Rethinking Thinking: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?

[Music] we humans have always had a sense of what makes us special sure some creatures are stronger faster other creatures have mastered the skies or the seeds but we alone possess intelligence what a piece of work is a man how in reason how infinite in faculties in apprehension how like a god and we the possessors of reason placed ourselves above and apart from other living things that is until Charles Darwin knocked us off our pedestal with his theory that all species even humans are connected to each other through a long history of evolution Darwin believed intelligence also evolved through natural selection and was not unique to human beings some dismissed Darwin's idea of animal intelligence as unscientific bias the reading of human cognition into animal behavior Darwin's Pierre C Lloyd Morgan argued that experiment revealed a more elegant explanation that all animal behavior arose from simple stimulus and response conditioning his ideas influenced generations of animal behaviorists from Ivan Pavlov the BF Skinner [Music] the idea that animals are just stimulus-response machines never really caught on with non-scientists it does seem like this guy is thinking that she is wandering and that this one has a plan and it was evil a young primatologist Jane Goodall helped turn the tide on Morgan's minimalist approach by living with her research subjects she devoted her life to the patient observation of chimpanzees in the wild what she discovered ended the idea that only humans can think I peered through my binoculars I saw a hand reach out to pick a piece of grass and to her amazement that chimpanzee fashioned that blade of grass into a tool pulling it out from the termite nest and picking the termite self with his lips her discovery was earth-shaking up until that moment it was believed that humans were the only creatures capable of tool-making that was what was supposed to make us most unique we were defined as man the toolmaker her mentor Louis Leakey's responds to redefine man redefine to accept chimpanzees as human what science did redefine was intelligence as research began to reveal that human brains functioned in many ways similar to our primate cousins as well as other animals farther and farther from us on the evolutionary tree whales and dolphins use sound to communicate complex ideas sea lions can Brazel logic and crows also make tools octopuses can learn to solve problems when I watch another octopus minions can count and scrub cheese can remember places and past events in some experiments animals outperform us chimps have better short-term memory for numbers than humans so it turns out the smarts we thought to find us are not unique to us at all but don't feel threatened we're still special still at the head of the class it's just a bit more crowded than we thought hello I'm faith se Lee and I thank you I am delighted to be here to answer this question so are we really as special as we think we are and are there are there any kids here yeah okay so for the kids the answer is yes you are special and capable and unique and resilient but for the rest of us I think asking that question can lead to two sort of fascinating and healthy introspection we're going to meet a group of experts and we'll bring them out one at a time first to talk about some pretty amazing examples of showing the remarkable range of animal intelligence they're working on and then once we're all together we'll discuss what it all means we will begin with a woman who has helped refine our understanding of the neurological foundations of intelligence our first guest is a professor of psychology and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University her work has utterly redefined how we understand the basic structure of the brain please welcome Susanna Hercule no puzzle so welcome Susana thank you thank you hiya neared this new way to count the number of neurons in the brain will you tell us about what you did because it has such a delicious name well I turn brains into soup brain do not eat it yes the well it's it's actually it goes something like this you have a brain that is made of lots of cells that are distributed very unevenly in it if you want to figure out how many cells it's made of the usual way to do it would have been to cut it into like very very fine carpaccio and put it under the works but yet again the food I know it works but it's very very very time consuming now it's much simpler if it is a commercial I'll save your time just yet in a blender yeah if you can if you can dissolve it then it becomes much easier to count how many cells it's made of because you dissolve the tissue to solve the cells and every cell remember from biology class every cell has one and only one nucleus so once you dissolve the tissue and you get the nuclei out you can't count the nuclei under the microscope and so your technique was more accurate than anything that in the slicing well it's it's as accurate as the slicing and more of what can be counted with both methods it's just that there's if you're interested in counting numbers and whole structures or in whole brains you're not going to be able to get that number by just slicing the brain you you have to turn it into soup and you can make this soup out of any animal brain yeah actually it also works with any organ okay so what did you find when you use this technique to compare rodent brains with primate brains one of the things well I think the key thing we found is that contrary to what everybody expected a brain is not a brain is not a brain meaning there's not one single way of putting a brain together so let's say you eight two-brains of a similar size and that's these two jars here these so at first sight you'd think these are brains of a similar size they should be capable with doing similar things like say the brain of a cow and the brain of a chimpanzee they have about the same size right but then you realize once you're capable of couching themselves that you realize that one of them is made of this is 50 beads and the other one is made of 1 2 3 I'm not gonna fool them all out but you get you get the idea this is this is 50 new runs and this is 50 neurons and the difference is the way that primate brains were put together is with cells that never really become much bigger so if you have one primate brain that's a small primate brain is with maybe 50 beads is this big and if you have a primate brain that is made of all of these beads that's still the same size so the cells never become bigger so a primate brain that is 10 times bigger also has 10 times as many neurons but if you're not a primate then the more neurons you have the bigger they become hmm so it's a very inflationary way of putting a brain together and just because I don't want people thinking that primates are at the top of the world the the super guys in the block birds can fit even more neurons in the brain of the same size so this is this is this is 50 bird neurons and this is 50 primate neurons so calling someone a bird brain it's not in it it's a compliment yeah it's the greatest thing to kids how we wait but also also are you all does it mean that the the denser the neurons in your brain the more intelligent you are not no so here's here's the thing I don't think so these a brain made of these neurons very tiny here a bird brain will always be much denser than any primate brain and then any mammalian brain right yeah but I can have a prior I can have a bird brain that is made of just these 50 bees it's much denser than a human brain that it's made of all of these right right I say what actually matters and that's a working hypothesis really is simply how many neurons you have especially in your cerebral cortex regardless of the size of the brain regardless of the size of the of the body just think of neurons as your basic information processing units so whatever it is that neurons do the more the the neurons you have in cortex the more you're gonna be capable of processing information you know when you analyzed the human brain you made a discovery that completely overturned received perceived wisdom right everyone everyone had a feeling had it was it was conventional wisdom that there were how many neurons in our brain oh it was a hundred billion neurons that was the magic number 100 billion yeah okay yeah so it turns out that and that's this is what got me started the there was this number supposedly that we had a hundred billion neurons and ten times as many glial cells which you squint your eyes do some poor math and you come up with ten percent of the brain cells or neurons so maybe that's how we only use 10% of our brains which is not true we use the entire brain all the time please I don't know if you can say that about everyone but every single person yes they use all of their brain all of the time just in different ways got it every table genius uses a hundred percent yeah okay so we covered that so so you you challenge this number one hundred billion neurons right so what what happened was I I wanted to find out who said that it's a hundred billion neurons and ten times as many glial cells because you know that might be where this 10% crazy myth idea came from and that's where I started looking for the members who ever say it seemed to me like such a basic fundamental thing neuroscience can do all these super cool fancy high-tech things these days so I figured somebody must know this right how many neurons different brains are made of how does the human brain compare no they didn't and I think it was a combination of we didn't have a method for it but also there was this game of telephone going on where everybody thought that everybody else already knew and that there was this magic number going around we have a hundred billion neurons and I could never find it like I could never find any proper neurons for any other brain so I figured ok I have an idea I might be able I think I know how to get these basic numbers so you made brain soup of a human brain yes and no matter which human's brain you take it will be 100 no no so so there's there's variation ok um there's always variation which is by the way a really really interesting question of its own what is the extent of variation across individuals Yeah right and and by the way we don't have data for humans but I can say that you have mice with very big and very small brains you have mice with lots of neurons or very few neurons the biggest brains do not necessarily have the most neurons so size of the brain is no indication of anything the but the so we realized that you needed we needed to get these numbers and it turned out that well the human brain does not have on average a hundred billion it's a six billion on average plus or minus a little bit and also depending on what you did in college well and also the good good news is the the the the brain the oldest brain that we had in our sample was actually the one with the most neurons it was 91 billion I thought so too so yeah you have you have a range but the important thing about that number about it being 86 not a hundred billion is that once you start looking at other brains and once you start realizing that there are patterns like if you're not a primate the more neurons you have the bigger the neurons are but that there's this predictable relationship and if you're if you're a primate the relationship is something else it's linear then you realize that you can predict how many neurons the human brain should have if it were just a generic primate brain and guess what we are that generic primate with a human with uh with a large primate brain yes so your your conclusion was that the human brain is not very different from other primate brains and this upset a lot of people oh my god yes and you you'd be you'd be surprised because you know people love praising Darwin and saying how right he was and you know you've tried to walk off the line a little bit and people start saying no no no it has to be natural selection it has to be a door when what Darwin said Darwin was convinced that the human brain was just another primate brain in in almost exactly these words he wrote an entire book on that the descent of man men but what happened was that after them I don't know exactly how or when this whole ëthis came of no no humans must be different we have different that the rules of evolution sure yes evolution and scaling and biology blah blah blah but that's for everybody else that's not for us humans we have to be special so you you see a lot of what is done in human neuroscience out there trying to figure out what human brains are like to this day still has to do with figuring out what is it that we have that nobody else does which honestly I think is kind of crazy because I mean nobody here would mistake us for a dog or a chimpanzee so of course there's a number of genes and molecules that are different between us and anybody else but that's gonna be true of any two species that you look at and I don't think we're gonna get much anywhere just comparing what are the genes that dogs have that are different from cats that's not what makes them dogs that's what makes them different from cats so if you compare us to other primates you're not gonna find what makes us human you're gonna find what makes us not a monkey right right but were you surprised at the resistance within the scientific community to your empirical research that I showed the lack of exceptionality on on the one hand I was yes because I had already realized that people have this very large respect and belief for textbooks and if it's written in a textbook then it must be absolute truth and you know I grew up during the military government in Brazil my parents were both rebellious in their ways and we my sister and I were raised to not buy anything simply because we were told that this is the truth and so something that's written in textbook to me is something that's written in a textbook and can be rewritten someday and so there's that respect going on for something that somebody else said already and how dare you say otherwise but on the other hand I never trained to do what I do I did not get a PhD in anatomy it was something else I didn't really have a pedigree at the time I was working in Brazil I did not even have a lab in the in the beginning I was working on borrowed space in a collaborators lab and then out of the blue comes this paper where this luxury lady with lady from Latin America is gonna turn brains into soup yeah I I had comments of people saying this disciplines this is unethical she's throwing away she's dissolving macaque brains and throwing everything away that's wasteful and I had to explain the no it's actually not wasteful I have several freezers full of brain soup in my lab I do not throw anything but but keep all of it we can always use it again there's so many new questions waiting to be asked that we have the material for already stored in our lab all right Susana thank you that's a great start now that we have established our place in the pecking order we're gonna talk to a group of scientists whose work is reshaping our understanding of animal intelligence joining us now is the founder of the wild dolphin project and has been studying a community of Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas for more than three decades she's also a professor of Biological Sciences at Florida Atlantic University and her focus is dolphin behavior and communication please welcome Denise Herzing [Applause] so Denise I need not tell you that this that this idea of communicating and actually talking to animals which I understand you've wanted to do since your child has long occupied a really special place in our in both our cultural and scientific imagination and with our apologies to you here is a short video to help set the stage for the next phase of our discussion talk to the animals it's impossible but it's true it's kind of too good not to be true why is man good he says we're smooth as he is in the case of talking with dolphins the truth has been stranger than fiction in the 1960s neuroscientist John Lilly took a completely immersive approach flooding the first floor of a house with water so that a research assistant could live with a dolphin around the clock for months and teach him to speak English [Music] the conclusion real-life didn't work out as well as fiction [Music] how do you feel when you watch that well science has made a lot of progress since then okay well and you know honestly chimpanzee workers also started trying to get chimpanzees to talk to use English words by shaping their mouths and they just don't have the Anatomy to make those sounds right well neither do dolphins but it just shows you how human centric our approach approach has been to to have them speak not only human language but English of course right right it should be probably trying to teach them Portuguese really most common language would anyone ever design an experiment like those today no I think we're more savvy that we want to really look at their own communication system first to try to understand it and then there have been quite a few interfaces and keyboards designed for many animals actually to be able to bridge the gap right so that's how we would approach it scientifically these days so would you say that the Dolphins failure was actually a sign of our lack of intelligence you know the methods is everything right so methods stem from our view on what we think animals should do could do want to do and yeah it's definitely lack of knowledge about the animal often so you have taken a very different approach to your dolphin research who or what inspired you to head out into the ocean to study dolphins in the wild well Jane Goodall was a model for me she was someone who had gone and planted herself out in the forest to observe chimpanzees in their natural environment and society and we had Dian Fossey looking at gorillas so I chose to go out and try to do it with dolphins because I didn't know anybody who was doing that and I thought well I'm young I'm naive I can do that it strikes me as interesting that the people you name they're all women who were perhaps humble enough to go in to enter into another environment and say baby maybe I'll maybe I'll take your lead to figure out how we can bridge well I think that happened with women anthropologists also it gave a new view on anthropology and from a relationship maybe what are the challenges of studying dolphins in the wild how long do we have so well finding them and we work in the water because I wanted to really find a place I could observe their behavior and sound together on the long-term whether money boat time teamwork all that but that's true of most fieldwork really how do they react when you I mean you've been working with the same group for a while but was there an initiation process where they had to trust you and that's actually not well understood when I talk about my work because so I work in the fairly remote area in the Bahamas and for the first five years I literally anchored our boat and let them check us out five years five years because the idea was that I didn't want to run around and harass them and you know try to chase him around so we we would be on our boat the Dolphins they were kind of known to come through that area and they had been curious about some of the treasure hunting boats in that area but we would just slip in the water when they came by the boat we try to take our little ID photos and and try to sex them their male with the females but we wouldn't see a lot of been really perspectives and then they go on their way and he go back on the boat and then they started showing us so we started moving the boat around and following them to areas where they were doing the behavior and to me that was an investment in their relationship and you've been doing this with this particular group of dolphins for nearly 40 years 35 years 35 years so what are the what are the key signs of dolphin intelligence well that is a big question you know we well how do you measure intelligence right this is the whole discussion of this afternoon but people often say oh dolphins they're so smart right well let's they passed the existing test shall we okay you just turn about brains one of the measures is the physical encephalization quotient brain to body ratio which now we know doesn't necessarily hold true is the only measure but so they rate right under humans for EQ at least in the measures that I'm aware of even above the great eight EQ EQ emotional it no encephalization oh thanks oh great okay yeah not not emotional right you know they do you tools believe it or not there's one place in Australia where they carry a sponge on their little rostrum beak and they'll chase around poisonous fish and save themselves from stinging they can understand artificial languages that humans present them with gesture languages like American Sign Language types and acoustic languages and they passed mirror self-image tests which we've used for chimpanzees and now quite a few other meanings they see themselves in a mirror they recognize them right they'll do exploratory behaviors versus think it's another animal so they pass those tests they're good at problem-solving they can understand abstract ideas like they can watch TV and understand signals which is probably not a great thing but what does that mean that they can watch TV and understand so one of the well-known cognitive labs that was in Honolulu Hawaii for many decades they would teach an artificial language right in real time at the poolside but then one day they put a trainer on TV underwater TV for the dolphins and the trainer would do the gestures and you know this is not three-dimensional anymore right it's a two-dimensional abstract and the Dolphins could figure out what the cue was right away and they did the specific task so and I think that's surely rare so now all the dolphins want iPads oh hi um so so what are the main differences between how dolphins and humans communicate and interact with the world well dolphins are primarily acoustic so they again they live in a three-dimensional world they use sound most the time they're actually blind in front of their you know eyes their eyes are kind of on the side so they don't really have visual information so they use sound to project and get bounce back information so they can make sense of their world so they have really exquisite hearing exquisite production I mean they're mammals in the water basically with some adaptations and they use echolocation right right can you explain what that means sure they basically blow their blowhole they have a few different air sacs kind of like a balloon when you you know go squeaky a balloon thing so they'll they'll produce sounds that will bounce either bounce off the parabolic shaped front of their brain skull their skull and they'll project those sounds out it goes through this fatty structure which people usually think it's their brain but it's a fatty thing called the melon they send the clicks out and it bounces off like a fish comes back and so they're mammals they have inner ears like we do but they don't have external ears right to receive sound so the sound actually goes through their lower jaw and gets to their inner ear which is basically a similar mechanism so they're really acoustic and they're directional so they send out high frequencies ahead low frequencies to the side and they make it really difficult for researchers because they can actually internally focus their sound twenty degrees off so if you're trying to get a head on sound you don't know if you are because they might just be haha sound this way so challenges yeah so one of the ways you address the challenges of communicating with dolphins this huge breakthrough way is the chatbox please tell us about your chat box well most of what we do is really observe record their sounds and analyze their sounds but what many years ago we started noticing that they were really curious about us on a specific level and we thought you know people have done keyboards for dolphins in captivity why don't we make a keyboard for these semi friendly dolphins in the wild who knows you know where could it go so called a chat box it's basically an underwater computer and has a speaker that puts out sounds a hydrophones that receive sounds and then this is the keypad that I will play a specific repertoire of sounds that are already in the system and the idea being maybe we could agree on some sounds between us bridge the gap with this technology be more like a dolphin so we're putting out sounds that label things right so we have toys they play with naturally toys we bring in the water and the idea is that if they want to mimic the sounds which we design the sounds to be mimicked by the Dolphins then we can show them what they can get from it and maybe we could start talking about a piece of Sargassum seaweed or we could start talking about a turtle lit swimming buyer is something like that the idea is to create a very small vocabulary with them potentially and in chat is an acronym stands for it is it's for a cetacean hearing and augmented telemetry ooh that's scary that's a lot of imitations dolphins porpoises whale is ready great so you made sure the word Sargassum right Sargassum is a kind of seaweed the national toy it's a natural toy that they they like to play with okay so you created a dolphin game to see if you could come up with like an agreed-upon dolphin sound that would be like a word SAR gasps well they create the game so this for example is this is a mother and calf this is taro she's about 35 years old in this shot this is her one-year-old copper and this is a game they play with each other we didn't invent the game okay right so this is a game they play so the mom has got the Sargassum on her fluke and she's can see the little caps trying to get at it he's like and so she's trying to learn teach him how to play sarcasm but they do this with us so she just dropped it he got it so this is the game they play and it's fun and how did she do with you she puts on her tailing what ready goes like this so now she's got it on her pectoral flipper and action impetus go dive down into tritak great they like to be chased right so the game is you never get it from really great they're much better at swimming than we are back up yeah but because it was a natural toy we labeled it with a whistle and you gave it a distinct name right exactly Yeah right right which them they hear the whistle so if you had the box on and I had the box on if you wanted that piece of Sargassum for me you would press the key pad for the sarcasm result I would hear it in my ear set and I know you want to circus and I'd give it to you okay so the idea is that they're watching this the dolphins are watching this and if they mimic this sound I would also hear it in my headset and I go oh maybe the dolphin wants a sarcasm so it's a it's a modeling technique that has worked for interspecies kinds of experiment and did it what does it work do they make the Sargassum sound well yes No so once again our technology is kind of like way behind what they are doing so we programmed the computer to the level at which we thought we would recognize they're mimics but they would do things like they mimic the Sargassum was still better be up an octave alright so the computer wouldn't recognize it or it'd be a little delayed and maybe stretched out or something so we're still struggling with actually improving the technology because they're showing us how they want to mimic it right and we're trying to catch up with how they want to do it so they actually are mimicking it it's just that different different frequencies that the chat box wasn't set for correct right how did you figure that out well we went through the data I mean this is after you know three years of data now so so they have all these ultrasonic sounds right this is a spectrogram the lower left corner is showing you what a dolphin whistle looks like and all the other information is this is kind of like a musical score right it's it's pitch vertically and time horizontally and then the brightness of the sound is the loudness but so they're making sounds way above our hearing range so they can do this stuff we don't hear and the computer might not also be trained to hear so I went through all the sound files looked at all the potential mimics and we found mimics in a lot of different places but the computer didn't trigger on them because of our strict maybe a little naive thought of what they might be what they should be doing right right cuz they do this in captivity putting human barriers around technological limitations also yeah I mean we knew they could do that octave jump and all that stuff but sometimes they're just technical barriers also but were you going along thinking they weren't mimicking these words and then all of a sudden during your research you realize they were was it kind of a gratifying once while you'd be in there why are you going it sounds like a minute like we'd all pop up ago was that a minute but then the computer didn't tell us it was a mimic so we're like then we'd go back and look at the the sounds ago look at okay well they were doing the partial mimic that's why the computer didn't recognize that but boy it sure sounded you could almost tell in the water it was mimic but you want the data right you have to have the data you keep saying the word mimic that's probably a careful choice does that mean they're understanding like Helen Keller knowing what water is now so there's so dolphins are great mimics right there they're visual mimics their acoustic mimics they do this in their own communication so you can mimic something without understanding the function of that sound right so first idea is that they mimic the sound and then they're learning the function of what mimicking that sound gives them right yeah it's like your child right there they're comprehending before they're producing words yeah and so they're hearing the word milk in a lot of different contexts right oh here's the milk oh go get the milk from the counter dear do you want the milk so they're hearing the word in a bigger context with activity so that's the ideas that they eventually learn the function of that sound so we have yet to really know if they understand that and the way they would do that is you'd switch toys in the water right yeah and play a different sound a different label for that toy and see if they mimic that or ask you for a toy that you didn't have or had so their ways would be ways of testing it but it's a slow process and these are wild animals right so they have interesting lives without us wait why there's like a window of time you know we can have their attention and try this so so now thank you Denise now we're going to turn to another incredibly intelligent animal underwater our next guest is well is not that animal underwater our next guest is a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College where he runs the biomimetic and cognitive robotics laboratory and studies octopuses among other creatures please welcome Frank Grasso okay so hello you know so we're now going to turn to this completely different almost alien form of intelligence it octopus intelligence really has been called the closest we could come to understanding alien intelligence okay I think I think that's fair and I think the fundamental reason for it going back to the sorts of things that Suzanne and have been talking about is that the structure of their brain is just fundamentally different yet they interact with the world in a way that's similar the way that we interact with it so they have a structurally very different brain and bit body that's very very different but they're actually able to interact with the world even though their brain doesn't have like a neocortex or anything like that that we would find familiar when we think about human brains and I think you've brought a friend to demonstrate this along with your friends entourage who are your these are your research assistants in the back there we have Hector Suzanne and Maya all Brooklyn College octopus Wranglers and they're gonna make sure that qualia here doesn't get into any trouble while we because we don't want any King Kong episodes here right so this octopus is named qualia this octopus is named qualia and we've got some things we're gonna ask qualia to do but I want you to understand that this is a very intelligent animal and he may just have a little pout and decide to hang out in the corner but happily we've got wonderful cameras here so at least you will be able to see an octopus maybe there he is back there can we get the camera in to get a look at qualia and you know qualia is a he is that right actually you know okay just checking so we with this species long to postpone macula ladies we can't know until after we after they die and we look inside but one of the most important things you can see about qualia here are his or her suckers and a huge portion of the octopus brain is actually distributed inside of his arms or her arms so he has a central brain and then a distributed brain that works around the suckers and controls all of them the first thing we're going to do is we're going to see how motivated quale is so a Hector and Maya will you mind taking off the lid so we're gonna supply a crab this is like candy for many octopuses and so perhaps qualia will get very excited you can see on qualia beginning to move around inside of the tank there now if you watch qualia if she begins or he begins to get aroused he may change colors darken put on a body pattern and why would call you change colors well you know we could talk about animal emotions we don't know if these animals have emotions but it is a reflection of the animals internal states you see their reddish dots beginning to appear there on the surface right the animal has control with its brain of thousands literally thousands of little color packets that it can turn on and off at will to blend into the background and obviously he's controlling or she's controlling herself but I don't think qualia is particularly motivated now okay let's let's give qualia moment and and let's back up will you tell us where where octopus is kind of sit on the evolutionary tree with respect to mammals sure so the common ancestor of mammals and octopuses or cephalopods the group that they come from 505 million years ago and so they're the first cephalopods were like a hundred million years ago but the branching was five hundred and five million years ago before there were even bony fishes there were creatures that could be considered like cephalopods basically dominating the Seas and so they don't have bones in their bodies they don't have muscles that control those bones instead a way that they interact with the world is to have their bones of substitute muscle for bone and pull muscle against muscle to reshape the body so an octopus can extend its arm the way we can but then it can stretch and reshape the arm dick become as long as it needs to reach out for something up to about doubled its length so they can do this they can reshape their body so they can fit through small spaces and going to the sorts of things that Suzanne has talked about a lot of the the brain might be devoted to just motor control for this real the bizarre way of interacting with the world so evolutionarily they are very ancient very different from us and how far back split without a common ancestor the common answers goes back five hundred five million years ago and they've been evolving for five hundred and five million years with this body and this brain plan which is fundamentally different from ours and as I mentioned before the really wonderful and amazing thing is that they interact with the world in the same way that we do give us some examples because that points to their and that demonstrates their intelligence right I think so I think it does so you could give an octopus a novel object like a jar which it in this evolutionary history it hasn't had exposure to and it can learn how to move its arms and its suckers and coordinate them to be able to open that jar and get at the contents and are you the person who decided giving an octopus a jar I mean is does this happen in your lab a jar it does happen in in my lab and the earliest studies that demonstrated this were here's a video of it right she's still quality okay it's a quality beautiful yes probably is look at the body patterns on her or him and the let's go through she's moving around did she eat the crab not yet and I have a feeling that she is Jesus he's not really shy right now but I think she might be a little disoriented with all the lights and things so so do you think now is not the time to ask her to open a jar should we wait should we give her him on that you know what I think we should do is we'll keep the conversation going but we'll ask Maya and Suzanne to put two jars in we're gonna do a little experiment here there is a jar here that she has been exposed to before and she may feel comfortable in opening and then there is a jar that's completely novel so we're doing an experiment Maya can you indicate which one is the familiar jar and which one is the unfamiliar jar so the ones a black top it's kind of narrow it's narrower yeah and everybody you can pay attention to me but you can also pay attention to qualia go ahead and oh please you're not gonna pay attention to you all the quality is in there with a jar the thing the thing I want to tell you it could take a while the thing I want to tell you is that the what you get to grab okay so we wanted to give her a crab what just to like give her a reward in the beginning we're wingin ah that's right give her a sense that this is an environment that's safe for her okay and you know if she it also indicate her mood and so she's she's probably a little disoriented being here but she was oriented enough to be able to to take this crap which is great so I was gonna say we'll just let that run and when she chooses to take the bottle maybe you'll see that while we're talking and the thing is go right ahead Maya there is air inside the bottle and a crab so she should be able to see in the glass but you will know that she has opened the bottle if you see her air bubbles rising so when Quaglia was first given a jar she she had never seen one before nor witnessed another octopus do this that's right and we have a video of the first try of an octopus that actually did this that we can cue up and play and you'll be able to swatch the octopus solve the problem how long does it take well it's just a few seconds actually and it's it's it's you've got to watch closely because it's a flurry of arms and suckers so there is an older octopus in the sense of a couple of years ago and their first try and as my childproof pill bottles that's the next experiment notice the black spot on the side there with the blue blue rings inside that is the reason it's called by macular these that's actually a nice pot there's another one on the other side of the animals body it can use to fool the predator into thinking that it's much larger than it is deception right now octopuses okay and I looked it up it's octopuses because it's a Greek word and not octopi right right octopuses can use tools we have this great video Oh calling us really check it under crab out do you do you think we should wait and see what she does or should we look at the video of an octopus using tools you think she might act fast she is moving like actually the crab has her attention okay but this could take quite a while as I told you she's under she's under a really unusual set of circumstances let's let's go ahead with the with the video she's a diva I love it oh if you look underneath her web you'll see she has the crabs still there she hasn't eaten it she can carry the food around with her I've had I ought to pose take 50 crabs and keep it underneath for later on 5050 all right then we should run the video yeah let's run the video please let's see the video look at this is like me coming from Trader Joe's so this octopus is carrying two half coconut husks and has kept it with him or her this is in the field obviously not in the laboratory look at the coordination of the arms using it suckers to hold the two halves of the coconut husk together and she brings us around with her as a sort of home and watch how she can use her suckers so and her arms now this is not something that you would think she would have had experience with this is probably what we would call an innovation that not all members of this species of octopus octopus anemia assignee ax do this but individual animals innovating be haters producing novel behaviors novel ways of using objects and the activist saw these shells and thought I can use them to protect myself I don't know if that's what it's thought but certainly certainly it represents a kind of planning and certainly a use of resources for a long time the ideas about intelligence were human beings use tools and nothing else do nothing else does and it was humans have language and nothing else does and the problem with that is it isn't very scientific its intelligence is that thing that humans do using tools is that thing that humans do and when you define it that way you aren't able to investigate it other than looking at humans and saying they're using tools right when you have a thing like this you have an example of tool use and it's an example that another species with a completely alien brain is using a tool now we can argue now about the definition of tool use but then we have to figure out what the heck is going on with this octopus but I I see what I'm doing which is so typical of humans were saying oh it smart because it does something we do but there's something octopuses do which we can't do camouflage that's right we talk about that please that's so fascinating so I mentioned quality is chromatophores and there were millions of them can we see quality on what we're talking about her just just in case anything happens okay go ahead okay and the wonderful thing about this is that this is a system that's controlled by the brain you guys have heard of chameleons right chameleons change colors and match okay match their background that's done hormonal II and it takes a long time in a few milliseconds qualia can send neural impulses out from her brain to reshape her body and to recolor her body to blend in with the background or to communicate with other animals by being high contrast having a high contrast pattern can we see the video watch this now try to find the off everybody spot the octopus you've had practice with qualia and so the animal was blending into the background by changing its color to match the algae it was on but also reshaping its skin to match the pattern of the algae now what you have to recognize in terms of intelligence that is is the animal looked at the world shaped its body to do that and then thought what would a predator be seeing when it's looking at me it wasn't just mirroring the background it was sitting on it was projecting an image of what it might let me use the word imagine that a predator would be seeing now this could be something that was built in by evolution or it could be something that is innovated on individual cases by the individual animals but no matter what the animals body is built to support this and the animals brain in parallel controls millions and millions of parts in an instant in an instant and can change them it will to do those things and we're gonna hear a little bit about that with our next our next guest because that collective behavior sort of thing where many small parts have a set of simple rules that are coordinated is exactly what's happening inside of the octopuses skin and brain and side of the brains of dolphins and inside of just about every mammal that exists I love you for giving me my Segway that's so eloquent it's a good but before but before we go to our next guest I think the mic dropped with the octopuses and their can instant camouflage is that aren't they colorblind yes you're exactly right so they don't even know what colors they need to turn or what colors they can turn so some being scientists I'm a little more conservative what we know is that there are no visual pigments in the octopuses eye that match color they all just basically have one kind of photo pigment but what they do have is the capacity to see polarized light and so it's very likely that their brains are able to interpret the patterns of light that come in through a combination of polarized light and then light intensity and contrast as a way of arranging their skin to do that but the reason that they probably do that is an evolutionary story the ones that figured out that trick could survive being eaten by fish so their brains evolved to fool the eye of a fish which is essentially a human eye their brains have got a little bit of our brain built into it as a defense against predators like us Frank thank you qualia thank you you can continue to have your moment over there our next guest last but not least is a professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology where he directs the swarm lab he's a biologist who studies collective behaviors in slime mold army ants elephants and robots please welcome Simone Gagne [Applause] [Music] Simonne I don't know if you notice this but I just love that your word cloud just has this gigantic slime mold comes out of the audience when you're introduced I love it we're going to move to a totally different kind of intelligence now as as Frank so eloquently uh sure distort the strange and startling intelligence of swarms and collective behavior but before we go there Simone has asked us all to pause a moment and consider puppies it's really quite hypnotic it's amazing is that in real time do they move that fast I think this one is sped up that's just that's just amazing he works all the time I usually play twice because the audience always ask for it again yeah so these families Ramone are undeniably cute a great way to make an entrance but but why is this puppy pinwheel a good place to start when we're talking about the intelligence of swarms well it's probably the best way to explain something we call self-organization the CID that simply through the interactions between the puppies in this particular case a puppy pushing a puppy pushing a puppy pushing a puppy a sort of collective organization it sounds like a nursery school yes so it's it's natural organization its self-organization it emerges from the interactions between the puppies without any sort of central control there's nobody in charge in the puppy group there's no like puppy boss that is essentially telling all the puppies to turn around right so the reason that behaviors exist it's not in this particular case probably doesn't have any adaptive reason but it's just because they are pushing each other and the physical force is just transmitted from puppy - puppy - puppy and come back to the first puppy and it keeps going and going and going it's way I mean it's so distractingly cute but it's really it's really efficient right well yes I mean it's it allows the group to coordinate its behavior or to synchronize in this particular case at a scale that is much bigger than the scale of the individual itself right you could imagine doing these things on on a puppy ball that's like 10 miles diameter as long as you have enough puppies and enough food this thing will keep working right and so the beauty of that simple principle it's a simple interaction in spots if you like is a physical interaction is that these can propagates of a very large scale and organize the group of a very large scales and so how does this principle of self-organization relate to your research into army ants well so the research I do essentially is trying to understand the intelligence above the intelligence if you want so the we have a lot of intelligence organisms and might not be as intelligent has worked up but they have capabilities of doing some pretty smart behavior for creatures with 200-300 thousand neurons but what makes them super efficient nature is this ability to coordinate their behavior across the entire colony so while each individual has a very small number of neurons as a collective the colony has a lot of computing power and they can achieve that through the self-organization principle so this idea that by interacting with each other and modifying each other's behavior ever so slightly and these propagating to the entire colony you can reach a very high level of organization without requiring an architects or boss or someone with enough brain power to organize the entire colony so when someone says just how smart are ants they're not they're not like an ant and then tis is quite stupid so good in a French accent yes yes yes when you put ants together they are so as a whole they actually are capable of achieving that in solving problems that are much bigger than one any single ant could be able to solve itself but how do they know what to do they don't the queen isn't even in charge now the queen Helsley I mean the role of the queen is is is to pump up eggs and new a new workers for the colony so it's the equivalent of the reproductive organs in an organism it's the equivalent of the what the reproductive organs the reproductive organs sorry for my French happen many times I love it um so okay so so they don't know what to do so how does stuff get done so they know what to do locally right they perceive some information in their surroundings and they use that information to decide what to do next but they don't have a global picture of what's happening at the colony level right a single ant is not capable of gathering all the information and and processing all that information that is happening at the colony level by the same way that you don't know what's happening in Los Angeles right now you don't have that information yet you here behaving based on low Hue's that you receive from the environment so each ant is behaving like this but through evolution the way they've learned to react to these cues in particular the social cues the social information they receive from other ends as how do they receive that information depends the the use tactile cues they touch each other you can see them drumming was there Anthony on each other's head it's very cute they used a lot of yeah I can do that they also use a lot of pheromones so smells essentially that carries some information and tell us what's going on here no these are means so these ants that you find in Central and South America and they are migratory ants unlike other ends that have a fixed nest and then forage around that nests these ends actually every night they pack up the entire colony which can be some time a million individuals move it throughout the forest to 300 meters away and then rebuild their colony from there and in order to facilitate the movement of this huge army of ants right it's a million ants is like the equivalent of the city of Philadelphia or something like this they have this give you adaptation where they capable of forming these bridges this ladder by attaching to each other and allow them to span gaps along their way and allow them to shorten their path to their next destination but you're not saying that because the individual ant doesn't get to that gap and say you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna stop here and make a bridge with all my with all my colleagues yeah your company right right does that happen so what we think is happening here it is when an ant arrived next to a gap it has to slow down right tom will fall and but the ants coming behind don't slow down essentially this they see an end in front of them and you step over it and that tactile signal is all they need the soul that the ants it's that under to know that he has to stop and stop moving right and so the the when you win when you've done start building these bridges essentially the only rules they have is as long as someone stepping over me I don't move that's all they need to know to be able to build these things and then we've done mathematical model in computer model that shows that that's all we need to produced these behaviors and and what's happening here so in this particular video so you have to imagine is actually a horizontal surface just film from the top the ends we forced the ends to go on a short cut deviation along the trail but normally that trail would be straight here and we forced that deviation along the trail and then they start building a bridge at the top of that sort of v-shape and then slowly they're going to move the bridge down that v-shape short cutting the deviation that we have imposed I don't know if you can see this slow but it's present and so you can take or one can take a certain kind of scientists can take all of this kind of movement I wouldn't call it's not called decision-making right these patterns I don't want to friend here we go wait but this how's this this benign these patterns of behavior it can be turned into a mathematic can be turned into a mathematical equation yeah so a lot of the work we do is we go to the field this was filmed in Panama this is studied in the forest we bring this back to the lab we studied individual behaviors and then we turn this into computer program algorithm and then we can show that these algorithm the simple decision-making rules that they have is enough to reproduce this collective organization at the level of the colony and then we pass this on to engineers and and you know property seized etc and these people use this maths and this this computer program we've created and that adapt them to solve problems that they have about I once interviewed someone from Southwest Airlines who took ant behavior and and applied it to the boarding process believe it or not but that's the kind of stuff we can learn so that there is actually a class of algorithm called ant colony optimization algorithm that I use to actually optimize the past that information or Goods have to take on the network to go from point A to point B so you're trying to find the shortest path between point a and point B on the complex network you use these algorithms and they and define very near optimal solution for that problem that's normally very complicated to solve so can a swarm be thought of as a single collective brain so we use the term super organism when we talk about these systems in the sense that they are organisms made of organisms right an organism is something that can reproduce something that can sense the environment reacts to the environment something that will developed and become more and more complex over time but an colony is the same thing when it's on of having cell as their base unit they have other organisms and so yes we think of that as a sort of an organism made of organisms I mean I'm steering across that susana's jars is it is it almost like the the swarm is one of those jars and the individual ants are like the beads the neurons so so if you want yeah there's actually a like a sort of term that is floating around in the in the community at the moment is called liquid brains liquid brain well the idea is that our brains are solid brains the sense that our neurons are connected physically to each other in this particular case the patch of neuron that is carried by an ant is actually moving and then bumping into other patches of of brains and that creates a sort of fluid processing of information that has different or slightly different properties in terms of competition in the type of competition they can achieve so if intelligence is connected to the number of neurons in a brain as Susanna's research has suggested does this hold true for swarm intelligence are swarms with more members more intelligent so Swan with more members there's something that's interesting and as you increase the size of the Swan is actually you have an increase in the division of labor inside this one so you have individuals that become more and more adapted to particular tasks in the colony and make the colony overall more efficient and achieving all these different tasks they need to to do to survive so instead of having small colony events where everyone has to do a little bit of everything they can specialize in different type of tasks and that makes them overall more efficient so I don't know if there's they become smarter but they certainly become more efficient happens in the brain to the more new ones you have in the brain if everything else remains the same if the overall patterns of connectivity remain the same the more neurons you have what you see exactly that you start seeing division versus what used to be one visual area divides into two visual areas and each of them can do its own thing and and that's the idea that's one of the ways in which you gain functionality as you have more neurons you gain flexibility you gain complexity and you gain diversity through the same kind of analogy with with octopuses because the difference between an octopus and another mollusk is the complexity of the brain even though we don't have a neocortex we have a vertical lobe we get these specialized areas present in the octopus brain that we can identify and say these are specialized for particular types of functions but it's the whole brain of the octopus or the whole brain of the mammal that integrates all of that to produce intelligence as an emergent property and I think it's perfectly fair to think of collections of of organisms as well with specialized functions as paralleling what happens in a brain so we were just talking beforehand it's really fascinating you want to mention the the in vertebrates you have typically like 90% of all the neurons in your nervous system they're all in your head they're in your brain this one thing that has structure that you can call brain and there's hardly anything around in an octopus you have it depends on the size of the octopus but you can have as many neurons in the brain as you have distributed in the arms or actually even more something that we found is as the octopus grows the brain doesn't gain more neurons but the arms gain more neurons so is this crazy distributed system and you can think of a an anthill as as a distributed system as well I love the liquid brain idea because yeah but it's that's the idea that you have these information processing units each one has its own properties let's say its own capabilities and that's what neurons do that's what ants do that's what slime mold cells do and when they come together as when they interact with each other you get this collective self-organizing behavior and that's I I see it very much the same in the brain as the entire like field of complex system are the important thing is not the unit itself is the interaction between the minutes right because that's where the competition that's where the the complexity or the the novelty is emergent is in the interaction between the the parts of the system not right in studying each part of the system separately from the others simple example of that is take a few drops of anesthetic and apply it to a human brain you have a brain that's still made of exactly the same number of neurons they're they're still there they're still alive it's just that they're not they're no longer interacting with one another the same way anymore and your consciousness just goes poof you looked gestured to me before and said you didn't want to offend me by saying advance make decisions I don't have any problem of thinking that an ant makes a decision I think they make lots of disease in ants though certainly they have to decide which way to go based on the sensory information that comes in their brains are making decisions but in analogy with thinking about behavior that's a whole other story but just for the record ants have brains that's right like a lot of value ones are actually not in the what we would call the brain there's a lot of neurons a lot of computation that is done in a distributed fashion in polling that's a great see that's right a lot of shared information I'm just gonna go a little bit further before I go back to to to what I was saying I think that if you look at octopus brains and you look at ant brains and you look at vertebrate brains the divergence that I talked about 505 million years ago was about the organization of the brain but the basic building blocks of neurons and the neurotransmitters and the proteins that most fundamental level is what they all have in common and we can think about neurons individual neurons as simply making decisions the inputs come in they make a decision about whether or not to fire this is a fundamental tenant of neuroscience the cool thing that we can be thinking about when we think about your ants and about brains is if you have specialization of regions then you have decision-makers that are custom designed to deal with particular types of information as you said more efficiently so I don't have any problem with a hierarchical organization of decision-making because I think that's what brains do they ask us to fight with each other but it doesn't do you have like outlaw ants oh yeah posse and do something else yeah forget you guys like like eager ants with egos like why do you get to be the clinton plan yeah well there is I mean so it's like something like about fourteen to fifteen thousand known species of ants hope you a few more that haven't been discovered yet and you get every form of organization you get like very small colonies with maybe ten and then you are very large or very large colonies with mediums and meaning I'd be like leafcutter ants the ends we saw before like moving this little leaves the core needs can be 25 millions individuals in a single mess well that's huge but when you look at this smaller colony and the smaller part of the spectrum you have a lot more conflict between the end so some species when the Queen dies the worker starts fighting with each other they become queens we don't call them Queen we call them cameo gates oh it's like Game of Thrones yeah this is like you guys they have a fight with each other and then the winners of the fights get to reproduce while the losers go back to becoming normal workers so there are a lot of conflicts in an ant colony in the same way there are conflicts and you mean societies like says I'm not gonna like let you walk over me and be part of this bridge I'm out of here and then the bridge collapses we don't know that but it's so what we see in these bridges is if you look at the composition so the army ants have sort of four different castes events that are based on their size like like the tiny one the medium one the large one that that runs with the food and then the big one which other soldiers which is only about 2% of the colony so we're not going to talk too much about them but when you look at the composition of the bridge of all the structure that they build comparison to the position of the colony in general there are a lot more small ends of a small one inside the bridge than you have in the rest of the colony and so the question is are these small ants exploited by the larger one or is it it could be also more more simple explanation they are small so they can fit in more small holes and there are most more holes than our Biggles and so the result is that they end up being in this situation more often but overall it looks like the bigger one sort of taking advantage of the ability of the smaller one to build these bridges so I'm gonna help fight here so this was getting at is is there no ant personality well so there's a lot of genetic diversity within an ant colony that's something that most people tend to not talk about at least uh when we talk to the public but a single queen can mate with multiple males and so there's gonna be a lot of genetic diversity and therefore there's going to be a lot of viability in the behaviors of the ends some behaviors are determined by the type of genes you have received and so you can have some colony actually you can have personality the colony level I don't like to use the word personality I prefer to say they are like some different tendencies in their behaviors at the colony level yeah where some colonies are tend to explore more than vironment and others some colony tend to invest more into reproduction like so creating new repetitive rather than foraging you start talking about colonies who have tendencies it sounds a little bit like culture and culture I think in a sense I wanna say Kuchar because there's no transmission to the next generation sorry right it's it's based on the genetic composition of the colony at least that's what we think at the moment when you talk about Cuchillo I think I mean I think you probably would agree with me there's a notion that something is transmitted something that we have acquired and this generation is transmitted to the next generation that's a kind of scientific definition of culture right could you say that there is transmission when when you look at a colony over years is there transmission down the generations within the same colony well to the extent that so the problem here is that because Mosconi is a single queen producing the eggs there's a genetic diversity but there's also a lot of income all of the the sisters in the colony essentially have 50% of the gene in common because they have the same mother and so you can't really distinguish whether this culture that you see is used down to the genes or if it's actually something that has to do with you will have to have exactly the same colony with the same gene starting and then see that they evolved into different directions I'm thinking of things like the ants that cultivate fungi do ants have a short lifespan right so workers the Queen in this colonies can leave like thirty years thirty thirty years wow that's really cool so but the the workers they gotta keep replenishing themselves right I mean I think they substitute each other so is there any evidence that the newcomers learn the job from the previous ones or is tending let's say tending to fungi is just something that they do so in this particular ends a bit special right they are in this particular case there are fourteen sized casts by size and a lot of the what they do is determined by their how they made essentially we have the really tiny one are the only one we can access the fungus garden and then you have this one that specialized with like this massive muscles wrong I mean the most of the head is muscle there's not many neurons left in this guy and they are specialized in cutting especially some cutting the leaves and these are bit special because their morphology determine the function and not necessarily they don't learn but if you look at other species like honeybees or their ant species that don't have this very big difference morphologically you see that as the age actually they tend to change role as the age and the question is always it's it's big debate but we don't exactly know why did we get when we have some ideas some people think it's due to the fat reserves so the bees or the ends that have more fat reserves than to see more inside the nest and take care of the brood etc and the one we are losing fat reserve go out I guess they get hungry or something like this but there's also a lot of genetic determinants when you transition from being a nurse to being a forager or to being a soul etc I'm sorry I'm going too long well I want to I want to jump in here ants and swarms are getting a lot of attention for me and I know but I feel French I feel the waves reason I'm in the middle here you think intelligence we really want to we really want to touch on language and that I'm looking right at your knees because I want to because because you we have you brought along some really interesting dolphin sounds right so can you briefly describe the ways that dolphins use language to communicate sure well we don't call it language first of all okay what do you call it up communication okay and because language at least right now has pretty strict definitions by human human standards of course right you know you have to be able to talk about things out of time you have to be able to recombine sounds to make words that sort of thing so the big thing with animal communication at least from where I sit is is a sound referential or is it graded so referential meaning it refers to something it's on label for something so words are referential a graded system is going to represent emotional or motivational information so I'm talking to you right now I'm using words which are referential but I'm waving my hands my sound my voice is getting louder or more rapid or if you're French really rapid so with don't come back to the swarm little one so with dolphins we they have a certain are we gonna look at some of these slack we have I yes so they have a type of whistle so they make whistles clicks and burst pulses those are the three categories of sounds they make a signature whistle here is a very specific whistle that's unique to an individual it basically functions as their name okay they have other kinds of whistles to but so each dolphin has a name they can broadcast who they are or they can call each other by name right so that's the only thing we know about dolphins that is considered referential right so they have a word and they know each other's names if they could call each other by name by a name yes I did appear so right they also make other types of sounds they make burst pulse sounds which are what's coming up here next to it oh so what are you doing there they sound funny that's it what is a burst post sound you so burst pulse sound is a packet of clicks they're considered social sounds and in this particular slide you see this is a dolphin fight their head-to-head actually it's a they're Republicans on the Left Democrats on the right a guy in the distance is the independent he's deciding which group is gonna join undecided so they have political conflicts right so they're close proximity fighting sounds or social sounds right then they have echolocation clicks which are their sonar these are click they find fish and Edison and they navigate we all know that and the Navy copied them right no not yet just to finish the fourth type of sound then Icahn asked question is are called buzzes and these are basically tightly packed clicks and I felt it [Music] you've been buzzed I had they used to drink courtship but that wasn't my case and and it's the same sound the mothers will use to discipline a calf they'll buzz the cap and hold him down on the bottom if they're misbehaving like a dolphin tame this behavior she said oh you were mr. keen oh I said who knows and then they use that sound to chase sharks away and you can see the shark kind of twitching so it has you know sound goes through tissue and water the same because of the acoustical impedance and so dolphins can feel sound so it becomes a tactile tool for them right so how complex is this is there evidence of dolphin grammar no we are looking for that people have measured their sounds okay so here you have these are three spectrograms the top one is human the middle one is dolphin and the bottom one is human these are our words and that middle one kind of looks like potential structural sounds right what we don't know we don't have a rosetta stone we don't know if they're actually referencing something if they recombine these sounds to make the equivalent of words and that's what we're doing right now is using machine learning to try to figure out if the computer can help us parse and separate small units of sound and look at if they have that part of language which requires you to recombine information to create words efficiently which we then we would call potentially like language or some structure or language like structure do octopuses communicate they're very solitary right yeah so we can look across all of the cephalopods right cuttlefishes squids octopuses and octopuses they tend to leave little own solitary but chromatophores that we talked about can be used to communicate and if we look at the social species like cuddle fishes and so forth they do amazing things with very dramatic body displays like the ice pot that I showed you on qualia just a few moments ago but over the entire body and so they can control those patterns instantaneously and they're a particular displays that say hey I'm ready to mate or hey buzz off or I'm gonna fight you that kind of thing and there are many many of these signals kind of like with the dolphins that we don't know what they're about but they're very distinct and deliberate and not cryptic I have a question for you all right so I read that cuttlefish not only can send each other signals with I'm ready to mate or fight with their chromatophore changes but that they can send those signals to a predator but then disguise other communication through polarization to talk to each other that's right so they're using stealth communication to talk to their comrades meanwhile they're telling the fish that they're not here they're gonna fight or whatever that's pretty cool so you remember I told you that their eyes can actually process right polarized light so they're set up that's all of the colloid cephalopods the ones that I mentioned that's the cuttlefish is they occupy all have all of these abilities they all have essentially the same brain structure the same as if we look across mammals I can find my way around any man the brain because all the structures are in common well a cuttlefish the squid and octopus have very different bodies but their brains are basically the same in organization they just get a little bigger a little smaller in different parts a cuttlefish will run or a squid will come together he'll go side by side you know when they're going to mate and if there's a female here and a male here mal can make a display which is saying hey hey sexy I'm ready to go right and the female can make a corresponding response if there's another male over here the male will divide his body in half and send a threatening display in the other direction like hey falls off I'm ready to fight and and the thing is that when the body shift they actually shift that pattern like they're mentally tracking what the target is where it is in space and it adjusts with social context so the answer is No octopuses we don't have any evidence that they communicate because they're mostly crawling under rocks are looking for crabs it's me right I could tell you about the mating if you want we're gonna get really far from language okay they do not converse they do not converse before they mate whereas table fish and squid have elaborate communication systems that we've only scratched the surface of just as we've only scratched the surface of what we know about dolphins I want to circle back to the word culture so that we started talking about and this idea that culture culture speaks to some kind of animal intelligence and culture scientifically is something is when learning something is passed down through through generations of animals right and Susanna you you have this really fascinating idea about about culture in humans your work found that human brains are not that different from other primate brains so why is it that we ended up being so smart it's a question of culture right so I was just about to jump in and say it and say can I just observe that I'm loving that we're not talking about humans and what humans do so sorry mother thing is it turns out that we we do have something that is distinctive what we do have this very large number of neurons in the cerebral cortex that no other creature has and their simple explanations I think for how come we ended up that way and but really the story is there's there's a pattern and it's not that humans are outliers or special singled out in any way it's simply we have a primate brain and we happen to be the species that has the largest primate brain now there is something that comes along with having more neurons in the cortex that we just realized and that is you get to live longer if you're a warm-blooded so no not talking about ants not talking about about octopus we don't know anything about that yeah I am talking about if you are a warm-blooded animal it turns out that the more neurons you have in the cortex the longer you live and also the longer it takes you in childhood the longer it takes you to reach puberty so think that's the beautiful thing body size has nothing to do with this you can actually show mathematically that body size is not part of the the equation and by the way metabolic rate as well so the what people used to say was that the bigger the animal the more slowly the animal uses energy so therefore the most more slowly damages accumulate to the body and therefore the longer you get to live right it turns out that you can show mathematically none of that matters it really makes no difference what size your body is by the way that's how I got to this because you realize comparing a large sample that if you take a bird a primate and any other mammal of a similar size the bird always lives longer than the primate and the primate always lives longer than the other mammal which turns out to be exactly the pattern that I was talking about in the beginning that birds have more neurons than primates which have more neurons than other mammals of a similar brain size but anyway so it turns out that the you have we have to add that bit to the story of evolution now because as you get mammals with more neurons in the cortex as you get humans with larger brains and more neurons in the cortex however that happens we have the evidence now that indicates that more neurons in the cortex come along with a slowing down of life which means that you're gonna be a child for longer you're gonna hang around your parents you're going to depend on your parents for longer your parents are also going to live longer lives so you get more overlap across generations and all of that now we're extending lifespan from one or two years in a mouse let's say ten years in a cow - what now we're now talking 50 60 70 80 years in a large brained primate right so you start having time and opportunities to learn things that a mouse will never be able to learn although I don't know how many neurons an octopus has but they're so insanely smart in this alien way and they only live for what a year this is the point that I wanted to make they don't have an opportunity for overlapping generations right they they live about a year octopus by macula ladies the largest octopus the Pacific giant octopus will live four to six years think about what a human infant learns in the course of just one gear and what we've seen qualia learning in the course of just its few months with us so there's a kind of accelerated form of learning going on in in these these cephalopods they learn remarkably thing remarkable things how to control this complicated body how to interact with the world and they do it on a very short timescale tell you another thing it's really lucky there are no cephalopods that have gone into freshwater that could be coming up and like living alone Club but but think about the trajectory of learning and we can think about our ants which live even shorter at 33 days or something but the workers most of insects yeah that depends how you see it like a lot of insect they go through this metamorphosis that can actually sometimes take years before they have been introduced going domains during this time right but yeah a worker an ant worker or maybe workers during the summer leaves a month max most of the time it's dies from exhaustion all because the flying or a lot or from just you know play traditions so they don't have opportunities really to require much in the way of memories right they don't have much of a wife what's most insects of a memory that lasts 24-48 hours No [Laughter] yeah you see this kind of rapid learning in every single species I mean that's that's not a property of ants or octopuses or dolphins or humans learning is something that circuits made of neurons do the thing is the longer you have and you have to remember that neurons are forever I mean they're you're you're not substituting your neurons as you go you're stuck with pretty much the neurons that you had decades ago in in our case so as you as you live more and longer and longer lives you really have the opportunity and the potential to start coming up with new solutions and that new solutions to problems are what we call technology and you not only you have the opportunity and the need as you run into more and more problems as you lead longer lives to generate new technologies as you overlap with who came before you and with who comes after you you get to transmit that technology you get to pass it on so not only you get lots of neurons you get to live a long time and and shape those neurons yourself into something else you get to participate in the shaping of the the brains that come after you which by the way is why we have to go to school we need the opportunity of systemic transfer of information yeah of exposing our brains to the brains of those who came before us and then someday in the future doing our part of transferring what we learned to the brains that come after hours I feel confident that I speak for just about everybody that I'm sad that we have to wrap this up very very soon not least because we now know qualia has to get to her retirement home but very nice it's very nice thank you there's so many fascinating lessons you've left us with tonight I mean starting with brains brain size doesn't matter this this idea denisa that you you have helped us understand with your research which is like we we can't limit the range where we're looking for animal intelligence right I mean quite literally with you the frequency is higher and lower than we may ever understand right now and and with both octopuses and and swarms we have to just broaden our notion of what intelligence is and what a brain might look like we now we're all walk out of here saying liquid brain I think so so I just this is a tall order but but if you each could could as pithily as possible sort it right sort of maybe just circle back to where we started it from your individual points of view just how special are we what do you think who wants to begin that whilst dirt yeah of course I think humans have unique qualities like every species does and every species is probably intelligent in its own environment right because of what we're talking about but in humans you know we're great at modifying our environment we have language which is still yet to be looked at with other species seriously um but yeah I think I think we are unique but that doesn't mean we're the only ones that are unique or special I take an evolutionary perspective I think that all the species that exists today have evolved for as long as we have and so every one of them is unique right know as long as long as we have right we all have a common ancestors even the cephalopods and I had a common ancestor five hundred and five million years ago let's not go there that's a long time I'm trying to get this done quite quickly but but but the idea is that a human kind of like what you were saying is uniquely evolved to be as intelligent as it needs to be and when we think about intelligence in a unitary form and we use a human standard to say that's what intelligence is we miss them because even amongst the people we know some of us are better at learning languages some of us are better at learning gymnastics we have different intelligences within us and I think what we should be doing is coming up with an idea of what intelligence is and then looking for it in general across the diversity of species to really understand what our intelligence is because it would put it into perspective you've said everything so I'm gonna talk about the next problems for Humanity is right we have evolved in small groups actually as small and so gatherers troops and but we are the only species on earth that has reached the point of starting as a small species evolving as a small group species and now we reach the point where we have millions and millions and millions of interactions every day and our brains are yet evolved to process that kind of information we see all the problems with that right right now in our societies where force information spread extremely quickly well that kind of thing does an opinion and colony for instance or not as well and so the next evolutionary thing that our brain has to do or kuchi us to do is evolve the mechanism to defend ourselves again if problems that is caused by the rapid evolution into large large societies that is kind of unique I think in the history of life how special are we we're not we're aware one we're we're one more speak biologically we're one more species biologically we are a large brain primate the larger brain climate primates that does however come with something that we've built to ourselves and I completely agree with the moment we've we've built ourselves an enormous amount of knowledge that we pass on culturally and that doesn't happen like that that doesn't happen in one lifetime meaning it's not the doing of one individual human that's not the doing of the biological individual that's the doing of our species over 200,000 years at the very least and that's something that can be lost that yet like that if you just lose the opportunities to educate the the next generations you four are very special thank you thank you so much you [Music]

Channel: World Science Festival

Views: 573,127

Rating: 4.7875409 out of 5

Keywords: Rethinking Thinking: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?, How Special Are Humans?, What is the Definition of Intelligence, Is intelligence uniquely human?, cognitive abilities, animal intelligence, What is intelligence?, how special are humans?, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Denise Herzing, Frank Grasso, Simon Garnier, Faith Salie, are animals as smart as humans?, understanding, emotional knowledge, critical thinking, problem solving, best science talks, Science, Festival, 2020

Id: tdsVRh9oKiE

Length: 93min 46sec (5626 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Vathor]

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[u/NeuroKix]

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[u/blurrk]

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