? Do animals see pictures of food when they're hungry the way I do? Do they see a picture of water when they're thirsty?

Another question I have is: do animals have constant mental activity the way people do, or do they walk around with their minds a blank?

We know they have constant mental activity of some kind, because their EEGs aren't that different from ours. I expect the content of their consciousness is mostly pictures and probably sounds, too. Animals might even have conscious “thoughts” of smells, touch, or taste.

A report in January 2001 about dreaming mice gives us pretty good indirect evidence that animals think in pictures.
¹⁸
In that study, two researchers, Matthew Wilson, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences in the biology department at MIT, and Kenway Louie, a biology graduate student there, implanted electrodes in the brains of
mice, then taught them to run a maze. When they recorded all of the mice's neural firings they found the brain wave patterns were so precise they could see in the recordings exactly what a mouse was doing at any given moment: making the first turn left, making the first turn right, running down the first passageway or the second passageway, and so on.

Later on, when the mice were asleep and had gone into the REM phase, Wilson and Louie recorded the exact same firing pattern the mice had shown when they were awake and running the maze. The sleep firings were so exact the researchers could tell where in the maze each mouse was, at any given moment, in his dreams. Since people dream in pictures during REM sleep, this is pretty good evidence that animals dream in images, too. There's no way to know for sure that Wilson and Louie's dreaming mice were seeing images of the maze, since the only way to know what pictures anyone is seeing in a dream is to wake him up and ask him. Of course you can't do that with a mouse. But the fact that the dreaming mice were firing the exact same sequence their brains fired when their eyes were open is a good reason to suspect that mice, like people, see pictures when they dream. It's not a huge leap to assume they probably think in pictures when they're awake.

A
NIMAL
S
PECIALISTS

Animals are probably
cognitive specialists.
Some animals, like the Holsteins, are manipulation specialists. Dogs are smell experts. Other animals, like pigeons, are visual specialists.

Some bird and mammal species that have to remember where they've hidden their food are memory specialists and have extra large brain areas devoted to visual memory. The Clark's nutcracker, a type of crow, buries as many as thirty thousand pine seeds in the fall in a two-hundred-square-mile area, then finds over 90 percent of them during the winter.

Compared to animals and people with autism, normal humans are
generalists.
Typical people are usually good at some things and bad at others, but a person who's really smart in one subject tends to be really smart in a lot of subjects. There is one exception to this, which
is that gifted children have greater variability on their IQ test sub-scores than children with normal intelligence. But it's not a case of gifted children being brilliant at some tasks and hopeless at others. They're still highly intelligent overall, and they do extremely well on all the different IQ tests, not just on one or two of them.

One important piece of evidence that may support the idea that people are generalists while animals are specialists is the new findings on
g
or
general intelligence
(also called
general fluid intelligence
). The idea of general intelligence, which is what classic IQ tests measure, has been controversial. People like the psychologist Howard Gardner emphasized
multiple intelligences
over one single, general intelligence, and some psychologists have rejected the idea of
g
altogether.

But new brain research supports the idea that
g
exists, and that it's localized to one spot in the brain: the lateral prefrontal cortex, an area at the top of your head and off to the side that handles working memory, abstract thought, and
response inhibition,
which is stopping yourself from doing something you're on track to do, like answering the phone when it rings. If you've decided not to answer the phone while you fix dinner, your lateral prefrontal cortex has to block the impulse to pick up the receiver every time you hear the phone ring.

Jeremy Gray from Washington University, one of the researchers on the
g
study, found that the higher a subject's general intelligence, the higher the activity level in his lateral prefrontal cortex. Dr. Gray told the
New York Times
that the hardest IQ tasks he used in the experiment are like “trying to remember a new 10-digit telephone number while listening to people who are having an interesting conversation.”
¹⁹

This finding fits in with behavioral research showing that being able to integrate a lot of information is a big part of being “school smart.” Jennifer Symon, a graduate student working with Bob and Lynn Koegel, did a really interesting study comparing “regular” schoolchildren to children whose teachers said they were gifted.
²⁰
She found that the gifted kids were much better at doing multifaceted tasks. She tested the children using tasks that increased in complexity. In the
one-component task
a child was given four bears that were
identical in every respect except color, and asked to choose the blue bear. To do this the child had to pay attention to only one element of the task, color. In the
two-component task
children chose among items that varied along two dimensions, like bears and dogs in different colors. The researcher would ask them to pick the green dog. A typical
three-component task
asked the child to pick the “big polka dot circle,” and a
four-component task
asked them to pick two objects, such as the big teddy bear and the little square, that added up to four components altogether.

Dr. Symon found that by age three the gifted children could do
four-component tasks
—tasks where they had to pay attention to and pull together four different things in order to succeed. The regular kids couldn't do four-component tasks until they were six.

No one has tried to find
g
in an animal or bird brain yet, and I don't know what we'll see when they do. For now, since animals—especially domestic animals—as a group have a smaller and weaker prefrontal cortex, I'm assuming they probably have weaker general intelligence. That probably opens the door for them to become super-specialists, which I'll talk about in the next chapter. For now I'll just say that I think the kind of specialization I see in animals and in autistic people probably depends on having a weaker prefrontal cortex.

T
HAT'S
M
Y
S
TORY AND
I'
M
S
TICKING TO
I
T

There are definitely times when normal people's high level of general intelligence makes them too smart for their own good. My favorite example is the rats who beat the humans in a lever-pressing task. Years ago someone decided to compare rats to humans in the kind of standard operant conditioning task experimenters usually do only with animals. (Remember, operant conditioning means the animal or person gets a reward when he does what the experimenter wants him to do.) The rats and the humans had to look at a TV screen and press the lever anytime a dot appeared in the top half of the screen. The experimenter didn't tell the human subjects that's what they were supposed to do; they had to figure it out for themselves the same way the rats did.