Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (43 page)

Table 27.2 Comparison of Brain and Body Mass in Different Species of Birds

I
N THE SUMMER OF 1997, THE
Maine Fish and Wildlife Department was contacted by a woman near Farmington, Maine, about one of my ravens. She had identified it from the aluminum ring on its right leg and a yellow plastic tag on its left wing. This bird had been tagged eight years earlier. She felt it was a special bird, possibly one singled out for its “extreme intelligence.”

I have never met anyone who has known a raven who did not think it was bright, but this woman, Diane Pickard, tipped the enthusiasm scales with superlative comments: “This bird is
so
truly amazing that I just had to tell someone about it. Nobody is going to believe this. But I have witnesses. It is scary how bright this raven is. He
knows
what he’s doing. I had
no idea
a bird could be so smart.”

In the two years that she had known the raven, he had followed a routine. In the early morning, he flew along Route 43, covering seven to ten miles and apparently scouting for roadkills, which Diane determined by following him by car. Next, his schedule included a stop at the Pickards’ house to feed on suet suspended in a wire cage. He did not go on weekends when people were there, and Diane suspected that he usually did not come to get suet until she and her husband had left for work. “One day I stayed home just to watch,” she said. “As soon as my husband went out the driveway, the raven came out of the woods from across the road where he’d been hiding and watching. He looked all around as if to make sure the coast was clear before coming to the suet container. When other cars came along the road, he crouched behind a tree and peeked out to one side, just enough to see. No other bird I’ve ever seen acts so deliberate and alert, as though he knows exactly what’s up. I see all sorts of other birds here in the woods where I live, including blue jays and crows, but in comparison to this raven, they look really dumb.”

Getting the suet out of a squirrel-proof feeder
.

Deciding to put his intelligence to the test one July day, Diane twisted ten separate strands of wire over the suet container opening, and again stayed home to watch the results. The raven came as usual, at that time of year with his mate and two young. “It was just unbelievable!” Diane said. “He started untwisting the wires. Sometimes he’d twist one the wrong way, and then he’d stop and take a break. But he always went right back and did it the right way. He went from one wire to the next, and untwisted them all. He must have had some idea of what he was doing, because he kept at it for one hour, not giving up. Occasionally, his mate would come down and just crudely
pull on the box, then stop. He’d fluff out and act very irritated at her. When he finally got it open they both fed on the suet, but they chased their young away until they had their own fill.”

I asked Diane to send me the exact suet container, because I wanted to test my own ravens. I received it via parcel post, put cheese inside, twisted the wires shut on top as she had done, and put in into my aviary. All six of my birds gathered round and pecked and pulled the wire. After twenty-seven minutes, they all gave up, and I stopped watching. A month later, the cheese I had put inside was still there. I mentioned this to Diane. She didn’t think it was surprising, pointing out that mine were on “welfare.” They may not have been less intelligent. Perhaps they did not have the ambition, since they’d get fed even if they failed. Additionally, the Pickards’ raven was already nine years old, and mine were just over one year old. A long period of maturation could be required before ravens achieve their full reasoning power and/or persistence and patience in the face of obstacles.

Anecdotes like this are easy to dismiss. I have done so myself with numerous others, when I was not there to observe the fine details firsthand, to sift out facts from interpretations. Extraordinary cleverness can often be explained by “simpler” hypotheses, and I’ve always prided myself on my skepticism. But skepticism in what? With ravens I’m no longer always sure of how to distinguish a simple from a more complex hypothesis, how to know whether all of the ravens’ behavior is somehow complexly preprogrammed or whether they know or learn to know what they are doing. Science normally progresses one small step, one small observation, at a time. Discarding solid isolated observations could be tantamount to discarding critical clues.

Behavioral biologists have a long tradition of outright rejection of observations that are not, like reflexes, strictly replicable. Some reject the idea that the actions of some nonhuman animals could be guided by thoughts, by conscious inner representation of the world. Only a little more than a decade ago, many scientists felt that consciousness in animals was not open to verification and experiment, and that it was therefore necessary to set it aside (Wasserman, 1985). Many still agree with that view.

As a conspicuous example of one current of academic thought I refer to the views expressed by Euan M. Macphail. In his book
Brain and Intelligence in Vertebrates
and elsewhere (see Notes) he concludes that there is little evidence of differences in general intelligence between nonhuman species. This conclusion, which is shared with many other psychologists, is mainly a projection of the fact that fish, reptiles, birds, and primates, as well as insects, show no compelling evidence of qualitative differences in learning. It ignores evidence that does not fit classical learning paradigms, and falls into the same trap of equating learning with intelligence that unsophisticates are accused of.

Why should animals show differences in learning? I would
a priori
assume they would
not
because all have nervous systems, and learning (or facilitated transmission across synapses separating neurons) is possibly as fundamental a property of interconnected neurons as is electrical conduction along the neurons themselves. Secondly, Macphail goes on to define consciousness as the capacity of any organism to feel something—anything, particularly pain or pleasure. He refers to the overworked analogy that we can design a machine that yelps when you kick it, to imply that we cannot infer pain from behavior. True, but just because a worm may writhe without feeling pain, that says
nothing
about whether you or I do. Macphail proposes that since humans can communicate our experience of pain with words, he presumes that pain, to be experienced at all, requires a cognitive self, and since words imply cognitive self, therefore only language-using animals can feel pain! I’m highly skeptical of that conclusion. I’m too influenced by the
rest
of the data set. Along with almost all modern evolutionary ecologists, I see animals as adapted to environment, with common principles applying across species. I believe, as George Schaller has said, in his classic studies of mountain gorillas, that: “Only by looking at gorillas as living, feeling beings was I able to enter into the life of the group with comprehension, instead of remaining an ignorant spectator.” Donald Griffin of Rockefeller and Harvard Universities, one of my scientific heroes, similarly points out in his 1992 book,
Animal Minds
, which is devoted to exploring and reviewing possible consciousness in other animals, that dismissing the mind as trivial because one cannot personally prove it with
precision by a simple test or device is like the denial of the role of inheritance before genes were elucidated. Part of the problem is that we are hampered by what Griffin calls “paralytic perfectionism.” We can’t define or study mind fully, in part because it will never be understood in terms of such simple units as genes, because it is an emergent property requiring and arising only out of the
complexity
of billions of interacting neurons. So we say it is unknowable, and ignore it. This is folly, because the task of science is to study precisely what we
don’t
understand.

Philosophers have tried to explain consciousness in weighty books, concluding we know little. Opinions about consciousness differ enormously, as John Horgan explores in his book
The End of Neuroscience
. It is true, we know little about the precise neuroanatomical hook-ups that make “it” possible, even if we reach a consensus in how to define it. I agree with most others that consciousness, at its simplest level, implies awareness through mental visualization. It is difficult for me to envision performing any novel bodily motion without first mentally visualizing it. Indeed, I well recall my “eureka” experience of learning to do the butterfly stroke one night before going to sleep, endlessly practicing the motions of all of my limbs in my head, suddenly knowing I’d have it down pat when I stepped into the pool the next day. Every athlete knows the connection between mental and physical activity, and practices mentally for coordination. That’s thinking. Every step we take over uneven ground involves consciousness of where we’ll plant our feet. The longer and more unpredictable the journey, the more consciousness is required to get there in the quickest, most direct way. In the night, when we dream of making a jump, our legs may twitch as do a cat’s. When we dream of climbing a tree and falling, our arm may suddenly move. Our body motions, unless thoroughly trained, emanate from consciousness, from mental representation. Consciousness is a
monitoring
of motor patterns in this case, which are neurally engraved preferred pathways in the central nervous system. Is not the cat’s leg twitch a function of the same process as ours, or must we invoke vitalism for humans? I think not!

I studied such neural patterns governing flight (external behavior) and shivering (internal “behavior”) in bumblebees at U.C. Davis with the late Ann E. Kammer. In bumblebees, those motor patterns were
neurally nearly identical. Both were monitored in the bee itself, by other motor patterns with which they are integrated in a way that coordinated the whole animal, analogously to my concept of how consciousness works. In the bees, little neural activity exists in the absence of fully expressed muscle activity. In us, there is continual neural activity in the brain, often short-circuiting the neural commands to the muscles, although in dreams some of our consciousness may be
partially
expressed, since some of the filter between the mind and the body is relaxed.

Why do we have a monitor of muscle activity (i.e., behavior) of the brain? At the simplest level, it is necessary to note that every system monitors almost every other in a physiologically integrated animal. The monitoring is a ubiquitous and necessary property in any complex organization. In our brain most of that activity is unconscious, but why not
all
of it? I speculate it is for one specific reason only: To make choices. By far, the majority of our automated responses are those that require no flexibility. As soon as we have consciousness, we also have the possibility to make alterations in behavior. That’s generally useful, but it has costs. We can screw up royally.

Different options can be different “memories”—represented by different neural pathways that we can activate or deactivate, depending on feedback from the brain’s reward centers. Once we have these memories encoded in our brains, we can retrieve them from the past, rearrange them into novel configurations to provide insights, and project them forward to see, for example, the throwing motion of an arm to make predictions about hitting a target. The manipulations of symbols requires similar projections.

There is no need to assume that only we have consciousness because only we can think in symbolic language. Doing a back-flip, a raven’s barrel-roll, or aiming an arrow can all involve the same fundamental process of comparing and fine-tuning scenarios.

In searching for models to try to understand the physical basis of consciousness, we might consider a social insect’s decision-making processes, an analogy expressed by Lewis Thomas in
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony
. He likened a termite colony to “an enormous brain on millions of legs,” in which the individual termites
are mobile neurons. In a termite colony or a beehive, the “sensory” experience of thousands of individuals’ feeds, like information from sensory receptors to the brain, into the collective organism out of which an “intelligence” emerges. Various options or potential choices are encoded in circuits of neurons, compared, and weighed. The more sensory input there is into the hive, the more informed, appropriate, and “rational” the colony decision-making process becomes. A collective intelligence emerges.

In the insect colony, different decisions are tried out and an intelligent decision is made, but no consciousness as such is necessary to accomplish that task. Why? Because the colony response can be, and is, glacially slow. In effect, different courses of actions are communicated, and intermediaries within the colony evaluate and act on the various options. That is, intermediaries “eavesdrop” on, or monitor, different potential options proposed by other individuals. The response takes hours, not milliseconds. For example, bee dance followers may evaluate the recruitment dances of different individual bees, each indicating various potential food locations. In a single thinking individual, in contrast, all of the decision-making, backed up by innate responses and by learning, is tried out in the brain by populations of billions of neurons connected with all of their neighbors, rather than by populations of different “mobile neurons.” Consciousness is the brain’s way of quickly monitoring the many options so that a choice can be made without overtly trying the alternatives first. Once choice is no longer necessary, then consciousness becomes superfluous.