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For a brief period in 2022, Dr. Vinay Prasad faked a concern about routine vaccines to infect unvaccinated children with COVID.

The post I Am Calling on Dr. Vinay Prasad, the Medical Establishment, to Break His Silence on Vaccines as Measles And Pertussis Spread Under His Watch first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Here’s the comedy bit from Bill Maher’s latest “Real Time”, and it’s called “New Rule: Don’t be a hypocrite.”

A few examples:

Trump touting electric cars (Teslas) after he appropriated Elon Musk.

Republicans buying Tesla cybertrucks after most saying they’d never buy an electric truck

The American Academy of Pediatrics reversing its position on getting kids into schools after Trump agreed with them

Republicans denigrated Michelle Obama’s program, “Let’s get American healthy again”, simply because it was from Michelle Obama.

Republicans now love Russia (so Maher said) when it was previous their nightmare country.

There are lots of examples of people accepting or rejecting programs or propositions simply because of who advocated them, and that is a form of hypocrisy. Most of his examples are anti-Republican, so take that, those people who consigned Maher to hell because he had dinner with Trump and found him a gracious host. (That denigration of Maher by those who dislike Trump—and those people include Maher—is itself a form of hypocrisy. If you dislike Trump, it’s impossible to ever find him gracious.)

As he says, we should “not to automatically rush to the opposite viewpoint based solely on who said it. But until we get to where we can do that, and I just hope the Democrats come out strongly next week for a dictatorship, coal mining, and making pot illegal.”

It’s a plea for comity, but nobody seems to be in that mood these days.

If you’ve read about the various pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests across American campuses, one thing you’ll notice is a general reluctance to punish demonstrators when they violate university rules. Of course protests are usually fine if they conform to First Amendment principles (though some schools don’t hold those principles), but they’re never fine when they violate campus rules.  These latter rules are usually called “TPM rules”, meaning that universities can regulate the “time, place, and manner” of demonstrations in a way that doesn’t impede the mission of the institution: teaching, learning, and research.

So at the University of Chicago, for example, we’ve laid out the rules for protests and demonstrations at this website, which gives information about noise levels permitted, building occupancy (not permitted at all) and the like.  In 2024, I gave four examples of pro-Palestinian demonstrators violating University regulations without any punishments meted out. The only sanction levied was a tepid warning to Students for Justice in Palestine that they disrupted a Jewish gathering, a warning that they’d better not do it again or else. . . .

As I always say, rules that aren’t enforced are not rules at all. Even our encampment, which involved several hundred people—both students and outsiders—which was declared in violation of university rules, was dismantled by the university police, but none of the demonstrators faced any punishment.

Is it any wonder, then, that the anti-Israel demonstrators feel empowered to break any campus rules they want? And they did—two weeks ago when the pro-Pals, a consortium called “UCUP”, for “UChicago United for Palestine” held a week of demonstrations commemorating last year’s encampment, which, not coincidentally, also included Alumni Weekend. (One wonders what mindset thinks that these loud and obnoxious intrusions will change peoples’ opinions.)

At any rate, the Chicago Maroon, which loves nothing more than an anti-Israel demonstration, had an article about a week of protests that included several violations of University rules, all of which seem to have been unpunished. Oh, well, there’s one exception: the police confiscated one megaphone being used illegally. I suppose they arrested it for “excessive loudness.”

Click below to read the article. I’ve bolded the bits where illegal actions went unpunished. The cops and deans-on-call showed up, but the former are constrained by the administration and can’t take action without permission from above, and deans-on-call are, to me, a joke; mere observers who can’t enforce anything and barely want to report anything. In fact, some of the deans-on-call are blatantly pro-Palestinian, and so can’t be objective. Here’s a photo of the “watermelon” (Palestinian colors) fingernails of one of those deans-on-call taken by a student during the encampment last year:

I’ll give some excerpts showing how the U of C ignores violations, as well as giving the article’s introduction. Click headline below to read; unpunished violations are in bold.

Marking the one-year anniversary of the 2024 pro-Palestine encampment, UChicago students and community members launched a week-long protest and installation outside Swift Hall. The students, organized as the “Popular University for Gaza,” called for solidarity with Palestine and the divestment of University funds from institutions tied to Israel.

Between Monday, April 28, and Friday, May 2, the group held teach-ins, workshops, and demonstrations—some resulting in confrontations with the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) and deans-on-call—as they sought to maintain public pressure on University leadership.

Shortly after 1 p.m. on April 28, protesters gathered on the quad outside of Swift Hall, raising a banner reading “Free Palestine, Bring the Intifada Home.” UCPD officers and deans-on-call observed from a distance as the group began a series of chants over a megaphone. Deans repeatedly informed the protesters that they were in violation of University policies regulating the use of amplified sound on campus.

Did anybody stop the violations? Are you kidding me?

Around an hour and a half into the demonstration, the UCPD officers and deans-on-call requested identification from those who had been using megaphones. The protesters initially locked arms to prevent possible arrests, with the crowd gradually dispersing as officers continued to ask for identifying information.

And again it seems as if the protestors, who are obliged to provide identification, did not do so; nor did the cops take any IDs.

Here’s a protestor waving a Houthi flag; photo by Grace Beatty.  Love that AK-47! Note the covered faces of the protestors, indicating two things: they are cowards who don’t want to be identified, and they are not enacting civil disobedience, whereby you break a law considered immoral and voluntarily take the punishment.

On Thursday they arrested. . . .a megaphone:

Two UCPD officers, along with several deans-on-call, gathered to observe the protest.

As protesters continued to chant, UCPD officers chased after demonstrators and confiscated at least one megaphone. The demonstration, which took place after 1 p.m., was again in violation of University policy regarding amplified sound. An unidentified protester flew a flag identifying with the Houthi movement in Yemen; one UCPD officer was overheard saying “As long as they’re holding [the flag], it’s free speech.”

The cop is right about free speech; our campus police are well aware of what is a violation and what is not. But they cannot move against real violations without permission of the administration.

Finally, although again this is legal, they heckled the President and Provost. Not THAT is going to change their minds!

Here’s President Alivisatos being heckled as he walks to the alumni tent. He kept his cool and did not respond. And you have to hand it to the heckler that he didn’t cover his face. (This was published on the UC United Instagram page.)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by UChicago United for Palestine (@uchicagounited)

So the week was a mixture of legal and illegal activities by the protestors, but the only thing arrested was a megaphone.

Below you see a poster in the Quad. If you know what “Intifada” means, it’s a term in Arabic for “shaking off” and has come to mean “shaking off the Jews”, i.e., killing them. These are really congenial sentiments.

I’m not sure whether the students had permission to post such a banner, but even if they did the sentiments surely create a hostile climate for Jewish students:

Photo by Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon

These demonstrations used to bother me more, especially their implicit calls for genocide of Jews (the poster above and the “From the river to the sea. .  ” chants), but now that Hamas is losing, and the University of Chicago has made it clear that it will not divest from Israel, these demonstrators strike me as pathetic, cosplaying as Houthis and members of Hamas.  Surely a large moiety of them are antisemitic, and it’s okay to do that so long as you don’t create a climate inimical to the participation of Jewish students at the University.  Do we have such a climate? You’d have to ask the Jewish students, but some of them have, I’ve heard, said “yes.” I know some of them won’t wear their Stars of David necklaces in a way that make them visibly Jewish.

I wish only that my University would be serious about its demonstration rules. When students break those rules, they should be punished, bar none. If Columbia can do it, so can we.

We have three—count them, three—items today.  The first is the first known portrait of an individual cat, that is, a cat who is known to have existed as a pet and with a name:

From Strange Company,

tumblr:  Giovanni Reder, Portrait of the cat Armellino, 1750. Oil on canvas. The first known painting of an individual cat. The italian poetess Alessandra Forteguerra commissioned the artwork of her beloved tom cat. Museo di Roma.

The Mister Tristan site says this:

Very few cats can boast that they have actually had their portraits painted, that is, that they have been depicted without any allegorical, moralizing, religious, esoteric, or simply decorative intent on the part of the artist….Armellino, wearing an elegant little collar, has literally posed on a luxurious cushion; a sonnet by the abbot Bertazzi has even been dedicated to him.

Now, I can’t find a translation of that sonnet anywhere. If any reader can, or can speak Italian, please provide me with a translation. I will credit the translator and put the sonnet in this post. You can enlarge the text by clicking on it.

Reader Brooke supplied the necessary sonnet:

The translation of the sonnet in the painting can be found on this page (you have to scroll down the page quite a ways):

Sonnet to a Cat

by Abbott Bertazzi

This Cat painted here on canvas,
tasted a loving kiss from a beautiful goddess,
after having done the portrait from life,
The cat keeps himself well guarded and most jealous.
In order to keep himself fully intact,
like an Ermine who lives in fear
and to avoid being caught
flees rapidly to stay in the wood or in a more hidden place.
So you as well, oh adventurous Cat,
preserve your mouth intact and your heart pure,
and only think of the one who kissed you,
and allow only me to love you,
you who shoot a kiss,
and take back my lovely kiss to cool the passion.

The cat’s name, Armellino, apparently means ‘ermine’ in old Italian.

Another site has an excerpt about this painting from H.V. Morton’s A Traveller in Rome (1957).

In a picture gallery upstairs [in the museum of Rome] I found a portrait of a black and white cat. This lordly and imposing creature prowled the marble halls of some seventeenth century palace and is here seen enthroned upon a tasselled cushion, wearing a broad collar to which bells are attached. Pinned to a curtain behind the cat is a little poem which says that a great and beautiful lady once kissed the cat and bade him keep his heart and mouth pure, and to remember her kiss. No one knows who the lady was.

Wouldn’t “the lady” be the cat’s owner? It’s rather confusing.

There are earlier named cats, of course, including Pangur Bán (“White Pangur”), the subject of a poem written by an Irish monk in a 9th-century manuscript. It’s a wonderful poem, comparable to “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry,” by Christopher Smart, but, alas, there is no portrait of Pangur.

These are the two best cat poems ever.

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The Japan Rail Club site gives us a look at a wonderful Japanese cat train (I think there are several). The article and photos are from Carlissa Loh, and go to the site to see tons of photos. If you’re an ailurophile, you’ll want to take this train.

Click below to read and see photos, alo by Carlisa Loh:

Excerpts:

Would you take a 1.5-hour train in the Wakayama (和歌山) countryside just to see a cat? Many people would, and many have! In fact, it was thanks to a beloved cat, Tama, that one railway line was revitalised and saved from closure.

The railway line was Wakayama Electric Railway’s Kishigawa Line (貴志川線), and in January 2007, Tama (たま), a female calico cat, became the station master of Kishi Station (貴志駅).

Here’s Tama, the subject of a Wikipedia article in Japanese that autotranslates into English. It says, among other stuff, this:

Tama ( also known as Stationmaster Tama ; April 29 , 1999 ( Heisei 11) – June 22, 2015 (Heisei 27 )) was a cat and the honorary permanent stationmaster of Kishi Station on the Wakayama Electric Railway ‘s Kishigawa Line .

She was a female calico cat kept at the station’s convenience store and became an idol , like a maneki -neko (beckoning cat), before eventually becoming the station’s official mascot (a unique stationmaster, or cat stationmaster ) with the title of ” stationmaster ” and becoming world-famous . [ 3 ] She is now the station’s honorary permanent stationmaster.

On January 5, 2007, he was officially appointed as the stationmaster by the Wakayama Electric Railway, which caused quite a stir . [ 3 ] His main job was to “welcome customers,” and he is said to have not only attracted customers to Kishi Station, but also brought about the Heisei era cat boom, ” nekonomics ,” in Japan . [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] He was employed for life with no term limit , and his annual salary was one year’s worth of cat food .

Tama died in 2015, age 16.

But the Japan Rail Club says there’s a new stationmaster cat:

Her role of station master at Kishi Station was assumed by another beautiful calico cat, Nitama (ニタマ literarally “Tama two”), for whom curious travellers and excited fans alike travel all the way to the quiet station in Wakayama Prefecture.

Here is Nitama from CNN:

Nitama — the new stationmaster of Kishi Station in Wakayama Prefecture — has been praised for her “hat-wearing” skills. courtesy Ryobi Group

Notes (indented) and 3 photos from Carlissa Loh:

As a tribute to Tama, Wakayama Electric Railway started operating the Tama Densha train (たま電車), an adorable train with an exterior decorated 101 drawings of Tama donning a station master’s hat in various poses. Affectionately called “Tamaden”, the train’s front even has ears and whiskers, how cute is that? As a self-professed noritetsu, I love riding special trains, and knew I had to make room in my trip to take a ride on this train and pay a visit to Nitama.

Inside the train, there were even more darling drawings and decals of Tama adorning the windows and walls, and since it was the New Year’s period when I visited, there weren’t many other passengers, so I could take photos to my heart’s content.

The Tama Densha is made up of two carriages, and each one is furnished with wooden seats of varying designs of shades of orange, black, and white, and just oozed comfort and cosiness. The train was designed by Mitooka Eiji (水戸岡 鋭治), who has designed many memorable sightseeing trains such as the luxury cruise train Seven Stars in Kyushu, many of JR Kyushu’s D&S Trains, Kyoto Tango Railway’s sightseeing trains, and more.

I’d surely ride this train if I went to Japan (one of my dream destinations)!

More photos and info at the site.

*****************************

And from Defector, Alex Sujong Laughlin interviews his cat Pong about the cat’s obnoxious behaviors. Click below to read:

Excerpts by Laughlin are indented:

Like every other member of my generation who has put off traditional markers of adulthood, like home ownership and having children, I am completely, utterly devoted to my cat, Pong. In the five years he’s lived with us, Pong has evolved from the scrawny street cat we adopted in the Union Square Petco to the ruler of our household. We often quote a decade-old Adam Serwer tweet about his own cats: Management doesn’t need a union.

We’ve invented a rich mythology for Pong’s inner life over the last five years. His hardscrabble early years taught him to flirt and charm for his meals on the streets of Harlem, where he developed his taste for French fries, noodles, and pizza. He ran with a tough crew that wasn’t afraid to get into scraps if he needed to assert dominance. He inherited his asthma and anxiety from his mother (me), and he spends his days working hard (sleeping on a chair in my office) for the money to pay our rent.

In any relationship, you fall into rhythms built around each other’s quirks and scar tissue. This is true even—or maybe especially—when the relationship is with an animal who cannot speak English. We’ve come to accept his most annoying behaviors; his loafing on our backs at 5 a.m. like a sleep paralysis demon is just a part of life with Pong, as are the lost hours of sleep and frequent yelling when he can’t find us in the house. \

I got a recommendation for a pet communicator, whose identity I’m keeping private at their request, and booked a 30-minute session with them. We met on Zoom, and when they started looking for his energy, they asked if he’s a male, six to eight years old, who’s very sure of himself. Pong was sleeping next to me in a little kitty croissant but the communicator couldn’t see him on screen. I told them they had the right guy.

What follows is an interview with Pong, through the communicator, which I’ve edited for clarity.

Just two Q&A’s via the pet communicator:

Can you tell me anything about your life before you came to live with us? 

There wasn’t a loving family, but there were two or three people who took care of me on the street. There was one man who I had a strong relationship with. There was a misunderstanding, the people tried to bring me into the house, and then took me away.

(This made me think of Alex, the doorman who apparently fed him when he was a stray, and who he was named for when he was brought to Union Square. Yes, we should’ve kept that name.)

. . .I appreciate that. OK, one last question. Sometimes you’ll crawl up onto my lap and be really sweet and snuggly, and then out of nowhere you’ll start attacking me, biting me and breaking skin. It really sucks when that happens! What’s going on? 

Sometimes I feel like I’m back on the street and it just happens. It feels right in the moment, but when you get upset I feel ashamed. I saw the tissues with the blood last week and I feel bad. It’s not your fault.

There’s a lot more Q&A at the site.

h/t: Malcolm, Ginger K.

Dumbest Word of the Week: Moxibustion; News Items: Cold Plunges, The End of Life, Floating Nuclear Power, Visualizing Special Relativity, Brainspotting Pseudoscience; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Ethics of Pig Hearts, Are Flat Earthers Real; Science or Fiction

In a recent paper, an international team proposed an ultra-long wavelength radio interferometer that could examine the Cosmic Dark Ages and Cosmic Dawn. Known as the Dark Ages Explorer (DEX), this telescope could provide fresh insights into how and when the first stars and galaxies formed.

Newly discovered weapons of bacterial self-defense take different approaches to achieving the same goal: preventing a virus from spreading through the bacterial population.

Millions of years of evolution have enabled some marine animals to grow complex protective shells composed of multiple layers that work together to dissipate physical stress. In a new study, engineers have found a way to mimic the behavior of this type of layered material, such as seashell nacre, by programming individual layers of synthetic material to work collaboratively under stress. The new material design is poised to enhance energy-absorbing systems such as wearable bandages and car bumpers with multistage responses that adapt to collision severity.

New research details how infrared thermography, high-definition imaging and neural network analysis can combine to make concrete bridge inspections more efficient. Researchers are hopeful that their findings can be leveraged by engineers through a combination of these methods to strategically pinpoint bridge conditions and better allocate repair costs.

New research details how infrared thermography, high-definition imaging and neural network analysis can combine to make concrete bridge inspections more efficient. Researchers are hopeful that their findings can be leveraged by engineers through a combination of these methods to strategically pinpoint bridge conditions and better allocate repair costs.

When navigating the modern world with its varied conveniences and modes of leisure, it seems that we humans are completely detached from the harsh environments that our species evolved out of thousands of years ago. Under stress, or in moments of crisis, however, the tools that our minds have evolved to deal with danger or imminent threat become quite apparent. During times like the recent global COVID-19 pandemic, when resources become unpredictably unavailable, we can turn to rather selfishly acquiring large quantities of particular products. From toilet paper rolls to baking flour, perceived essentials are coveted and cached away, hidden from other individuals, reserved for personal use in the future.

During such periods of uncertainty and upheaval, we aim also to construct meaning and a story line from the world rapidly changing around us—one by-product of which is the development of conspiracy theories. While such actions may be frowned upon in today’s society, and can be explained by hardwired behavioral reactions, they also point out the sophisticated cognitive tools that were likely critical to our evolutionary survival, indeed success, namely: recall of specific past events, future planning, the attribution of mental states to other individuals (theory of mind), a strong belief in some source of causation, and an underlying curiosity about the world we live in.

Thankfully, perhaps, we are not the only species with a tendency to cache goods when resources become scarce or when environments are risky—this is a trait we share with over 200 other vertebrates.1 Food-caching behavior is particularly impressive among birds such as the Clark’s nutcracker. This species lives in harsh seasonal environments and can cache tens of thousands of pine seeds within a season. Remarkably, they are able to remember and retrieve the seeds with great accuracy over nine months after storing them.2 The scrub jay on the other hand, caches a smaller number of more varied items, some of which perish relatively quickly (insects and olives, for example), and must therefore also keep track of the decay rates of different food items, and the passage of time, in order to successfully retrieve edible snacks.3 Are these remarkable behavioral feats potentially underpinned by sophisticated cognitive tools like our own, or can they be explained in terms of simpler, hard-wired behavioral predispositions?

The Clark’s nutcracker can cache tens of thousands of pine seeds within a season and remember and retrieve the seeds with great accuracy over nine months after storing them.

Ethologists and comparative psychologists who study some of the cleverest organisms on the planet have grappled with such questions concerning the nature and origin of intelligence for decades, across a wide variety of different contexts and animal taxa. The comparative study of animal cognition has raised a number of critical questions over the years, including: Are other animals conscious?4 Can they “mentally travel in time” by storing specific memories and imagining the future?5 Are non-human animals able to attribute mental states to other individuals,6 and does curiosity motivate their interaction and exploration of these abstract phenomena?7 Ultimately, what is it about human cognition that sets us apart from other animals, and why? Trying to answer these types of questions is more important than ever. Not only does it give insight into the nature and origins of our own thinking and behavior, tackling these questions can also help us better understand, build, and predict artificial forms of intelligence, which are becoming increasingly embedded in the fabric of society and our daily lives.8

Though comparative cognition is a vast field, researchers are unified by a central challenge: unlocking the secrets of animal minds, which are like black boxes whose contents are neither directly visible nor accessible. Unlike work in human psychology that can partly rely on participants to report their own subjective experiences, research in animal cognition must employ creative behavioral tasks and interventionist approaches in order to test causal hypotheses about mechanisms that underlie behavior. This is the only way to tease apart hardwired responses or simpler forms of associative learning from more complex forms of cognition that could potentially explain behavior in question.9

Take, for example, the remarkable (and often frustrating) ability of ant colonies to identify and efficiently transport food from sparsely scattered patches in the environment to their nests. Research employing mazes has shown that Argentine ants are capable of solving fiendishly difficult transport optimization problems, flexibly finding the shortest path to food sources, even when known routes become blocked off.10 When watching individuals zealously journey out of the nest and back again, in close coordination with one another, it would be reasonable to assume that each ant had an understanding of the transport problem being solved, or that a central organizing force was shaping the behavior of the colony. Yet this feat is an example of self-organizing collective intelligence; a phenomenon that does not require a global controller, or even that the individuals be aware of the nature of the challenge that they are solving together. By adhering to simple, fixed rules of pheromone following and production, individual ants by means of only local interactions can produce complex collective behavior that does not rely upon any sophisticated cognition at all. This example highlights the need to employ carefully crafted experiments to elucidate correctly the true nature of behavioral processes.

Ants efficiently solve complex transport problems, working together through simple rules of pheromone following, showing self-organizing collective intelligence, without needing a leader or central control. (Photo by Ivan Radic, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Initially, comparative studies of complex cognition focused primarily on other primate species.11 Their close evolutionary relation to humans means they provide something of a window into the ancestral origins of our sophisticated cognition, and by comparison, the novel idiosyncrasies that characterize human intelligence (although they too have evolved both their bodies and their behavior in response to the selective pressures they have encountered since their split from us and our common ancestor). Nonetheless, it is anthropocentric to assume that complex cognition is exclusive to primates. Indeed, research on primate cognition has generated two influential hypotheses for the evolution of advanced intelligence that are applicable to a wide range of taxa. The Ecological Intelligence Hypothesis suggests that challenges associated with efficiently finding and processing food promote sophisticated cognition,12 while the Social Intelligence Hypothesis argues that activities involved in group living, including the need to cooperate with and potentially deceive others, drive the evolution of sophisticated cognition.13

Understanding the nature of intelligence is a tricky business but comparative psychology provides us with experimental tools that offer a window into the mind’s eye of other animals.

Over the last three decades increasing evidence has accumulated to show that a similar combination of selective pressures has driven the evolution of comparably complex cognition in other animal groups, notably the corvids.14 This group of birds, which includes crows, jays, ravens, and jackdaws, is capable of remarkable behavioral feats. These include the manufacture and use of tools for specific tasks,15, 16 and even the ability to “count out loud” by producing precise numbers of vocalizations in response to numerical values.17 The discovery of such behaviors points to complex underlying cognition, and given that primates and corvids diverged some 300 million years ago, it also suggests that advanced intelligence evolved independently at least twice within animals as the result of convergent evolutionary pressures.

In order to closely elucidate the nature of intelligence in animals, it is instructive to first identify natural behavior that may reflect complex cognitive processes, especially ones that can also be studied in controlled laboratory conditions. The food caching behavior of birds has proven to be a powerful model through which to investigate the nature of animal intelligence across a range of domains, including recall of past events, future planning, and the ability to attribute mental states to other individuals (“Machiavellian intelligence”). In particular, laboratory studies on scrub jays have leveraged that species’ propensity to cache a variety of perishable foods, but not eat items that have degraded. How do individual birds efficiently recover the hundreds of spatially distinct caches they make daily, given that different food items decay at different rates?

Western Scrub-Jay, Aphelocoma californica (Photo by Martyne Reesman, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, via Wikimedia)

In a notable study published in Nature,18 researchers hypothesized that jays use a flexible form of memory that previously had been thought exclusive to humans—episodic memory. Episodic memory allows us to recall specific events that have occurred in our mind’s eye, and we experience these memories as our own, with a sense that they represent events that have occurred in the past. In the absence of a method to ascertain whether jays subjectively experience memories as we do, the researchers proposed behavioral criteria that would indicate “episodic-like” memory: an ability to retrieve information about “where” a unique event or “episode” took place, “what” occurred during the event, and “when” it happened. To test this, they conducted a series of experiments in which jays were presented with perishable worms that could be cached in trays at one site and non-perishable nuts that could be cached at another. The results of the experiments showed that when given the option to recover caches after a short time, the birds preferred to search for the more desirable, tasty worms, but switched to searching for the less attractive nuts after longer delays, when the worms had decayed. These experiments demonstrated for the first time that a non-human animal can recall the “what-where-when” of specific events in the past using abilities akin to episodic memory in humans.

While birds might rely on recall of specific events to successfully retrieve cached items, the initial act of caching itself is prospective, functioning to provide resources for the future when they might otherwise be scarce. This raises the possibility that non-human animals are capable of future planning, mentally traveling forwards in time to anticipate future needs that differ from present ones. However, caching may also simply be a hardwired behavioral urge, rather than a flexible response that is reliant on learning. To explore this, researchers tested scrub jays using a “planning for breakfast” paradigm.19 Over a period of six days the jays were exposed daily to either a “hungry room” where breakfast was never provided, or a “breakfast room” where food was available in the morning. Otherwise, the jays were provided with powdered (uncacheable) food in a middle room that linked the other two. Then, the birds were offered nuts in the middle room, and the opportunity to cache them in either the hungry or breakfast room. The results showed that the birds spontaneously strongly preferred to cache the nuts in the hungry room, indicating for the first time that a non-human animal can plan for the future, guiding its behavior based on anticipated future needs independent of their present motivational state.

The examples above demonstrate the ability of birds to “mentally travel in time” and form representations of their own past and future. To recover their caches successfully, however, each individual bird must also pay attention to the other birds who might attempt to steal their caches. To lessen the risk of that happening, individual birds employ a range of strategies to protect their stored food, including caching food behind barriers, out of the sight of other birds, and producing decoy caches that do not contain any edible items. To explore the cognitive processes involved in cache protection behavior researchers allowed scrub jays to cache food when alone, or while being watched by another bird. The caching birds were then provided the opportunity to recover their caches while in private, giving them a chance to re-cache the hidden food items that might be vulnerable to pilfering. Interestingly, not all birds re-cached the items most at risk of being stolen (those cached in front of the conspecific). Only those scrub jays who were experienced pilferers themselves decided to re-cache items that had been watched by another individual.20 The implication is that birds who have been thieves in the past project their experience of stealing onto others, thereby anticipating future stealing of their own caches. In other words, it takes a thief to know one! This experiment therefore raises the possibility that the jays simulate the perspectives of other individuals, suggesting that like humans, they may be able to attribute mental states to others, and therefore have a knowledge of other minds as well as other times.

The approach employed in these studies highlights the utility of exploring behavioral criteria indicative of complex cognitive processes by using a carefully controlled experimental procedure. One advantage of this approach is that it is widely applicable, since it relies on externally observable behavior, rather than obscure internal states, and can therefore be used to investigate a diverse range of intelligences. Recently, comparative psychologists have started to apply these techniques to systematically investigate the intelligence of soft-bodied cephalopods—the invertebrate group comprised of octopus, cuttlefish, and squid.21 These remarkable animals have captured the imagination of naturalists for hundreds of years and reports suggest they are capable of highly flexible and sophisticated behaviors. For example, veined octopuses transport coconut shells in which they hide themselves when faced with a threatening predator, raising the possibility that they may be able to plan for the future. Further, the male giant Australian cuttlefish avoids fights with other males by deceptively changing their appearance to resemble that of females—perhaps they are capable of attributing mental states to other members of their species.

A coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus), hides from threatening predators between a coconut shell and a clam shell. Using its tentacles, it carries the shells, while pulling itself along. Sensing a threat, the octopus clamps itself shut between the shells. (Photo by Nick Hobgood, Wikimedia)

Recently, laboratory experiments with the common cuttlefish have shown that like some birds, apes, and rodents, they are able to recollect “what-where-when” information about past events through episodic-like memory.22 Unlike other species however, episodic memory in cuttlefish does not decline with age, offering exciting opportunities to study resistance to age-related decline in cognition.23 As with food caching among corvids, behavioral experiments with cuttlefish have also revealed prospective, future-oriented behavior: after learning temporal patterns of food availability, cuttlefish learn to forgo immediately available prey items in order to consume more preferred food that only becomes available later.24, 25 Presently, however, it is not clear whether this reflects genuine future planning, which requires individuals to act independently of current needs—and so presents an exciting avenue for future research.

Given the broad applicability of the experimental approach developed in comparative psychology, it is worth considering the utility of experimental paradigms to investigate the behavior of non-organic forms of intelligence. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are becoming increasingly embedded in the way that we work, solve problems, and learn, perhaps best exemplified by the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, now ubiquitous by their use in content creation and even serving as a source of knowledge.26 It is more important than ever that we develop an understanding of the behavior of these forms of intelligence. Fortunately, decades of research aimed at understanding the minds of animals has provided us with the conceptual tools needed to elucidate the processes underlying artificial behavior, and the means to build a form of artificial intelligence that is more flexible and less biased. Though reports of ANNs besting humans in traditionally complex, strategic games such as poker abound,27 some have argued that these wins are often restricted to very specific domains, and that ANNs are far from displaying the general intelligence of animals, let alone humans.28

Interdisciplinary efforts, however, are helping to close this gap. Inspired by research in cognitive psychology, computer scientists have incorporated an analogue of episodic memory into the architecture of ANNs. Endowed with the ability to compare present environmental variables with those encountered during specific points in the past, ANNs are able to behave much more flexibly.29 Recently, influenced by classic tasks in comparative psychology, psychologists and computer scientists have collaborated to produce a competition testing the relative cognitive abilities of ANNs.30 Dubbed the “Animal-AI Olympics,”31 this competition should help to promote the development of artificial forms of intelligence capable of mirroring the general intelligence displayed by animals, and perhaps one day, humans.

Understanding the nature of intelligence is a tricky business, but comparative psychology provides us with experimental tools that offer a window into the mind’s eye of other animals. In the future, these approaches may prove invaluable in providing insights into the behavior of artificial forms of intelligence, and one day, perhaps, into the behavior of organic life that looks very different from that on Earth.

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