20/09/2009 by admin.

ScienceDaily has an item on research into the control of consciousness by M Devor (here).

…discovery of an area of the brain that participates in the control of “alert status.”

Loss of response to painful stimuli and loss of consciousness are the most striking characteristics of surgical anesthesia and anesthesia-like states, such as concussion, reversible coma, and syncope (fainting). These states also exhibit behavioral suppression, loss of muscle tone, a shift to the sleep-like “delta-wave” EEG pattern, and depressed brain metabolism.

It has been widely presumed that this constellation of dramatic functional changes reflects widely distributed suppression of neuronal activity in the brain due to dispersed drug action, or to global oxygen or nutrient starvation.

However, new results revealed by the Hebrew University scientists suggest a radically different architecture — that a small group of neurons near the base of the brain, in the mesopontine tegmentum, has executive control over the alert status of the entire cerebrum and spinal cord, and can generate loss of pain sensation, postural collapse and loss of consciousness through specific neural circuitry.

…this knowledge could contribute to the ability of medical science to treat disorders of consciousness and its loss, such as insomnia, excessive sleepiness and even coma. …

the discovery of a specific cluster of neurons that control the brain’s state of consciousness can be expected to lead to the beginnings of an understanding of the actual wiring diagram that permits a biological machine, the brain, to be conscious.

This seems to imply that at least some aspects of consciousness are extremely ancient and at least shared with all vertibrates.

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16/07/2009 by admin.

Howard Eichenbaum’s group has published many papers on the hippocampus. This one, “Episodic recollection in animals: “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…”, here , makes a good case for animal consciousness. The abstract is below:

In humans, episodic memory is most commonly defined as the subjective experience of recollection, presenting a major challenge to the identification of episodic memory in animals. Here we take the position that episodic memory also has several other distinctive qualities that can be assessed objectively in animals, as well as humans, and the examination of these properties provides insights into underlying mechanisms of episodic memory. We focus on recent evidence accumulated in this laboratory indicating that recognition in rats involves a threshold retrieval process, similar to that observed in human episodic recall. Also, rats can remember the temporal order of unique events, characteristic of the replay of vivid episodic memories in humans. Furthermore, rats combine elements of “when” and “where” events occur, as well as the flow of events within a memory, to distinguish memories that share overlapping features, also characteristic of human episodic memory. Finally, all of these capacities are dependent on the hippocampus, which also plays a critical role in human episodic memory. This combination of findings strongly suggests that animals have the same fundamental information processing functions that underlie episodic recall in humans.

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19/06/2009 by admin.

A study by A. Horowitz reported in ScienceDaily (here) purports to show that dogs do not feel guilt.

This study sheds new light on the natural human tendency to interpret animal behavior in human terms. Anthropomorphisms compare animal behavior to human behavior, and if there is some superficial similarity, then the animal behavior will be interpreted in the same terms as superficially similar human actions. This can include the attribution of higher-order emotions such as guilt or remorse to the animal…Horowitz was able to show that the human tendency to attribute a “guilty look” to a dog was not due to whether the dog was indeed guilty. Instead, people see ‘guilt’ in a dog’s body language when they believe the dog has done something it shouldn’t have – even if the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offense….Dogs looked most “guilty” if they were admonished by their owners for eating the treat. In fact, dogs that had been obedient and had not eaten the treat, but were scolded by their (misinformed) owners, looked more “guilty” than those that had, in fact, eaten the treat. Thus the dog’s guilty look is a response to the owner’s behavior, and not necessarily indicative of any appreciation of its own misdeeds.

The problem here is that there is no control in the experiment. Would a child look guilty if they had done something they should not have but no one had noticed? I have my doubts about some children. Would a child look guilty if they had done nothing they shouldn’t have, but a parent started shouting at them and poking a finger in their face as if they had done something bad? I think I have known children who would look guilty because they assumed they had done some terrible unknown thing. And if you know what you have done wrong, you might look less guilty then if you had done something wrong and did not even know what it was.

Yes, we have to guard against anthropomorphism but we also have to guard against anti-anthropomorphism. Dogs are very social animals and so there is every reason for them to have social emotions like guilt as well as non-social ones like fear.

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27/12/2008 by admin.

Article in the Scientific American Mind site by Paul Patton on intelligence in animals, One World Many Minds, talks about goldfish learning mazes with the skill that rats show.

“By performing tests on goldfish after parts of their forebrain had been destroyed, the Spanish team showed in a study published in 2006 that the spatial abilities of goldfish derive from a part of the roof, or pallium, of the forebrain that may correspond to the hippocampus in mammals. Together these new studies indicate that the common ancestor of cartilaginous fishes, bony fishes and land vertebrates may already have possessed a hippocampuslike structure and the spatial cognitive abilities it confers. The hippocampus, which is also involved in processing emotions, is the main pallial component of the limbic system; in MacLean’s triune brain scheme, it was supposed to have originated with mammals. A variety of other limbic system structures are now known to exist in nonmammals.”

Goldfish are part of the teleost fishes that first evolved 200 million years ago - and well after land vertebrates appeared. Their brain structures therefore developed independently from those of the land vertebrates from common early fish structures. The two main branches of land vertebrates have evolved separately for about 300 million years. The one branches evolved into modern mammals and the second into birds and modern reptiles. They have evolved different brain plans, again based on the plan of their common ancestors. The difference in anatomy was first interpreted mistakenly so that it was thought that birds and reptiles did not have a well developed pallium. It is now known that the dorsal ventricular ridge in birds and reptiles is a pallium structure and is similar in function to the mammalian pallium structure, the cortex. Both the cortex and the DVR are involved cognition, planning, learning, remembering, perceiving, and controlling fine movements. Similar connections with other areas of the brain and between areas within the pallium are found in the cortex and the DVR. The neuroanatomical terminology for birds was revised in 2002 to reflect this new understanding.

“Far from being “birdbrains,” our feathered friends have displayed clever behaviors. Among birds, the largest forebrains are those of parrots and corvids (a group that includes crows, jays, ravens and jackdaws). Relative to body size, the brain of a parrot is as large as that of a chimpanzee, although, in absolute terms, it is about the size of a walnut. In recent years researchers have documented stunning cognitive abilities in these two groups of birds.”

In another Scientific American Mind site item by Nicole Branan there is a report on self-awareness in magpies, Magpies Recognize their faces.

“When you look in the mirror, you know you are seeing yourself. Your dog, on the other hand, thinks its reflection is a fellow canine (if anything). So far scientists thought this lack of self-recognition was ubiquitous in the animal kingdom—with the exception of apes, elephants and dolphins. But a new study presents evidence that self-recognition has also evolved in a bird species.

Helmut Prior of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and his team tagged magpies with a brightly colored mark below their beaks, where the birds could not see it directly. When the magpies looked in the mirror, some of them tried to reach the mark with their beak or touch it with their foot, which shows that they recognized their own mirror image, the researchers say.”

If that isn’t enough, we also have the invertebrates. Some such as the octopus long known to be quite intelligent with some remarkable talents. But now there are indications that bees may have some consciousness. A Scientific American Mind site article by Christof Kock looks at the talents of bees,

Exploring Consciousness through the Study of Bees.

“And contrary to assertions made by philosophers, novelists and other literati, by and large this stream of consciousness does not relate to quiet self-reflection and introspective thoughts. No, most of it is filled with raw sensations… I suspect this feeling is not that dissimilar to the way animals consciously experience their world. Except perhaps for the great apes and a few other privileged big-brained animals, most species do not posses the highly developed sense of self, the ability to reflect on oneself, that people have. Most biologists and pet owners are willing to grant consciousness to cats, dogs and other mammals. Yet our intuitions fail us completely when we consider fish and birds, let alone invertebrates such as squid, flies or worms. Do they experience the sights and sounds, the pains and pleasures, of life? Surely they can’t be conscious—they look too different from us, too alien.

Insects, in particular, were long thought to be simple, reflexive creatures with hardwired instinctual behaviors. No more. Consider the amazing capabilities of the honeybee, Apis mellifera….”

Experiments are described using glass mazes and sugar-water rewards that show that bees can be taught to run glass mazes using the delayed matching-to-sample paradigm. For example, the bee can be shown a green patch and will remember this in the maze and will turn right if the T has a green patch and left if it has a different colour. Having mastered this skill it can quickly learn to run a maze with different colours to match and with different stripe patterns.  

“Bees live in highly stratified yet flexible social organizations with group decision-making skills that rival academic, corporate or government committees in efficiency. In spring, when bees swarm, they choose a new hive that needs to satisfy many demands within a couple of days (consider that the next time you go house hunting). They communicate information about the location and quality of food sources using the waggle dance. Bees can fly several kilometers and return to their hive, a remarkable navigational performance. Their brains seem to have incorporated a map of their environment. And a scent blown into the hive can trigger a return to the site where the bee previously encountered this odor.

…What this dilemma highlights is that there is no accepted theory of consciousness, no principled theory that would tell us which systems, organic or artificial, are conscious and why. In the absence of such a theory, we must at the very least remain agnostic about consciousness in these creatures.”

It seems to me easier to explain the intelligent actions of animals if they have some form of consciousness then if they haven’t.

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12/12/2008 by admin.

 “Medieval naturalists placed living things along a linear scale called the great chain of beings, or scala naturae. This hierarchical sequence ranked creatures such as worms and slugs as lowly and humans as the highest of earthly beings. In the late 1800s the enormous mass of evidence contained in Charles Darwin’s masterwork, On the Origin of Species, convinced most of his scientific contemporaries that evolution was a reality. Darwin explained that modern species were related by physical descent and saw the relations among species as resembling the diverging branches of a family genealogical tree.”

This quote is from Scientific American Mind Article . The idea of the chain of beings lingered on. The immediate interpretation of evolution was ‘humans are descended from monkeys’ when it should have been ‘humans and monkeys have a common ancestor’.

“Over the past 30 years, however, research in comparative neuroanatomy clearly has shown that complex brains—and sophisticated cognition—have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineages.”

We do not just need to look at what other mammals can do with their brains but also birds, fishes, mollusks and even insects. In our outlook on other animals we should teach ourselves not to think in terms of the ‘chain of beings’. In a sense all living things with us today are approximately the same in terms of newness or oldness, and approximately the same in terms of being well adapted to their environment. There is no clear criteria for ranking species into higher and lower along a chain of beings. Some are bigger, some are faster, some of smarter, some can stay under water longer, some are more fearsome, some are better fliers, some live longer, some have more offspring, some have larger ranges, maybe some are happier, but all of them are approximately equally successful.

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28/10/2008 by admin.

We need to have a lighter blog for a change, so I will talk about dogs.

I have had smart dogs and dumb dogs. There are smart dogs – I know this in the same way that I know that there are cold winters. Not all winters everywhere are cold but I have personally experienced cold winters and I have experienced smart dogs. People who have known parrots, dolphins, bonobos and the like seem to feel the same about those animals. Of course, there are cold winters and then there are Cold Winters – smart like cold is relative.

My current dog is the sort that looks at your hand when you point at something. My last dog was the sort that looked at what you pointed to and not your finger. This smart dog was a cross between a Border Colley and a Huskie. An example of the sort of behaviour that convinced me that there was a real mind in that head was her showing off the house. We were building a house and the whole ground floor was open with just the studs showing where the walls would be. The dog watched me show someone the house on a few occasions. I would stand in one place and say that this was going to be the bathroom. The visitor would have to imagine walls where the studs were, then on to other rooms. One time I was showing someone the kitchen and I said to the dog to show them the bathroom. She went to the ‘bathroom door’ studs and looked over her shoulder which was her sign for ‘follow me’. I told the person to follow her when she did that posture and she led them into the bathroom. I said to show them the living room, the dog went to the edge of the living room space and looked over her shoulder and then entered the space. And so on.

What she had done was to pick up, in my conversations with others, the words (probably ones I had emphasized and that were accompanied by a gesture) for the rooms. And she picked up the idea of going from room to room. She had a large vocabulary of words she understood – I figure she had well over a hundred. I talked to her in an ordinary conversational way rather then barking commands as I must with my present dog. She had already taught me how to follow her. It took her longer to teach me that, than it took her to learn a few of the things I taught her. She understood from my reference to her and to the next room on the tour that I wanted her to take over the task. The usual ‘dogs only follow commands, they do not communicate’ does not seem to me to cover this sort of situation. Shepherds communicate with their dogs. So do blind people. There really is communication between people and some animals. The communication is not through a language, however, it is through things like words, gestures, postures, and symbols. The communication does include quite complex concepts.

I have the same sort of evidence that my dog had a mind as I had that the next person I might be introduced to had a mind. It is easier for me to understand and predict their behaviour if I use a theory-of-mind then it is otherwise. It is also easier for me to believe that the other person has conscious experience like mine than it is to believe they don’t. The same applied to my dog. She will be more conscious of some things than me and less of others because her senses are slightly different, but on the whole it will be a similar sort of experience.

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04/08/2008 by admin.

First I must declare my interests here. I like dogs and I know how smart and how dumb they can be. I have had a dog that would look where you pointed and I have had dogs that looked at your finger. Whether an animal like a dog, or an ape, or dolphin, or parrot, or elephant is conscious is going to depend on how consciousness is defined. If you want the answer to be no, it can be. If you want it to be yes, it can be. But if your search is to understand consciousness, then you must be interested in its earliest beginnings, whether you consider them fully formed or not.

When we look for the earliest nervous system, we look at the earliest animals. It is very early animals that developed the neuron, although some important pieces existed earlier and are shared with fungus. Yeasts use something akin to synapses to sense their environment. Vertebrate synapses have about 600 proteins, invertebrate only about 300 of these and yeast share about 50. (see here) The neuron is a major feature of a nervous system and the synapse is a major feature of a neuron. We have to go back to the common ancestor with worms to find the start of brains, organized groups of neurons working together as opposed to wide nets. We share a nervous system architecture type with all other vertebrates. We share more specifics with other mammals, still more with other primates and most with other apes. It is going to be impossible to put a point along this history and say before this there was no trace of consciousness and after it there was full consciousness. So the question should probably not be ‘are animals conscious?’ but ‘how similar is the consciousness of this particular species to ours?’ Is it very similar, hardly similar at all or somewhere in between?

Here is the abstract of BJ Baars’ paper, There are no known differences in brain mechanisms of consciousness between humans and other mammals. (paper here)

‘Recent scientific findings indicate that consciousness is a fundamental biological adaptation. The known brain correlates of consciousness appear to be ancient phylogenetically, going back at least to early mammals. In all mammals alertness and sensory consciousness are required for the goal-directed behaviors that make species survival and reproduction possible. In all mammals the anatomy, physiology, neurochemistry and electrical activity of the brain in alert states shows striking similarities. After more than seven decades of cumulative discoveries about waking and sensory consciousness, we have not yet found fundamental differences between humans and other mammals. Species differences such as the size of neocortex seem to be irrelevant to the existence of alertness and sensory consciousness, though different mammals obviously specialize in different of kinds of sensory, cognitive and motor abilities. Skeptics sometimes claim that objective evidence for consciousness tells us little about subjective experience, such as the experience of conscious pain. Scientifically, however, plausible inferences are routinely based on reliable and consistent patterns of evidence. In other humans we invariably infer subjective experiences from objective behavioral and brain evidence — if someone yells Ouch! after striking a finger with a hammer, we infer that they feel pain. The brain and behavioral evidence for subjective consciousness is essentially identical in humans and other mammals. On the weight of the objective evidence, therefore, subjective experience would seem to be equally plausible in all species with humanlike brains and behavior. Either we deny it to other humans (which is rarely done), or, to be consistent, we must also attribute it to other species that meet the same objective standards. It seems that the burden of proof for the absence of subjectivity in mammals should be placed on the skeptics.’

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