If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes

Art, craft and culture require a sophisticated mind. They require language too, to communicate the complexity of those abstract creations and their meaning to our families and wider social group. We cannot know the order by which we acquired these traits, and it might be unhelpful to even think of this evolution in a step-by-step way. The changes are slow, gradual and subtle to get all the pieces in place for who we are today.

We can think about the progress of language acquisition as a child might, which is different from the evolutionary process because the framework required is already in place in a child. Nevertheless, first you name objects – cave lion – and later, you attach action to named objects – approaching cave lion. Next you can associate more detailed and useful attributes – two large cave lions approaching. In a social group, conveying this type of information is essential, just as the calls of a vervet monkey alerting its pals to an eagle are. You are conscious of this situation, and it is useful to know that someone else is – are you aware of the two large cave lions approaching? – because they can further impart useful details that will save you from wasting precious resources – the two approaching cave lions are full cos they just ate Steve.

To imagine the mind of another is key to our cognitive development, and language has to be part of that too, because we have to transfer complex information between individuals and groups. When babies are born, they almost immediately have the ability to recognise faces, most frequently those of their mother and father. Eye contact comes naturally to infant humans. We can test how long their eyes fall upon an object or person, and infer what they are more interested in. Babies prefer open eyes, and over the months of development will recognise different emotions in the faces of others – joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust. They will begin to express their own emotional state in their faces and voices too, which go from simply pooling pain, hunger, tiredness and fear into one category – ‘this feels wrong’ – to the full gamut of human emotions, hopefully at some point in their life. We know that a few animals can read human faces, and maybe even limited emotional states of those humans. Sheep are very good at identifying individual humans. Experiments in 2017 showed they could be trained easily to recognise specific faces – including Barack Obama’s – though shepherds have known this for a while.1 We saw earlier that those very smart Caledonian crows learnt faces that were a threat and ones that were benign, and could remember this information for years. Dogs, as any owner will know, seem pretty good at recognising the emotional state of their human, and in tests, will change their facial expression much more if they know a human is looking at them.

The ability to assess the emotional state of another is mind reading. You are trying to understand what it is that another mind wants or needs. That’s limited if you’re just using non-verbal cues. It also limits the communication to the present, which is something that humans do not do. Of course, beasts think into the future, and recall the past. They think about feeding and reproduction, and the success of their offspring. Birds and other animals, including the squirrel, think forward in time by squirrelling food away for another day, and then have to recall where they put their nuts. Many salmon return to the precise place of their birth, even though they have spent most of their life in the ocean.

These memory feats are not the same as in us. We are extreme mental time-travellers. We think about the past, and not just in a perfunctory or rote-learnt way. Here I am thinking about Steve, my 40,000-year-old human. It’s not so difficult to imagine his thought process when he encountered the cave lion who spelled his demise – ours would be much the same today. But I can also try to imagine what that person was thinking when they sat and carved the Löwenmensch, or one of those bosomy Venus statues. And we can think about the future. Not just what the next meal is going to be, but make plans for my mum’s birthday in July, or what my next book will be. I like thinking about what songs I want played at my own funeral, and hope that the guests will enjoy them.

Leaping forward and backwards in time enables our innate ability to recognise the mind of another conscious being. Consciousness is a poorly defined concept, and means many things to many people, including a sense of self, sentience, an ability to experience or to feel, and other things. Much has been made of the question of whether animals have consciousness or not, but it really depends on what you mean by consciousness. Clearly animals are sentient and experience their environment. Many animals can recognise themselves, and can engage with the mind of another creature within or outside of their own species. Do they have an ineffable inner life? Will we be able to establish a neurological basis of our own consciousness and then compare it to that of other animals? These are all outstanding questions for much more research, and another book.

For now, we can recognise consciousness in another human, even though it is poorly defined, and we often think we see the same in other animals, regardless of whether it is true or not. In fact, we are so sensitive to another consciousness that we imagine it everywhere. Humans are so keyed into seeing faces as representations of a mind that in our fiction we give personalities to animals that fall well outside of any meaningful definition of consciousness – insects, tardigrades, crabs. Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon of seeing faces in inanimate objects – Jesus in a piece of toast, a face on the surface of Mars. Our brains know faces are important, so they recognise the pattern of a face even if there can be no mind behind it. We are also so plugged into other consciousnesses that we detect agency when there is none. It’s extremely useful to attribute agency to dangerous situations and adapt one’s behaviour accordingly. An animal might do this by many means: many mammals are innately repelled by chemical clues in the urine of a predatory fox or coyote; birds are fooled by scarecrows. We’re smarter than birds, but don’t have the noses of rabbits, so we largely rely on visual and auditory cues. Stumbling across the freshly mutilated body of Steve, it pays to think that looks like the work of a cave lion, I must flee! rather than simply acknowledging Steve’s not looking great right now.

Poor old Steve. The result of a mind so highly attuned to others is that like with faces, we attribute a mind to mindless events. A creak in a floorboard as the house cools at night and the wood shrinks is creepy because our brains are instantly trying to detect agency behind this noise, rather than rationally processing the thermodynamics of the situation. I am reluctant to delve too deeply into this, because it is an area only of speculation and not particularly scientific, but it is attractive to think that this might be a significant part of the explanation for the existence of religion. Our minds seek agency from another conscious mind, rather than dumb nature, either living or inanimate. This is a force powerful enough for us to imagine ghosts; it could conceivably also be the genesis of gods.

Mercifully, the full package of our evolution has also equipped us with the ability to override this cognitive short-circuit and seek the real reason why things without obvious agency happen. However we made the gods, with careful thought we can also tuck them away again.

1 Though this experiment seemed silly, sheep are very good model animals for terrible neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s. In some of these types of brain disorders, neurons die and specific functions are lost, including the ability to recognise people’s faces.