Animals in Translation (43 page)

This is the if-animals-were-smart-they-wouldn't-still-be-pooping-in-the-woods theory of animal cognition. If animals were
really
smart, they would have invented flush toilets!

What the indoor plumbing theory of animal IQ forgets is the fact that plenty of indigenous peoples never invented indoor plumbing, either, and they're no less intelligent than anyone else. Our thinking about animals is a lot like the Europeans' thinking about primitive cultures in the nineteenth century when European explorers first began to have a lot of contact with the people of Africa. That was a time when botanists and zoologists were creating classifications for every plant and animal on earth, so naturally Europeans created clas
sifications for humans, too. They thought the Europeans were the most intelligent, the Asians were next most intelligent, and the Africans were on the bottom.

The Europeans were wrong about that, probably for some of the same reasons people will turn out to be wrong about animals, too. One big mistake the Europeans made was to equate
IQ
with
cultural evolution. Cumulative cultural evolution
means that each generation can build on the knowledge of the generation before it rather than having to start all over again from scratch. For a culture to evolve, you have to have
cultural ratcheting,
which means that a group of people or animals has to have a way to hold on to the things the previous generations have learned so the next generation can add on new things.
³
Cultural ratcheting means a culture can maintain and pass along an expanding body of knowledge that no one generation would be able to invent for itself.

Researchers don't know how and why one culture evolves faster than another, but they do know it's not because of IQ. You probably have to have things like direct, one-on-one teaching along with
very
widespread paying attention and learning so you don't keep losing knowledge as fast as you gain it.

All human cultures, including indigenous peoples, have
cumulative cultural evolution
to some degree. But so far researchers think only birds and
maybe
chimpanzees also have it. However, there is so much of animal life we just can't perceive at this point, that the time hasn't come to conclude that animals do or do not have cultural evolution. Take dolphins, for instance. Dolphins talk back and forth to each other for hours on end. It's completely possible dolphins could have a rich “mental” culture they've developed over many generations that's invisible to us. How would we know one way or the other?

I thought about dolphins when I read
A Man Without Words.
In deaf culture people sign the same information to each other over and over again to make sure every person understands it and has the same information. The author, Susan Schaller, talks about a picnic she attended where “even though everyone saw my name and where I was from in my [signed] introduction, the spelling of my English name, my namesign, and California's namesign passed from person
to person until everyone was completely satisfied that they had all seen the exact same information.”

I wonder whether dolphins are doing something like that, passing precious cultural information from dolphin to dolphin over and over again to make sure none of it gets lost. Dolphins don't have books or hands, so they can't record the things they know in writing
or
in objects they've built. I say this because early humans didn't have written language, either, but they made simple tools, clothing, and shelters that could probably serve both as objects
and
as the instructions on how to make the object. (When an object is really simple, you can tell a lot about how to make it just by looking at it.)

But if you have only oral communication, and you've built a complex culture, then passing your culture along would be like playing the game Telephone. You'd be constantly in danger of having distortions come into the transmission process, ruining the knowledge you're trying to pass along. The only way to keep this from happening would be to develop a strict habit of repeating each piece of knowledge over and over again, back and forth, to make sure the person or dolphin you're transmitting to has received an exact copy of your message, not an approximation.

S
MART, BUT
D
IFFERENT

I think animals are smarter than we know. I also think a lot of animals probably have a different
kind
of intelligence than
g,
the general fluid intelligence normal people have.

In the last chapter I said that animals are cognitive specialists. They're smart in some things, not smart in others. People are generalists, meaning that a person who's smart in one area will be smart in others, too. That's what IQ tests show.

Autistic people are smart the way animals are smart. We're specialists. Autistic people can have IQ scores all over the map. Donna Williams, an autistic woman from Australia who wrote a memoir called
Nobody Nowhere,
has written that her own scores on the different subscales range all the way from mentally retarded to genius. I believe it.
⁴

After many years observing animals and living with autism, I have
come to the conclusion that animals with extreme talents are similar to autistic savants.

If you've never met an autistic savant, you might want to watch the movie
Rain Man,
which is about an autistic savant, Raymond, and his brother. Raymond couldn't fix himself a piece of toast without setting the kitchen on fire, but he could count cards in a game of blackjack and win thousands of dollars. That kind of disparity is typical with autistic savants. When you get outside their specialty they're almost never as smart or capable as normal people. That's why they used to be called
idiot savants
. Just like animals with extreme talent, autistic savants 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. Yet they usually have IQs in the mentally retarded range.

L
UMPERS AND
S
PLITTERS
: W
HAT
M
AKES
A
NIMALS AND
A
UTISTIC
P
EOPLE
D
IFFERENT

Charles Darwin first used the terms
lumpers
and
splitters
to describe the two different kinds of taxonomists. Lumper taxonomists grouped lots of animals or plants into big, broad categories based on major characteristics; splitters divided them up into lots of smaller categories based on minor variations. Lumpers generalize; splitters “particularize.”

This is a core difference between animals and autistic people on the one hand, and normal people on the other. Animals and autistic people are splitters. They see the differences between things more than the similarities. In practice this means animals don't generalize very well. (Normal people often over-generalize, of course.) That's why you have to be so careful when you're socializing an animal to socialize him to many different animals and people.

You have to do the same thing with training. Service dogs who are being trained to lead a blind person across the street don't generalize from one intersection to another, so you can't just train them on a couple of intersections and expect them to apply what they've learned to a brand-new intersection. You have to train them on dozens of different kinds of intersections: corners where there's a light hanging in the middle of the intersection and crosswalk lines
painted on the pavement, corners where there's a light hanging in the middle of the intersection and no crosswalk lines, corners where the traffic lights are on poles, and so on.

This is why dog trainers always make people train their own dogs. You can't send a puppy away to obedience school, because he'll only learn to obey the trainer, not you. Dogs also need some training from every member of the household, because if only one person trains the dog, that's the only person the dog is going to obey.

And you have to be careful not to fall into
pattern training.
Pattern training happens when you always train the dog in the same place at the same time using the same commands in the same order. If you pattern-train a dog, he'll learn the commands beautifully, but he won't be able to perform them anyplace other than the spot you trained him in, or in any sequence other than the one you used during training. He's learned the pattern, and he can't generalize the individual commands to other times, settings, or people.

People who teach autistic children deal with exactly the same challenge. A behaviorist told me a story about an autistic boy he'd been teaching how to butter toast. The behaviorist and the parents had been working really hard with the boy, and finally he got it. He could butter toast. Everyone was thrilled, but the joy didn't last too long, because when somebody gave the boy some peanut butter to spread on his toast, he didn't have a clue! His brand-new bread-buttering skill was specific to butter, and it didn't generalize to peanut butter. They had to start all over again and teach him how to spread
peanut
butter on toast. This happens all the time with autistic people, and with animals, too.

It happens so much, and it's so extreme, that it's not right just to call animals splitters; animals are
super-splitters.
That's what being hyper-specific is all about.

It's not that animals and autistic people don't generalize at all. Obviously they do. The black hat horse generalized his original traumatic experience to other people wearing other black hats, and the little boy who could butter toast had generalized that skill to other sticks of butter and other pieces of bread. With training, a service dog learns to generalize what he knows about other intersections to new intersections he's never seen before.

What's different is that the generalizations animals and autistic people make are almost always narrower and more specific than the generalizations nonautistic people make.
Human with black hat
or
spread butter on bread
: those are pretty narrow categories.

T
HE
H
IDDEN
F
IGURES
T
ALENT

To any normal person, being hyper-specific sounds like a serious mental handicap, and in a lot of ways it is. Hyper-specificity is probably the main reason animals seem less smart than people. How intelligent could a horse be if he thinks the really scary thing in life isn't a nasty handler but the nasty handler's hat?

Probably not too intelligent when it comes to school smarts. But being smart in school isn't everything, and high general intelligence comes at the price of high
hyper-specific intelligence.
You can't have both.
⁵

That means normal human beings can't have extreme perception the way normal animals can, because hyper-specificity and extreme perception go together. I don't know whether one causes the other, or whether hyper-specificity and extreme perception are just different aspects of the same difference in the brain. What I do know is that Clever Hans couldn't do what people do, and people can't do what Hans did. Hans had a special talent humans don't have.

Until we know more about it, I'm calling this ability the
hidden figure talent,
based on some research findings in autism. In 1983 Amitta Shah and her colleague Uta Frith tested twenty autistic children, twenty normal children, and twenty children with learning disabilities—all of them the same mental age—on the Embedded Figure Task. In the test, first you show the child a shape, like a triangle, and then you ask him to find the same shape inside a picture of an object like a baby carriage.

The autistic children did much better at finding the hidden figure than any of the other children. They almost always saw the figure instantly, and they scored 21 out of 25 correct answers on average, compared to an average of only 15 correct answers for both the learning disabled and the normal kids. That's a huge difference. It's so huge you could probably say normal people are disabled com
pared to autistic people when it comes to finding hidden figures. The autistic children were so good they almost outscored the experimenters! These were developmentally disabled kids scoring the same as normal adults.
⁶

I believe it, because a few years back I happened to come across a hidden figure test in
Wired Magazine,
and the hidden figures jumped out at me. For me, they weren't really hidden.

To my knowledge no one's ever tested animals on hidden figure tests, but I bet they'd do well. Probably the easiest way to do a hidden figure test with an animal would be to run a simple recognition task. Teach the animal to touch or peck a certain shape, then show him a picture with the shape embedded inside and see whether the animal can still find it.

Most people don't realize how valuable the hidden figure talent is in the right situation. In Maryland there's an employment agency for autistic adults that places its clients in jobs like quality assurance. They have one group of autistic men working in a factory inspecting logo T-shirts coming off the line for flaws in the silk-screening. Nonautistic people have a hard time seeing tiny differences between one silk-screened logo and another, but those autistic employees can pick up practically microscopic flaws in a glance. It's the hidden figure test all over again. To them the flaws in the silk-screening aren't hidden.

The agency's clients also outperform normal people in bindery work. When you're assembling corporate reports you have to be able to tell the front cover from the back cover quickly and accurately. To regular people the fronts and backs look alike, but autistic employees can always tell the front from the back, and they do it in a flash. Extreme perception lets them see all the tiny differences normal people can't see. The agency even has one autistic woman working quality assurance on submarine parts.