It’s getting to be obvious even to skeptics that animals are smarter than we think.
The question is, how much smarter?
My answer is that there are some animals who, like some people, have a form of genius. These animals have talents that are so extraordinary they’re way past anything any normal human being could do even with a lot of hard work and practice.
Who are these animals?
Birds, for one. The more I learn about birds, the more I’m beginning to think we have no idea what the limits to some bird species’ intelligence are. Bird migration is probably the most extraordinary talent we know about right now. Birds have brains no bigger than a walnut, but they can learn and remember migratory routes thousands of miles in distance. The Arctic tern has the longest migratory route we know about: 18,000 miles, round-trip. Some of these birds travel from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again every year.
EXTREME MEMORY
What makes this a genius-level ability instead of just some miraculous ability that’s built into the species, like having wings and being able to fly, is the fact that birds have to learn these routes. They aren’t born knowing their species’ migratory route; it isn’t hardwired. Moreover, they learn the routes with almost no effort at all. Many migratory birds have genius-level learning abilities when it comes to migration.
There’s a good movie about these birds called Fly Away Home, based on the story of Bill Lishman, the man who, along with his partner, Joseph Duff, taught a bunch of Canada geese to follow him in his ultralight airplane. They created the project because they wanted to try to save the whooping cranes, which are on the verge of extinction. Operation Migration, the charity Bill Lishman founded, says there are only 188 whooping cranes left in the world. They’re all in one big flock, which makes them even more vulnerable to extinction.
Up until Bill Lishman came along people were trying to save the species by raising baby whooping cranes in captivity. But it wasn’t working because when the babies were brought up without any migrating adults to teach them the routes, there was no way to reintroduce them to the wild. They didn’t know how to migrate, so when winter came they would just stay put and die in the cold.
Bill Lishman had the idea of teaching the whooping cranes to migrate by leading them along a migration path in his ultralight plane, a small one-person airplane that can fly as slowly as 28 to 58 miles per hour. He started out working with Canada geese, because geese aren’t in danger of going extinct. Any golfer on the East Coast can tell you there’s no goose shortage. As a matter of fact the goose poop problem has gotten so out of hand that some Border collies are getting a brand-new job working goose patrol at golf courses. That’s good, because Border collies need a job. They get antsy living a life of leisure.
Pretty quickly Mr. Lishman managed to show that you could teach geese to follow a human in an ultralight airplane, and you could teach them a four-hundred-mile one-way migration route flying it just once. No human being could memorize a four-hundred-mile route across unmarked open terrain after traveling it just one time. Bird migration is an extreme talent.
After he knew he could do it with geese, he switched to sandhill cranes, which are related to whooping cranes but aren’t endangered. In 1997 he led seven sandhill cranes from southern Ontario down to Virginia, a four-hundred-mile trip one way. The cranes spent the winter in Virginia and then, one day at the end of March, they went out for their daily foraging and didn’t come back. Two days later Mr. Lishman got a call from a school principal up in Ontario who said he had six big birds in his schoolyard entertaining the students! Six of the seven birds had made it the whole four hundred miles back to Canada, after having flown the route only once in their lives, and in the opposite direction. They ended up thirty miles away from where they’d been fledged.
Lots of animals have extreme memory and learning abilities in one realm or another. Gray squirrels bury hundreds of nuts every winter, one nut in each burial spot, and they remember them all. They remember where they hid each nut, what kind of nut it was, and even when they hid it. They’re not just marking the spots some way, or finding the nuts by smell, which is what a lot of people probably assume. I read a gardening column the other day where a woman wrote in asking whether there was any way to keep squirrels from digging up her garden. The columnist answered that squirrels forget where they’ve buried their nuts, so they dig everything up. That is not true. Squirrels remember exactly where they buried hundreds and hundreds of nuts. Dr. Pierre Lavenex at the University of California, Berkeley, a researcher who studies memory in gray squirrels, says, “They use information from the environment, such as the relative position of trees and buildings, and they triangulate, relying on the angles and distances between these distant landmarks and their caches.”1
No human can do that. A normal human can’t even remember where he put the car keys half the time, let alone where he buried five hundred individual nuts. How long would a person last if he had to eat buried nuts for food? He wouldn’t get through the winter, that’s for sure. “People can do this [i.e. triangulate landmarks to find the precise spot where they’ve buried something] for a few sites,” Dr. Lavenex says, “maybe six or seven, but not for nearly as many as squirrels do.”
Most animals have “superhuman” skills like this: animals have animal genius. Birds are navigation geniuses, dogs are smell geniuses, eagles are visual geniuses—it can be anything.
EXTREME PERCEPTION AND ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
Many animals also have extreme perception. Forensic dogs are three times as good as any X-ray machine at sniffing out contraband, drugs, or explosives, and their overall success rate on tests is 90 percent.
The fact that a dog can smell things a person can’t doesn’t make him a genius; it just makes him a dog. Humans can see things dogs can’t, but that doesn’t make us smarter.
But when you look at the jobs some dogs have invented for themselves using their advanced perceptual abilities, you’re moving into the realm of true cognition, which is solving a problem under novel conditions. The seizure alert dogs are an example of an animal using advanced perceptual abilities to solve a problem no dog was born knowing how to solve. Seizure alert dogs are dogs who, their owners say, can predict a seizure before it starts. There’s still controversy over whether you can train a dog to predict seizures, and so far people haven’t had a lot of luck trying. But there are a number of dogs who have figured it out on their own. These dogs were trained as seizure-response dogs, meaning they can help a person once a seizure has begun. The dog might be trained to lie on top of the person so he doesn’t hurt himself, or bring the person his medicine or the telephone. Those are all standard helpful behaviors any dog can be trained to perform.
But some of these dogs have gone from responding to seizures to perceiving signs of a seizure ahead of time. No one knows how they do this, because the signs are invisible to people. No human being can look at someone who’s about to have a seizure and see (or hear, smell, or feel) what’s coming. Yet one study found that 10 percent of owners said their seizure response dogs had turned into seizure alert dogs.
The New York Times published a terrific article about a woman named Connie Standley, in Florida, who has two huge Bouvier des Flandres dogs who predict her seizures about thirty minutes ahead of time.2 When they sense Ms. Standley is heading into a seizure they’ll do things like pull on her clothes, bark at her, or drag on her hand to get her to someplace safe so she won’t get hurt when the seizure begins. Ms. Standley says they predict about 80 percent of her seizures. Ms. Standley’s dogs apparently were trained as seizure alert dogs before they came to her, but there aren’t many dogs in that category. Most of the seizure alert dogs were trained to respond to seizures, not predict seizures.
The seizure alert dogs remind me of Clever Hans. Hans was the world-famous German horse in the early 1900s whose owner, Wilhelm von Osten, thought he could count. Herr von Osten could ask the horse questions like, “What’s seven and five?” and Hans would tap out the number 12 with his hoof. Hans could even tap out answers to questions like, “If the eighth day of the month comes on Tuesday, what is the date for the following Friday?” He could answer mathematical questions posed to him by complete strangers, too.
Eventually a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst managed to show that Hans wasn’t really counting. Instead, Hans was observing subtle, unconscious cues the humans had no idea they were giving off. He’d start tapping his foot when he could see it was time to start tapping; then he’d stop tapping his foot when he saw it was time to stop tapping. His questioners were making tiny, unconscious movements only Hans could see. The movements were so tiny the humans making them couldn’t even feel them.
Dr. Pfungst couldn’t see the movements, either, and he was looking for them. He finally solved the case by putting Hans’s questioners out of view and having them ask Hans questions they didn’t know the answers to themselves. It turned out Hans could answer questions only when the person asking the question was in plain view and already knew the answer. If either condition was missing, his performance fell apart.
Psychologists often use the Clever Hans story to show that humans who believe animals are intelligent are deluding themselves. But that’s not the obvious conclusion as far as I’m concerned. No one has ever been able to train a horse to do what Hans did. Hans trained himself. Is the ability to read a member of a different species as well as Hans was reading human beings really a sign that he was just a “dumb animal” who’d been classically conditioned to stamp his hoof? I think there’s more to it than that.
What makes Hans similar to the seizure alert dogs is that both Hans and the dogs acquired their skills without human help. As I mentioned, to my knowledge, so far no one’s figured out how to take a “raw” dog and teach it how to predict seizures. About the best a trainer can do is reward the dogs for helping when a person is having a seizure and then leave it up to the dog to start identifying signs that predict the onset of a seizure on his own. That approach hasn’t been hugely successful, but some dogs do it. I think those dogs are showing superior intelligence the same way a human who can do something few other people can do shows superior intelligence.
What makes the actions of the seizure alert dogs, and probably of Hans, too, a sign of high intelligence—or high talent—is the fact that they didn’t have to do what they did. It’s one thing for a dog to start recognizing the signs that a seizure is coming; you might chalk that up to unique aspects of canine hearing, smell, or vision, like the fact that a dog can hear a dog whistle while a human can’t. But it’s another thing for a dog to start to recognize the signs of an impending seizure and then decide to do something about it. That’s what intelligence is in humans; intelligence is people using their built-in perceptual and cognitive skills to achieve useful and sometimes remarkable goals.
INVISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE
By now you’re probably thinking, if animals are so smart, why hasn’t anyone noticed?
First of all, we have no idea what most animals are doing in the wild. Even when people like Jane Goodall have been able to spend years doing close observation of a group of animals in their native habitat, we still don’t learn what the animals think they’re doing, or what they’re communicating to one another about what they’re doing. That’s why it’s always a surprise when a crow like Betty spontaneously bends a wire to make a food hook, or a gray parrot like Alex suddenly spells the word “nut.” Just the other day I met a lady at a conference who told me about another super-smart bird living in a Florida hotel. This bird is a macaw who invented a new word—crackey—to signify either cookie or cracker. Those are the two foods his owner gives him as treats, so apparently the macaw decided that cookie-cracker is a food category unto itself, requiring its own word, which he created by putting “cookie” and “cracker” together. He’s right about cookies and crackers; they are a separate category. Cookies and crackers are both treats, not “real” food. I’m guessing that’s what the bird means when he asks for a crackey; he’s probably asking for junk food.
Another gray parrot, N’Kisi, owned by Aimee Morgana in New York City, has a vocabulary of over five hundred English words. She uses the present, past, and future tenses and once used the word “flied” to mean “flew.” She called the aromatherapy oils Aimee uses “pretty smell medicine.”
The point is, we don’t know what animals can and can’t do. The fact that we’re constantly being dumbfounded by brand-new abilities no one had a clue animals possessed ought to be a lesson to us about how much we don’t know.
IF ANIMALS ARE SO SMART, WHY AREN’T THEY IN CHARGE?
I think the reason researchers don’t take this lesson more to heart is that most people just naturally assume, without stopping to think about it, that if animals were as smart as humans or smarter, they’d have more to show for it. Where are all the animal inventions? That’s the big question.
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 classifications 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.
SMART, BUT DIFFERENT
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.
LUMPERS AND SPLITTERS: WHAT MAKES ANIMALS AND AUTISTIC PEOPLE DIFFERENT
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.
THE HIDDEN FIGURES TALENT
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 compared 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.
I thought about those employees not too long after 9/11 when news reports started coming out about how hard it is for people who work as luggage inspectors to spot weapons on their video screens due to clutter. If you’re a normal human being and your job is to sit in one place all day long staring at a video screen, pretty soon you’ll have trouble separating out the form of a weapon from all the other junk that’s packed in people’s bags. The screen is too cluttered, and everything blurs together. But that might not be a problem for autistic people, and I think airports ought to try out some autistic people in that job.
I think we’re letting a huge amount of talent go to waste, both in people who aren’t “normal” and in animals who are. That’s probably because we don’t really understand what animals could do if we gave them a chance. We’re just leaving it up to animals like the seizure alert dogs to invent their own jobs.
AUTISTIC SAVANTS
I mentioned at the beginning of this book that I think animal genius is probably the same thing as autistic savantry. I’ve felt this way for years, just from being around animals and observing them, and I mentioned it in Thinking in Pictures. But I didn’t know why autistic genius and animal genius looked so similar to me, or whether autistic genius and animal genius might come from the same difference in the brain.
It’s not that autistic savants and animal savants do the same things. Animal savants show brilliance when they learn complicated migratory routes after just one flight or discover how to perceive seizures before they happen. Autistic savants do lightning-fast calendar or prime number calculations inside their heads, or become artistic savants who can make almost perfect line drawings of buildings and landscapes from memory, often starting from a very young age—and using perfect perspective. That’s especially amazing, because even great artists have to be taught how to draw using perspective. A four-year-old autistic savant just naturally knows how to do it.
Even though autistic savantry and animal savantry seem so different on the surface, the one thing that did jump out was that a lot of these talents involve amazing feats of rote memory. Autistic people are known for their ability to memorize whole train schedules, the capitals of every country in the world, and so on. Autistic savants are the only people who seem like they could give a Clark’s nutcracker a run for its money when it comes to remembering where they hid thirty thousand pine seeds. But beyond that, I didn’t know why animal genius felt so familiar to me.
Then in 1999 Dr. Allan Snyder, a psychologist at the Centre for the Mind at Australian National University, published a paper that laid out a unified theory of all the different savant talents. If his theory is right, it probably explains animal genius, too.7 Dr. Snyder and his co-author, Dr. D. John Mitchell, say that all the different autistic savant abilities come from the fact that autistic people don’t process what they see and hear into unified wholes, or concepts, rapidly the way normal people do.
A normal person looks at a building and his brain turns all the hundreds and thousands of building pieces coming in through his sensory channels into one unified thing, a building. The brain does this automatically; a normal person can’t not do it. That’s why a common drawing lesson art teachers use is to have art students turn a picture upside down and copy it that way, or else draw the negative space surrounding an object instead of the object itself. Turning the object upside down or drawing the negative space tricks your brain into letting the image stay in separate pieces more easily,8 so you can draw the object instead of your unified concept of the object. People are always amazed at how good their upside-down drawings are.
Autistic people are stuck in the pieces stage of perception to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the person. Donna Williams, the autistic woman who wrote the book Nobody Nowhere, says she can’t really see a whole object all at once. She sees a kind of slide show of the object. If she’s looking at a tree, first she might see a branch on that tree, then the screen changes and she sees a bird sitting on the branch, then the screen changes again and she sees some leaves, and so on. Some autistic people have this problem a lot worse than others, and I think it’s possible some autistic people have such fragmented sensory systems that they may be almost blind or deaf. I wonder whether some autistic people are so deprived of coherent sensory input that they are like autistic Helen Kellers.
Snyder and Mitchell say that the reason autistic people see the pieces of things is that they have privileged access to lower levels of raw information. A normal person doesn’t become conscious of what he’s looking at until after his brain has composed the sensory bits and pieces into wholes. An autistic savant is conscious of the bits and pieces.
That’s why autistic savants can make perspective drawings without being taught how. They’re drawing what they see, which is all the little changes in size and texture that tell you one object is closer up and another object is farther away. Normal people can’t see all those little changes without a lot of training and effort, because their brains process them unconsciously. So normal people are drawing what they “see,” which is the finished object, after their brains have put it all together. Normal people don’t draw a dog, they draw a concept of a dog. Autistic people draw the dog.
It’s ironic that we always say autistic children are in their own little worlds, because if Dr. Snyder is right it’s normal people who are living inside their heads. Autistic people are experiencing the actual world much more directly and accurately than normal people, with all their inattentional blindness and their change blindness and their every-other-kind-of-blindness. (Dr. Snyder hasn’t talked about inattentional or change blindness that I know of, but the research on those concepts supports his work.)
Math savants use this same brain difference to do calendar calculations and prime number identification. An autistic savant who can tell you on what day you were born is seeing time as a sequence of seven different days repeating over and over again going back to the beginning of time. They quickly scan back over the pattern until they come to your day.
Normal people don’t experience time that way. To a normal person a month or a year or a decade is one unified time span, not a collection of separate and distinct days. It’s a blur. (Dr. Snyder’s theory is a little more complicated than I’ve been making it sound. He thinks the brain has a processor that divides all incoming data—time, space, objects, and so forth—into equal parts. That’s why an autistic savant can tell whether a number is prime or not, because a prime number can’t be divided.)
Calendar calculation is the hidden figure talent all over again. I believe most or even all of the savant talents autistic people have are variations on the hidden figure ability.
I also believe that most or even all of the savant talents animals have are variations on the hidden figure ability, and in just the past couple of years Dr. Snyder and Dr. Bruce Miller, a physician at the University of California at San Francisco, have supplied some hard evidence that I may be right. Dr. Miller works with patients who have a disorder called frontotemporal dementia in which the front part of the brain progressively loses its functions. In frontotemporal dementia the frontal lobes and the temporal lobes, which are at the side of your head, are affected.9 Neither of these areas is working well in autistic people either, and as I’ve been saying throughout this book, the biggest area of difference between the animal brain and the human brain is that an animal’s frontal lobes are smaller and less well developed than a human’s. Serious frontal lobe damage is worse than being autistic. If your frontal lobes are badly damaged you can have symptoms of practically all the psychiatric disorders—autism, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, severe mood disorders, you name it.
You’re probably going to have at least some autistic symptoms. We know that Dr. Miller’s patients do, because some of them start to develop savant talents. A few of these people have become artists in their fifties and sixties, even winning awards in art shows. Others have developed musical abilities; one patient invented a chemical detector and got a patent for it. When he made his invention he could name only one out of fifteen objects on a standardized word test. A patient who had lost all his language ability designed sprinklers! These patients had sudden-onset talents.
I suspect what’s happening with these people is that all of a sudden they’re able to have the same kind of hyper-specific perception that underlies an autistic savant’s ability to do a calendar calculation or make a perspective drawing without being taught.
Dr. Snyder has now begun to test the proposition that savant talents come from conscious access to the raw data of the brain. When he uses magnetic stimulation to interfere with frontal lobe functioning in his subjects, they start to make much more detailed drawings than they could just moments before.10 They also get better at proofreading. Before he turns on the magnetic stimulation, Dr. Snyder has his subjects read this poem out loud:
A bird in the hand
is worth two in the
the bush
Almost all people look at the poem and say, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
About five minutes after he turns on the magnetic stimulation some of his subjects suddenly read, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the the bush.” The duplicate “the” pops out at them as their left frontal-temporal lobes go down, and they start turning into hidden figure specialists, perceiving detail they didn’t perceive before. One of them even told Dr. Snyder that he felt more “alert” and “conscious of detail.” He was so intensely aware of the details around him that he said he wished they had asked him to write an essay, something he normally didn’t like to do.
THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS
I don’t know whether extreme talents in animals work the same way Dr. Snyder thinks they work in people with autism, but we have a lot of evidence that animals at least see the world in sharper detail than regular people do. I’ve already talked about how important visual detail is to animals, but we also have some fascinating research on ant navigation that goes along with Dr. Snyder’s experiments.
When ants walk through an obstacle course they use landmarks to remember their route the same way people do. If they pass a gray pebble going one way, they’ll look for that same gray pebble coming back.
But there’s one big difference. When an ant reaches a landmark, he does something normal people don’t do. He passes the landmark, stops, turns around, and looks at the landmark from the same spot where he saw it on the trip out.
He has to do that, because to an ant a gray pebble probably looks different coming and going. He has to see the pebble from the same vantage point where he saw it first to make sure it’s still the same gray pebble he saw before. This says to me ants probably don’t automatically combine separate pieces of sensory data into wholes in the same way or to the same degree normal humans do.
For a nonautistic person, a landmark looks the same coming or going. When a normal person sees a big red barn on the way to someone’s house, he automatically sees the same big red barn on the way back. It looks the same to him, even though he’s seeing it from a different side.
That’s because a normal person’s nervous system gets rid of a lot of detail and then fills in the blanks with whatever he expects to see. If he were consciously seeing what’s really in front of his eyes, he’d see a slightly different red barn coming and going, because the south side of a barn doesn’t look exactly like the north side of a barn, and the east side doesn’t look exactly like the west side. Even if the builder designed all four sides to be identical, in nature there’s always a difference in light and shadow.
I do the same thing ants do, which is one more thing that makes me think hyper-specificity is a key link between animals and autistic people. When I drive someplace I’ve never been before I look for landmarks along the road the same way everyone else does. But then when I’m driving back, the landmarks I’ve picked out all look different to me. I have to drive past each landmark until I reach the spot where I was when I first saw it; then I turn around and look at it from the original angle to make sure it’s the same thing I saw on my way out. For animals and for people with autism, different sides of the same object actually look different.
THINKING ABOUT WHAT ANIMALS CAN DO, NOT WHAT THEY CAN’T
I hope we’ll start to think more about what animals can do, and less about what they can’t. It’s important, because we’ve gotten too far away from the animals who should be our partners in life, not just pets or objects of study.
You always hear that humans domesticated animals, that we turned wolves into dogs. But new research shows that wolves probably domesticated people, too. Humans co-evolved with wolves; we changed them and they changed us.
The story of how researchers have begun to piece this together is an example of converging lines of evidence, which is what happens when findings from different fields start to fit together and all point in the same direction. For a long time, the best evidence researchers had about when and how wolves turned into dogs came from archaeological discoveries of dog remains that had been carefully buried underneath humans’ huts. Some archaeologists found dogs and people buried together in the same grave.
Those first buried dogs date back about 14,000 years. Humans had not yet invented farming at that time, but they had the same bodies and brains we do. So it made sense to conclude that primitive humans evolved into modern humans first, then began to associate with wild wolves who subsequently evolved into the domestic dog, in order to serve as working dogs and pets.
But a study by Robert K. Wayne and his colleagues at UCLA of DNA variability in dogs found that dogs had to have diverged from wolves as a separate population 135,000 years ago.11 The reason the fossil record doesn’t show any dogs with humans before 14,000 years ago is probably that before then people were partnered with wolves, or with wolves that were evolving into dogs. Sure enough, fossil records do show lots of wolf bones close to human bones before 100,000 years ago.
If Dr. Wayne is right, wolves and people were together at the point when homo sapiens had just barely evolved from homo erectus. When wolves and humans first joined together people only had a few rough tools to their name, and they lived in very small nomadic bands that probably weren’t any more socially complicated than a band of chimpanzees. Some researchers think these early humans may not even have had language.
This means that when wolves and people first started keeping company they were on a lot more equal footing than dogs and people are today. Basically, two different species with complementary skills teamed up together, something that had never happened before and has really never happened since.
Going over all the evidence, a group of Australian anthropologists believes that during all those years when early humans were associating with wolves they learned to act and think like wolves.12 Wolves hunted in groups; humans didn’t. Wolves had complex social structures; humans didn’t. Wolves had loyal same-sex and nonkin friendships; humans probably didn’t, judging by the lack of same-sex and nonkin friendships in every other primate species today. (The main relationship for chimpanzees is parent-child.) Wolves were highly territorial; humans probably weren’t—again, judging by how nonterritorial all other primates are today.
By the time these early people became truly modern, they had learned to do all these wolfie things. When you think about how different we are from other primates, you see how doglike we are. A lot of the things we do that the other primates don’t are dog things. The Australian group thinks it was the dogs who showed us how.
They take their line of reasoning even further. Wolves, and then dogs, gave early humans a huge survival advantage, they say, by serving as lookouts and guards, and by making it possible for humans to hunt big game in groups instead of hunting small prey as individuals. Given everything wolves did for early man, dogs were probably a big reason why early man survived and Neanderthals didn’t. Neanderthals didn’t have dogs.
But dogs didn’t just help people stay alive long enough to reproduce. Dogs probably also made it possible for humans to pull ahead of all their primate cousins. Paul Tacon, principal research scientist at the Australian Museum, says that the development of human friendship “was a tremendous survival advantage because that speeds up the exchange of ideas between groups of people.” All cultural evolution is based on cooperation, and humans learned from dogs how to cooperate with people they aren’t related to.13
Maybe the most amazing new finding is that wolves didn’t just teach us a lot of useful new behaviors. Wolves probably also changed the structure of our brains. Fossil records show that whenever a species becomes domesticated its brain gets smaller. The horse’s brain shrank by 16 percent; the pig’s brain shrank as much as 34 percent; and the dog’s brain shrank 10 to 30 percent. This probably happened because once humans started to take care of these animals, they no longer needed various brain functions in order to survive. I don’t know what functions they lost, but I do know all domestic animals have reduced fear and anxiety compared to wild animals.
Now archaeologists have discovered that 10,000 years ago, just at the point when humans began to give their dogs formal burials, the human brain began to shrink, too. It shrank by 10 percent, just like the dog’s brain. And what’s interesting is what part of the human brain shrank. In all of the domestic animals the forebrain, which holds the frontal lobes, and the corpus callosum, which is the connecting tissue between the two sides of the brain, shrank. But in humans it was the midbrain, which handles emotions and sensory data, and the olfactory bulbs, which handle smell, that got smaller while the corpus callosum and the forebrain stayed pretty much the same. Dog brains and human brains specialized: humans took over the planning and organizing tasks, and dogs took over the sensory tasks. Dogs and people coevolved and became even better partners, allies, and friends.
“DOGS MAKE US HUMAN”
The Aborigines have a saying: “Dogs make us human.” Now we know that’s probably literally true. People wouldn’t have become who we are today if we hadn’t co-evolved with dogs.
I think it’s also true, though in a different way, that all animals make us human. That’s why I hope we’ll start to think more respectfully about animal intelligence and talent. That would be good for people, because there are a lot of things we can’t do that animals can. We could use their help.
But it would be good for animals, too. Dogs first started living with people because people needed dogs and dogs needed people. Now dogs still need people, but people have forgotten how much they need dogs for anything besides love and companionship. That’s probably okay for a dog who’s been bred to be a companion animal, but a lot of the bigger breeds and practically all of the mixed breeds were built for work. Having a job to do is part of their nature; it’s who they are. The sad thing is, now that hardly anyone makes his living herding sheep, most dogs are out of a job.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I read a little story on the Web site for the American Veterinary Medical Association that shows the incredible things animals are capable of doing, and would do if we gave them the chance. It was about a dog named Max who had trained himself to monitor his mistress’s blood sugar levels even while she was asleep. No one knows how Max was doing this, but my guess is people must smell slightly different when their blood sugar is low, and Max had figured that out.14 The lady who owned him was a severe diabetic, and if her blood sugar levels got low during the night Max would wake up her husband and bug him until he got up and took care of her.
You have to think about that story for only five seconds to realize how much dogs have to offer. Dogs and a lot of other animals.
People always wonder how I can work in the meatpacking industry when I love animals so much. I’ve thought about this a lot.
After I developed my center-track restraining system, I remember looking out over the cattle yard at the hundreds and hundreds of animals milling around in their corrals. I was upset that I had just designed a really efficient slaughter plant. Cows are the animals I love best.
Looking at those animals I realized that none of them would even exist if human beings hadn’t bred them into being. And ever since that moment I’ve believed that we brought these animals here, so we’re responsible for them. We owe them a decent life and a decent death, and their lives should be as low-stress as possible. That’s my job.
Now I’m writing this book because I wish animals could have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do. I think we owe them that.
I don’t know if people will ever be able to talk to animals the way Doctor Doolittle could, or whether animals will be able to talk back. Maybe science will have something to say about that.
But I do know people can learn to “talk” to animals, and to hear what animals have to say, better than they do now. I also know that a lot of times people who can talk to animals are happier than people who can’t. People were animals, too, once, and when we turned into human beings we gave something up. Being close to animals brings some of it back.