Read Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds Online

Authors: Bernd Heinrich

Tags: #Science, #Reference, #bought-and-paid-for, #Non-Fiction

Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (41 page)

I next demonstrated experimentally that
one
behavior—choosing the correct string when two were side by side—could be the result of
two
different mental concepts. In the setup for this experiment, the birds that were experienced in pulling up meat were first exposed only to one string with meat. In the competition among each other they all rushed to be first at that string, and they pulled quickly. That is, I trained them to expect meat every time they pulled up string, hence looking at the string closely before pulling it up became unnecessary if not counter-productive. Then I provided two side-by-side strings, one holding a rock, the other, meat. There was again competition among the five birds to be first to pull up the meat. In this situation, there was as before much haste and some birds initially made mistakes; they rushed to the strings and yanked on the first one they came to. However, if that was the wrong one, they quickly realized their mistake. They dropped that string without pulling it up, looked again, and pulled up the one with meat. That is, I had now retrained them to look. As one might expect, after a few trials they learned to look before they gave their first yank. A choice was now necessary, and they learned to contact only the correct string. Then in the test, I crossed the two strings so that a raven perched directly above the meat and pulling on the string below its feet would now (in contrast to all its previous trials) end up pulling on the string with rock, not food. Conversely, to get meat, the raven
now
had to perch above the
rock
and pull the string below its feet, a novel setup contrary to its previous string-choice training experience.

In the test, three out of four proficient string-pulling ravens first contacted the wrong string—the string attached to the pole directly above the meat. That by itself was neither surprising nor interesting, because that choice previously had always been the correct one; but what was interesting and amazing was that now they showed no evidence of learning to correct their mistakes. In dozens of trials, they continued to yank first on the wrong string; i.e., the one over the meat, switching only after they had seen their mistake; i.e., the rock jiggled. That is, consciousness of what they thought they knew took precedence over trial-and-error learning, which was glacially slow even for this one extremely simple task.

Proof of conscious involvement was shown by one bird who was correct from the beginning. Before the test, that one bird had shown identical behavior to the other three. That is, it pulled, as trained, only on the string with meat, the one directly above the meat. In the
test
, this bird immediately and consistently did a novel thing. It pulled the string over the
rock
, the string to which the meat was attached. Rather than first contacting the “string-above-meat” as the other three had done and continued to do without correcting themselves, this bird had pulled on “string to which meat is attached” on the very first and all subsequent trials. Of course, the birds could not use words, but words are unnecessary for thinking as such. (If the ravens had evolved to communicate to their followers how to pull up string or some other useful tasks, then they would of course have had to evolve the capacity to use words, and to communicate using them they would then need the ability to think with them as well.)

In subsequent tests, birds that were proficient in string-pulling were given food on a new string of a different color, texture, and thickness, with which they had never been rewarded, versus a rock on the same string on which they had always been rewarded. If they simply had been conditioned to pull on brown twine, for example, then they would choose it above previously unfamiliar green shoestring, even when the food was attached to the shoestring, which they had never pulled up before. What did they do? They all chose the
new
string that they had never seen before, much less been rewarded from, right on their first trial.
They ignored the familiar twine that had always been associated with food. In summary, they knew the solutions to several new tasks without any overt trials. Given a choice, they attended to what is relevant in preference to what they had been trained, and what they had in mind could take priority over what they experienced. In conjunction with all the other prior observations that they can keep track in their mind of what they no longer can see, I conclude that they experience some level of consciousness, and use it for insight to make decisions. Whether that is “intelligence” is subjective; but according to most people it is.

 

 

I wrote up the data, providing thoughts on what it might mean, and submitted the manuscript to a journal that is reviewed by other scientists whose names remain secret to all but the journal editor. The editor then considers the comments of the reviewers and accepts or rejects the paper, generally asking the researcher to consider the reviewers’ comments in the revision if it is to be published. Constructive comments on one’s work are precious, because they often catch one’s errors and oversights. I anticipated few problems. Since I described something novel, I felt sure that my paper would be received eagerly and rushed into press. However, this manuscript took a different turn.

One of the reviewers felt that I needed to examine the evolutionary precursors of the behavior, and also pointed out that “Freud had shown much mental work to be unconscious and that much of human insight is unconscious.” Sure. Okay. Does that then preclude further research? What is mental work anyway? What evolutionary precursors of string-pulling? The editor rejected the paper, but offered to consider it again after a new submission, subject to another round of reviews. I rewrote and resubmitted.

Some months later, the manuscript was again rejected. A reviewer claimed that I had made a “clear dichotomy between learning and genetic programming—a dichotomy that is twenty years out of date.” Of course, he was partially correct! There is no clear dichotomy. But I had
tried
to create one. That was the experiment. About twenty years earlier, I had published several papers on learning and innate behavior in bees, making a point to show the relationship between genetic pro
gramming and learning. That a reviewer would now suppose I’d think that there
is
a “clear dichotomy” in real life seemed odd. The point of this experiment was that I managed to force a small chink in the armor, to drive a wedge into a mechanism, much as an experimental physiologist might ligate a blood vessel to find out what organ it might supply. The point of the experiment was that the effects of both genetic programming and learning could be minimized, to see if any behavior remained. I felt I was being taken to task for the study’s strength rather than its weaknesses. Yet another reviewer used such phrases as “incredible leap of faith” and “matters of the heart.” I felt that these, and several other best-not-repeated comments, were more emotional than rational. Had I violated a taboo? It might seem I suffered from attachments to my birds, thus reading human motives into them. Perhaps. But I was instead mostly wondering the opposite: what unconscious drives would move someone to reject that which they find new and unfamiliar, a very conspicuous raven behavior. Ultimately, the paper was rejected five times. Part of the price of doing what you feel is really rewarding and novel is sometimes the necessity to endure harsh criticism.

Several years after my paper was published, I got another group of six ravens and repeated the experiments, but that time in greater detail and when the birds were only nine to ten months old. I built a new aviary in which I could insert an opaque partition to separate two sections, so I could test each bird in isolation and counter the criticism of “social learning.” Since string shyness had been a big problem, I had also habituated the birds to string by tying several strands tautly between branches and onto the vertical cage walls so the birds could see string but not still pull and step. The results were essentially identical, except that five of the six birds in isolation pulled up meat much more quickly, all within four to eight minutes after contacting it. However, they first tried several alternate methods, including pecking, yanking, and twisting the string, before doing the pull-up. That is, the younger birds were overtly experimental. As in the first group, one bird only flew at the meat and never pulled string.

In the future, when I have another group of birds, I will give them the task of trying to access food that is suspended below them but that
they can get only by pulling
down
on a string that is
above
the perch. I predict this counterintuitive task will
not
be performed by naive ravens without lengthy learning trials, if at all. Those who already pull string up learn this trick quickly, as expected in what psychologists call transfer learning.

 

 

Any phenomenon can potentially be explained by several alternative hypotheses at the same time. The scientist then seeks to disprove each one. If all the likely alternatives are disproved but one, that one is generally considered to be the most likely answer—until new data come along that provide a better explanation. The currently accepted answer ultimately depends on the alternatives with which one begins. If insight is denied as a possibility from the very beginning, then it can never become an alternative hypothesis, and hence it can never be the best hypothesis that remains.

It is hardly to be expected that the human animal would be qualitatively different from all others. The psychologists who have studied learning in rats and pigeons have assumed (and found) similarities across species. If that is anthropomorphizing, I’m all for it. There is no evidence to suggest that humans have some new or different mysterious vital essence that other animals lack. Indeed, the raison d’être for studying animals is the unspoken assumption that results can be extrapolated to humans. Otherwise, the agencies that award research grants would not have spent untold millions of dollars on rats.

At the most fundamental level, learning, consciousness, insight, and all such correlates as problem-solving and intelligence, are simply the firing of neurons. Neurons are components of intelligence and insight, but you can’t probe specific neurons and say, “
There
it is.
Insight!!
” You can no more critically define insight by examining neurons than you can discover the structure of the Maine coastline by examining the grains of sand on the beaches with ever finer detail. The relevant patterns can sometimes best be seen by stepping
back
and looking from a new, unfamiliar vantage point.

I often see “intelligence” in my ravens in the stupid things they do. One time early in November 1992, I surprised a group of them in
a fir thicket. They were noisy and raucous around a long-dry cow scapula. Gathering around a dry bone is “goofy.” A chickadee wouldn’t do it, or a blue jay, or a crow. These birds would not be so foolish as ravens. But then, few species of birds except ravens (and some parrots) would end up pecking airplane wings, pulling off windshield wipers, swiping golf balls, and not incidentally, getting and opening food from Dunkin’ Donut dumpsters, or sealed black garbage bags, or from a string, or sliding on their bellies in the snow, or doing barrel-rolls in the air when returning alone to the roost at night.

Doing foolish things like stealing windshield wipers and dancing around a dry cow scapula is, like play, one of the costs of being bright. It’s a little like the “intelligence” of the immune system. Our immune system produces thousands of different kinds of molecules that most of the time do nothing useful. It may seem like a huge waste to produce them at all. If by chance, one of these odd, seemingly senseless molecules neutralizes a specific unanticipated invading pathogen, then this one is recognized and remembered by the body, to be replicated in huge numbers. That is, the body “learns” through selection. Neural networks work in the same way, but they pretty much have to be present all the time, barring some exceptions. Those that are used or rewarded are activated and strengthened, taking preference over others. From our own experience, we all know that we can try out what “works” within our minds even before we try it out physically. When we want to reach an apple over our heads, we can evaluate, by mental projection of our limbs, the feasibility of trying to reach it by hand. Or we can try to reach it by jumping up and grabbing, getting a chair to stand on, bringing a ladder, swinging a stick, calling the fire department, throwing rocks at it, hurling sticks, shooting the branch off with a shotgun. There are endless possibilities that we evaluate and discard in milliseconds. We may quickly come upon one that rewards us
mentally
, and when we do, we continue to run the scenario through our mind before actually trying it. If we had a raven’s mind? We’d be forced to try more possibilities overtly, and we’d have a great deal fewer and less elaborate possibilities to choose from.

This raven had been caching food in snow, and is carrying food to cache in its throat pouch
.

 

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