Originally published in slightly different
form on July 30, 2010 at PsychologyToday.com.
Dogs are amazing animals.
They have an ability to read us like no other species can. Sometimes they know
more about us than we know about ourselves. They also score higher
on certain so-called “mind-reading”
tests than chimpanzees, where the goal is to see which animal can
more reliably follow a visual cue given by a human being points at or even
looks at an object. Dogs can learn to do this
quite easily, chimps can’t.
“Dogs are more skillful than great apes at a number of tasks in which they must read human communicative signals indicating the location of hidden food. In this study, we found that wolves who were raised by humans do not show these same skills, whereas domestic dog puppies only a few weeks old, even those that have had little human contact, do show these skills. These findings suggest that during the process of domestication, dogs have been selected for a set of social-cognitive abilities that enable them to communicate with humans in unique ways.” (“The Domestication of Social Cognition in Dogs,” Brian Hare et al, November 22, 2002.)
To some people this suggests that dogs have a 1st level Theory of Mind.
What does that mean?
If you and I were standing or sitting across from each other and I pointed at something behind you, you would either look to see what was back there or ask, “What is it?” That’s because we both know you don’t have “eyes in the back of your head.” The conclusion that some dognitive scientists have come to recently is that Muttsy has pretty much the same capacity, while our closest cousins, chimpanzees, don’t.
If you think about it, the belief that dogs are smarter than chimps challenges two of the most basic assumptions of modern mainstream science. 1) Consciousness is a by-product of certain bio-energetic processes—most notably the firing of neurons—taking place inside a self-contained organ called the brain. And 2) Evolution tends to follows a specific course where, as organisms evolve into higher forms, they tend to become more and more developed, and their levels of development can be clearly seen in their anatomical features, including specific structures found in their brains. (This is not always the case, but it generally holds true.)
On the evolutionary scale, we would place the canine, chimp, and human brain in that order—canine > chimp > human—in terms of relative size, the number of neurons they contain, and the various bells and whistles (neurological substructures) they each possess. So, logically speaking, in order for dogs to be “smarter” than chimps, we’d either have to ignore evolution, or we’d have to redefine consciousness as something not entirely dependent on the number of neurons firing inside the brain.
Another problem is that these studies always seem to involve getting the dog to find a hidden toy or treat, meaning he’s asked to take part in a game involving the search aspect of his prey drive. And since dogs are group predators at heart, this means that if the dog’s mind is already primed to follow whatever cues might help with the “search for prey,” it increases the likelihood that a dog will do what we want him to.
Meanwhile, if you were to simply point behind your dog, without first establishing a similar context of searching for a treat or a toy, and particularly if there was nothing actually there, the chances are pretty good that your dog wouldn’t look behind him. I’ve tested this with a few dozen dogs, where either I or their owners point behind the dog and say, “[Dog’s Name], look!” And so far none of the dogs have been able to follow where we were pointing; they usually give us a blank stare, or look for something on the ground directly in front of them.
My little field “study,” as unscientific as it may be, involves a much a larger number of test subjects. Plus, the percentage of dogs that don’t exhibit a ToM (100% so far) is much larger than the percentage that do when the tests are skewed by establishing the behavior in the context of a hunting game. This suggests that something besides a ToM is at play.
This brings up another problem: the phenomenon of group consciousness, which is found in all social animals, but is seen most clearly and readily in how dogs form a kind of shared consciousness, both with other dogs and with their owners.
If we see the human/dog dynamic as a self-organizing system, it would make sense that, on a certain level, dogs would automatically be better at reading our signals (particularly if it involves their prey drive) than chimps would, because both dogs and humans have an evolutionary history that involves hunting large prey animals by working in concert. (That hunting-partner relationship still continues, in a way, when we play with our dogs.)
One of the hallmarks of self-organizing systems is that the system is always smarter than the sum of its parts. So the fact that a dog’s brain has less carrying capacity than ours—fewer neurons, fewer bells and whistles—works to his advantage. Once a dog has established a working relationship with us, he automatically becomes “smarter,” not because he can think for himself, or has a ToM, but because that’s how such systems operate. We bring our intellect and emotions to the relationship, dogs bring their instincts and emotions. Emotion is the common ground.
One of my clients told me recently how she and her husband and their boxer, Fancy, came home from a walk one day, and got off the elevator in their building. They expected Fancy to go racing down the hall to their apartment. Instead she stayed right in front of the elevator, refusing to budge, no matter what they said or did.
They initially chalked this up to some kind of weird, “boxer disobedience.” It was only after the husband put his key in the lock, found it wouldn’t turn, then looked up at the number on the door that he realized they’d gotten off on the wrong floor. Fancy wasn’t disobeying after all! Her owners weren’t paying attention to their surroundings, but she was!
Here’s my take on how and why this happened.
Initially, Fancy and her owners were in a group mind-set; they all had the same desire: to go home. To Fancy, when her owners got off on the wrong floor, and urged her to come with them anyway, they weren’t acting in accordance with that desire, which is why she balked. She wasn’t being disobedient; in fact she was quite faithfully obeying the group’s shared desire to go home, despite the fact that her owners unwittingly kept urging her to do otherwise.
Dogs are designed to be able to tune in to the way we feel, while our mental thought processes would be similar to the static found between AM radio stations. And by tuning in to our feelings, they create an emotional channel between our minds and theirs. This enables them to influence the way we feel about them, which automatically changes the way we think as well. So when people tell me they can sometimes see a “thinking process” going on in their dogs’ eyes, I would say that the dog’s mind probably isn’t adding and subtracting all the possible variables about what to do or how to act in a specific situation, she’s probably behaving more like a radio dial, tuning in to the proper frequency that would put her and her owner on the same wavelength.
This wouldn’t require us to rewrite the laws of evolution or neuroscience. We’d just have to see dogs from a slightly different point of view ... theirs.
LCK
“Life Is an Adventure—Where Will Your Dog Take You?”
“Dogs are more skillful than great apes at a number of tasks in which they must read human communicative signals indicating the location of hidden food. In this study, we found that wolves who were raised by humans do not show these same skills, whereas domestic dog puppies only a few weeks old, even those that have had little human contact, do show these skills. These findings suggest that during the process of domestication, dogs have been selected for a set of social-cognitive abilities that enable them to communicate with humans in unique ways.” (“The Domestication of Social Cognition in Dogs,” Brian Hare et al, November 22, 2002.)
To some people this suggests that dogs have a 1st level Theory of Mind.
What does that mean?
If you and I were standing or sitting across from each other and I pointed at something behind you, you would either look to see what was back there or ask, “What is it?” That’s because we both know you don’t have “eyes in the back of your head.” The conclusion that some dognitive scientists have come to recently is that Muttsy has pretty much the same capacity, while our closest cousins, chimpanzees, don’t.
If you think about it, the belief that dogs are smarter than chimps challenges two of the most basic assumptions of modern mainstream science. 1) Consciousness is a by-product of certain bio-energetic processes—most notably the firing of neurons—taking place inside a self-contained organ called the brain. And 2) Evolution tends to follows a specific course where, as organisms evolve into higher forms, they tend to become more and more developed, and their levels of development can be clearly seen in their anatomical features, including specific structures found in their brains. (This is not always the case, but it generally holds true.)
On the evolutionary scale, we would place the canine, chimp, and human brain in that order—canine > chimp > human—in terms of relative size, the number of neurons they contain, and the various bells and whistles (neurological substructures) they each possess. So, logically speaking, in order for dogs to be “smarter” than chimps, we’d either have to ignore evolution, or we’d have to redefine consciousness as something not entirely dependent on the number of neurons firing inside the brain.
Another problem is that these studies always seem to involve getting the dog to find a hidden toy or treat, meaning he’s asked to take part in a game involving the search aspect of his prey drive. And since dogs are group predators at heart, this means that if the dog’s mind is already primed to follow whatever cues might help with the “search for prey,” it increases the likelihood that a dog will do what we want him to.
Meanwhile, if you were to simply point behind your dog, without first establishing a similar context of searching for a treat or a toy, and particularly if there was nothing actually there, the chances are pretty good that your dog wouldn’t look behind him. I’ve tested this with a few dozen dogs, where either I or their owners point behind the dog and say, “[Dog’s Name], look!” And so far none of the dogs have been able to follow where we were pointing; they usually give us a blank stare, or look for something on the ground directly in front of them.
My little field “study,” as unscientific as it may be, involves a much a larger number of test subjects. Plus, the percentage of dogs that don’t exhibit a ToM (100% so far) is much larger than the percentage that do when the tests are skewed by establishing the behavior in the context of a hunting game. This suggests that something besides a ToM is at play.
This brings up another problem: the phenomenon of group consciousness, which is found in all social animals, but is seen most clearly and readily in how dogs form a kind of shared consciousness, both with other dogs and with their owners.
If we see the human/dog dynamic as a self-organizing system, it would make sense that, on a certain level, dogs would automatically be better at reading our signals (particularly if it involves their prey drive) than chimps would, because both dogs and humans have an evolutionary history that involves hunting large prey animals by working in concert. (That hunting-partner relationship still continues, in a way, when we play with our dogs.)
One of the hallmarks of self-organizing systems is that the system is always smarter than the sum of its parts. So the fact that a dog’s brain has less carrying capacity than ours—fewer neurons, fewer bells and whistles—works to his advantage. Once a dog has established a working relationship with us, he automatically becomes “smarter,” not because he can think for himself, or has a ToM, but because that’s how such systems operate. We bring our intellect and emotions to the relationship, dogs bring their instincts and emotions. Emotion is the common ground.
One of my clients told me recently how she and her husband and their boxer, Fancy, came home from a walk one day, and got off the elevator in their building. They expected Fancy to go racing down the hall to their apartment. Instead she stayed right in front of the elevator, refusing to budge, no matter what they said or did.
They initially chalked this up to some kind of weird, “boxer disobedience.” It was only after the husband put his key in the lock, found it wouldn’t turn, then looked up at the number on the door that he realized they’d gotten off on the wrong floor. Fancy wasn’t disobeying after all! Her owners weren’t paying attention to their surroundings, but she was!
Here’s my take on how and why this happened.
Initially, Fancy and her owners were in a group mind-set; they all had the same desire: to go home. To Fancy, when her owners got off on the wrong floor, and urged her to come with them anyway, they weren’t acting in accordance with that desire, which is why she balked. She wasn’t being disobedient; in fact she was quite faithfully obeying the group’s shared desire to go home, despite the fact that her owners unwittingly kept urging her to do otherwise.
Dogs are designed to be able to tune in to the way we feel, while our mental thought processes would be similar to the static found between AM radio stations. And by tuning in to our feelings, they create an emotional channel between our minds and theirs. This enables them to influence the way we feel about them, which automatically changes the way we think as well. So when people tell me they can sometimes see a “thinking process” going on in their dogs’ eyes, I would say that the dog’s mind probably isn’t adding and subtracting all the possible variables about what to do or how to act in a specific situation, she’s probably behaving more like a radio dial, tuning in to the proper frequency that would put her and her owner on the same wavelength.
This wouldn’t require us to rewrite the laws of evolution or neuroscience. We’d just have to see dogs from a slightly different point of view ... theirs.
LCK
“Life Is an Adventure—Where Will Your Dog Take You?”
"Evolution follows a specific course where, as organisms evolve into higher forms, they tend to become more and more developed, and their levels of development can be clearly seen in their anatomical features, including specific structures found within their brains."
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't sound like an accurate description of the scientific view of evolution at all. See, for example, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13617-evolution-myths-natural-selection-leads-to-ever-greater-complexity .
Hi Michael,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the correction.
Evolution myths: Natural selection leads to ever greater complexity
ReplyDeleteIn fact, natural selection often leads to ever greater simplicity. And, in many cases, complexity may initially arise when selection is weak or absent.
If you don’t use it, you tend to lose it. Evolution often takes away rather than adding. For instance, cave fish lose their eyes, while parasites like tapeworms lose their guts.
Such simplification might be much more widespread than realised. Some apparently primitive creatures are turning out to be the descendants of more complex creatures rather than their ancestors. For instance, it appears the ancestor of brainless starfish and sea urchins had a brain.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that evolution has produced more complex life-forms over the past four billion years. The tough question is: why? It is usually simply assumed to be the result of natural selection, but recently a few biologists studying our own bizarre and bloated genomes have challenged this idea.
Rather than being driven by selection, they propose that complexity initially arises when selection is weak or absent. How could this be? Suppose an animal has a gene that carries out two different functions. If mutation results in some offspring getting two copies of this gene, these offspring won’t be any fitter as a result. In fact, they might be slightly less fit due to a double dose of the gene. In a large population where the selective pressure is strong, such mutations are likely to be eliminated. In smaller populations, where selective pressure is much weaker, these mutations could spread as a result of random genetic drift (see Natural selection is the only means of evolution) despite being slightly disadvantageous.
The more widely the duplicated genes spread in a population, the faster they will acquire mutations. A mutation in one copy might destroy its ability to carry out the first of the original gene’s two functions. Then the other copy might lose the ability to perform the second of the two functions. As before, these mutations won’t make the animals any fitter – such animals would still look and behave exactly the same – so they will not be selected for, but they could nevertheless spread by genetic drift.
Use your mutations
In this way, a species can go from having one gene with two functions to two genes that each carry out one function. This increase in complexity occurs not because of selection but despite it.
Once the genome is more complex, however, further mutations can make a creature’s body or behaviour more complex. For instance, having two separate genes means each can be switched on or off at different time or in different tissues. As soon as any beneficial mutations arise, natural selection will favour its spread.
If this picture is correct, it means that there are opposing forces at the heart of evolution. Complex structures and behaviour such as eyes and language are undoubtedly the product of natural selection. But when selection is strong – as in large populations – it blocks the random genomic changes that throw up this greater complexity in the first place.
This idea might even explain why evolution appears to speed up after environmental catastrophes such as asteroid impacts. Such events would slash the population size of species that survive, weakening selection and increasing the chances of greater genomic complexity arising through non-adaptive processes, paving the way for greater physical or behavioural complexity to arise through adaptive processes.