If a Lion Could Talk - How Animals Think

In my pursuit to understand how cognition appears it seems natural that I would be inclined to read about how animals process the information around them. It was indeed necessary to take into consideration the idea that all the research and study into animal intelligence carries a powerful bias, that of anthropocentrism. The fact that we as humans are bound to our own experience of consciousness, of how we perceive the world around us, limits the understanding of other experiences, namely of that which other animals might have. 

Budiansky’s account of cleverly designed experiments is a proof that we need to take into consideration a lot of factors and conditions before we can state something about the way in which a different species reacts based on the stimuli it receives. The very nature of our sensory organs bounds us “to see” only a part of the environment, the one that is the most important to our own survival. Because we are social specie we put emphasis on the accurate perception of those signals that can offer information about other members of our specie (the social position, symbols of power or wealth, relations amongst ourselves) much like other social species: monkeys, chimpanzees, dogs, horses etc. We tend to consider these signs as those of greater intelligence, just because we are used to intelligence being expressed in this manner. 

Every organism learns through associations during its lifetime. Animals do that all the time and it’s a big advantage to their survival to do so. Learning and responding appropriately to the environment guarantees a better chance at transmitting the genes, and continue the legacy of every species. Only those organisms that adapt can maintain a competitive edge against other members of their species. Associations between stimulus and a response from environment (reward: food, water, sex, inclusion in the social environment etc., or punishment: food deprivation, injuries etc) are a powerful tools in learning. Dogs and other social animals exhibit this feat mostly because we know how to perceive it, but other animals do to. Budiansky offers a great amount of evidence to support this.

Some remarks are so true that I feel compelled to mention them. For instance: “Many animal researchers are fairly confident that more-sensitive experiments will show that apes, at least, do possess some ability to attribute mental states. But the entire search has been a vivid reminder of the dangers of anthropocentrism. The things that apes are good at are the things they evolved to do to survive in their particular ecological niche. And the things an animal is good at generally do not require three decades of ambiguous experiments to discover.”(p. 188) This particular point made me think of all the implications in every aspect of scientific research, mainly the idea that when we set ourselves to test a hypothesis we limit the perceived reality to only a narrow bit, the one that fits into our experimental instruments.

The final passage of the book is another idea that made me think, mainly because it manages to sum up different ideas about evolution. “It is always dangerous to draw moral lessons from the blindly amoral process of evolution. But if there is a lesson here, it is that all of the creatures that evolution has fashion are remarkable in their own right. All have hit upon unique ways to make a living against all probability. And that is something to respect, and to treasure.”(p. 194)

The God of Small Things

Living doesn’t seem to require much thought or any cognitive effort, I thought. When reading the book I realized that all the time we see things, we imagine alternatives, we correlate different images, we see much more than we perceived. It was wonderful. 

As a psychologist, I try to keep in touch with myself and  see how the events affect me and in what way I change with every challenge or task, and still find myself unable to grasp the concepts that could help me better understand my life. Roy’s language and mastery of words has helped me find a new way into looking at things around me, and made me much more willing to use words in a synesthetic way, thus compelling more meaning than before. Somehow the language was inside me and I needed a push to bring it into use, a model of some sort, and that model came from a brilliantly written book.

The subject of the novel transcends culture, and speaks to the inner human nature of us all. Although the cultural background of the characters is different, because they live in India, the torment of trying to find a way to live life in the most meaningful way possible is universal. The story of love, of stereotypes and prejudices towards other people, the story of how we can make social barriers so tall that we cannot climb or overcome during a lifetime, is one that needs to be read over and over again until we are left with only the truth about human life. That is to see that we need love, that love is different throughout our life, that it evolves from one pure, almost demanded, love possessed by children, into an ideal that eludes everyone who happen to be in a society which dictates how love must be and who can live it.

That pure connection often thought of as true love might come in different shapes, one between two twin brother and sister, one between a single mother and her children, one between a divorced man and his ex-wife and daughter, and one between an old woman and a twisted notion of love. We can see the pursuit of love throughout the book, mainly through the pains which accompany the feeling of fear of losing it. Rahel, the main character, a view-point narrator, takes a journey back to the house where she discovered love and felt she lost it. It’s a detailed account of events in which grief takes many forms, starting with the grief of losing a loved someone, to the grief of losing a sense of love and trying to find it once more. Rahel and Estha, the twin dizygotic brother and sister, represent in a way a metaphor of trying to live a life only half-filled with love, because they need the presence of each other in order to feel complete. 

The great charm and mystery of the book was, for me, the ability to pin point certain raw aspects of relationships between humans, how we let our fears rule society, or how we can let our fear rule our life in a way that can only bring us sadness and pain. It is after all our decision about how we want to live our life.

One of the fragments that I enjoyed mostly from the novel is: “D’you know what happens when you hurt people? (…) When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

I end my review with this brilliant conclusion:

“It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.

To let it be, to travel with it,(…), is much the harder thing to do.”

Pleasured By Philip Hensher

To be able to describe moments in history is great. To be able to make others feel some tension from the collision between human history and a nation’s history is a gift. Hensher’s description of a brief moment in the life of Friedrich and of how he perceives the falling of the Berlin Wall represents a portrayal of mixture between small moments that culminate into a big event. 

Life is meant to be lived as a series of events, and sometimes the events come together and mix and mash into something much greater than the person. To try to think that you can be the piece of the puzzle that can change the game is an erroneous way of thinking. Friedrich and Mr. Picker want to do just that, with their plan to sell drugs in East Germany in order to show them what fun they are missing in a liberal society. It’s a mocked plan, and even Friedrich doesn’t abide by it, in fact he plans to take the money from Picker and go his way, but his nature, and the fact that he starts to like Picker as a person makes him act otherwise. He returns the money, confesses the whole scheme and in the end resumes a somewhat strong friendship with Picker.

The other characters Daphne and Marion represent two different things. Mario a socialist spy, that betrayed his father and fled to West Germany and organized a fraction to undermine the political state of Federal Germany, and Daphne a young student, in love, and with minimal political aspiration or beliefs behind her action. Although they manifest themselves against the structures of society, each seems to think that no political system could in fact do justice to the people. It is the people who must choose how to act. Not a pamphlet or political dissemination. Yet this is what they try to achieve by their vandalism of capitalist small businesses. 

At first the novel didn’t startled me with a great sense of something great happening, but by the end I was glad to be able to have read it.

Man’s Search for Meaning

When you are left with nothing but yourself sometimes the resolution becomes clear as an end. But what can you do in face of repeated adversity and conditions no man/woman should ever feel?  Viktor Frankl’s answer to this question emerges from personal suffering and having to put up with conditions that threatened his existence. The answer he gives is that one must find a meaning in everything he/she does, even in pain, in simple pleasures and in trial that every life contains.

To be able to create a meaning out of pain is truly an exercise I can only compare to those made by Buddhist monks, because I imagine that only after meditation or intense thought one can accomplish that the essence of all things lies in the purpose that our actions pertain.

The horrors of being in concentration camps in Auschwitz, Dachau and others and afterwards finding out that those people that made you find a purpose for the pains endured are dead can be hard to live with. And wet his theory of finding a purpose for all there is to life, to ones life, give him strength to carry on living, to find people, things and action that can fulfill the need for meaning, a personal purpose to an individual life.

The book was really inspiring and made me think and realize the meaning behind my actions, and the purpose of chosen paths in life. It made me more aware and more responsible and yet it made me free. I strive to find the purpose of my life, the meaning of my actions and to endure with courage and optimism all that lies ahead in the great unknown of my life.

I also started reading about logotherapy and found it very useful in my work.

"Risipitorii" / (The Wasters)

Being young is always seen as something similar to being free and able to take any course of action or make any decision. Youth is not seen as a period of confusion, indecision or inability to do great things in life. M. Preda sees the young adults as individuals who take great decision easily and are sometimes stunned by small ones.

“Risipitorii”/ The Wasters is a novel of a brief period in anyone’s life, when major decision are prone to take place and some of the decisions made are haste and have an effect that contours the entire life. Decision taken too easily can make an impact on people triggering turning points in a persons search for purpose in life. A young woman who marries a young doctor without having a clear idea about married life, finds herself, after an abortion, left for another woman, and thus seems to forget the purpose of her existence. In the confusion set by her depression she learns to enjoy life once more and knows that from now on she will forever keep a mark of what it means to be without meaning, but will continue to live for a meaning discovered as life succeeds this crisis.

Other crises are described, for instance the meaning of living with the person you love, can appear for those who live it complicated, and yet simple for those seeing it from outside. The search for professional achievement can sometimes fail and leave the person with the impression of uselessness, trying to live with a new purpose. The search for love and fulfillment in a family life can seem daunting and like a purpose for many who see it as eluding their life. 

Many times the thing which we seek most and consider as a purpose is the thing we cannot attain. We continue to force our mind and actions into creating new alternatives for reaching the same idea over and over again, without even considering for a second time if that thing/idea is really what we need to be happy. Sometimes the happiness lies in the process, as it is described throughout the book, Flow. The psychology of optimal experience, and I believe that the process of creating and achieving your purpose is one of the most personal things one can do with their life.

"Adam si Eva" / Adam and Eve

Rebreanu's novel tells the story of a search for love and how the soul goes through stages in order to meet it's destined partner.

The story of how souls come to existence is drawn from an indian mythology. Incapsulated in a human body, the soul is destined to be purified through love, and with each life it comes near to its purpose. It takes seven lives for the soul to find its partner and to be united once more. These lives are presented in different times and places. The book contains eight short stories and in each story we see a different life of the soul. Only in the last life, when the soul has found its partner, we see a completion and the human is destined to relive his past existence.

I liked how the author portrayed the life in Sumerian times and in the times of the Roman Empire. The details are abundant, yet they lack the power to stimulate thought or to create a sense of imaginary flow. 

To me it seems a novel in which the author put a great deal of effort. At times you get carried into the atmosphere of the past times, but the cruel details in which the characters die is enough to deter those who seek a happy ending and to remind oneself that life can be easily terminated. I'm not convinced that souls reincarnate and go through stages of existence but I can understand the desire(maybe the existential need) that something which cannot be completed in this life is believed to be accomplished in another one.

The Blind Watchmaker

When I look at the world around me, I see things which simply are and things that seem to complex to exist without having a designer. Yet, what I see is not all there is and sometimes I need to open my eyes to understand more than these apparent features of things like complexity and adaptability. Dawkins tells the story of evolution using an approach that answers to my need of order, of things I can and cannot understand. By using the blind watchmaker analogy he makes a clear point in drawing attention to what we see and what we can understand at a certain time and with certain basis. For me, the basis of evolution has been laid some time ago, with the reading of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, but the understanding grows deeper every time I read something new.

In this book I’ve understood more clearly the fact that what we see is not what is perfect, but merely what it is functional from an adaptability point. Even with adaptability it must have started with something, and that something isn’t as glamorous as one might think. The grand scale of evolution is the ticking of the clock that got perfected, not the clock itself, and the ways in which this process occurs can be resembled to a blind watchmaker in action. Although we can see the watch, the watch is always changing, even if we don’t perceived as such, or we would never live in a scale of time that would enable us to perceive the changing. The variation of change can be in any direction (to give an advantage or disadvantage) but ultimately the selection favors those variation that tend to make an improvement and therefore they’re more likely to survive and be passed on to the next generation and further submitted to change.

The examples in the book are very useful and especially the way the “biomorphs” evolve can convince almost anyone that there is indeed evolution and when certain restraints from the environment are applied, the forms that take shape can be different and may even resemble some of the creatures that live in our world. The fact that the environment sets the rules and acts as a pressure to everything that is, might be seen as a law in our understanding of how life evolved in our planet. But the fact that life exists and evolves can’t be put to question in my opinion. If somebody sees in nature a perfect watch that needs no adjustments she/he has surely find one of the greatest wonders and perhaps the probability of that happening is so small that it is not even sufficient to be written on the scale of time in which we evolve from the Big Bang on. 

One of the greatest question for me is not how can we have evolved from something but why aren’t we using our intellectual power to evolve in a way in which we can adapt to our environment? Although I state my question I know the answer and just hope that time will prove me wrong.

A great book to read and think about.