Speaker 1: Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind, production of by
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: today is going to be the first and a couple
Speaker 1: of episodes that we wanted to do on the subject
Speaker 1: of invertebrate emotions. And strangely enough, I got interested in
Speaker 1: this subject the other day after I was reading a poem,
Speaker 1: not a scientific paper. I was reading a poem by
Speaker 1: the American modernist poet Marianne Moore, who I like a lot.
Speaker 1: She She writes a lot about like fish and you know,
Speaker 1: marine organisms. She lived from eight seven to nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 1: And uh, if it's okay with you, Robert, I wanted
Speaker 1: to start off this episode just by reading this poem
Speaker 1: that I encountered the other day. Okay. It is called
Speaker 1: the paper Nautilus for authorities whose hopes are shaped by mercenaries, writers,
Speaker 1: and trapped by tea time, fame and by commuters comfort.
Speaker 1: It's not for these. The paper Nautilus constructs her thin
Speaker 1: glass shell, giving her perishable souvenir of hope, a dull
Speaker 1: white outside and smooth edged inner surface. Glossy is the sea,
Speaker 1: the watchful maker of it, guards it day and night.
Speaker 1: She scarcely eats until her eggs are hatched, buried eight
Speaker 1: fold in her eight arms, for she is in a
Speaker 1: sense of devil fish. Her glass ram's horn, cradled freight,
Speaker 1: is hid but not crushed, as hercules bitten by a
Speaker 1: crab loyal to the hydra, was hindered to succeed. The
Speaker 1: intensively watched eggs coming from the shell free it when
Speaker 1: they are freed, leaving its wasp nest flaws of white
Speaker 1: on white and close laid ionic kite enfolds, like the
Speaker 1: lines in the mane of a parthenon horse, round which
Speaker 1: the arms had wound themselves, as if they knew. Love
Speaker 1: is the only fortress strong enough to trust to. Oh
Speaker 1: that's nice. I like that last art, especially me too.
Speaker 1: I mean, I love the way it moves from um this,
Speaker 1: uh this direct, almost clinical description of the actual biology
Speaker 1: of the paper nautilus and how it builds its shell
Speaker 1: and all that, and goes from that to these classical illusions,
Speaker 1: and then ultimately ends on this powerfully emotional note that
Speaker 1: kind of gives me a shiver. Uh So, the late
Speaker 1: American poet Anthony Hate, writing about More, said that one
Speaker 1: of the things he liked most about her poems was
Speaker 1: that they had quote a capacity for pure praise that
Speaker 1: has absolutely biblical awe in it, and I think you
Speaker 1: kind of see that here. I like that quality a
Speaker 1: lot too. It captures in language some of the overwhelming,
Speaker 1: almost religious kind of power I feel when looking at
Speaker 1: some animals, especially animals that live in the ocean. But
Speaker 1: also the poem really just has a very worthy subject.
Speaker 1: The paper nautilus, also known as the argonaut, is a
Speaker 1: remarkable species, and the shell that has talked about in
Speaker 1: the poem, the egg case, is a genuinely gorgeous under
Speaker 1: of evolution. Yeah, this is quite a remarkable critter. So
Speaker 1: the Argonaut, Uh, first, let's just talk about the name.
Speaker 1: This is of course a reference to Greek mythology, and
Speaker 1: we we recently talked about this on our other show Invention,
Speaker 1: the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, Right, Yeah, because
Speaker 1: the argonaut just means sailors of the Argo, the Argo
Speaker 1: being the ship built by Argus and the ship upon
Speaker 1: which Jason sails in his quest to find the Golden Fleece,
Speaker 1: which itself was a sacred pelt of a winged ram.
Speaker 1: But the argonaut we're talking about here is again the
Speaker 1: paper nautilus, a member of the genus Argonata. So they're
Speaker 1: octopods cephalopods, and there as many as fifty three species
Speaker 1: that have been described. They have this delicate calcite shell,
Speaker 1: hence the nickname, and these shells were once thought to
Speaker 1: be pilfered like the shells of a hermit crab. There
Speaker 1: was a question of where did they acquire these things? Well,
Speaker 1: they must have they must have stolen them. Uh, they
Speaker 1: must be using them, right, And they wouldn't be the
Speaker 1: only octopus that finds a shell or some kind of
Speaker 1: you know, a coconut or something and picks it up
Speaker 1: and uses it, right, Uh and uh. And this was
Speaker 1: also another contributing factor to this interpretation is the fact
Speaker 1: that the the argonaut is not physically attached to the shell,
Speaker 1: like when a specimen is examined. The creature can be
Speaker 1: removed from the shell with ease, though it typically expires
Speaker 1: if that is done to it. So, um, we've known
Speaker 1: about them for these creatures for thousands of years. They
Speaker 1: pop up an art from three thousand b C. According
Speaker 1: to Mark Carnal writing for The Guardian. But we did
Speaker 1: not know how they made their egg shells until the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. So this is what happens. The female and
Speaker 1: only the female secretes the shells via specialized arms and
Speaker 1: the resulting shell it's essentially a floatation device that resembles
Speaker 1: the shell of extinct ammonites. They lay their eggs inside
Speaker 1: of these shells. They retreat inside. Sometimes you'll you'll you'll
Speaker 1: find the detached reproductive arm of a male a hectocotalist,
Speaker 1: and then she'll use she'll use the shell though, to
Speaker 1: control her buoyancy in the water. There's so many interesting
Speaker 1: things going on here. I mean, number one is just
Speaker 1: the implied history of mating that at some point a
Speaker 1: male octopus came along and made it by what tearing
Speaker 1: off one of its own arms and giving it to her. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically it is like a detachable sexual organ, uh, that
Speaker 1: then she keeps. But yeah, the other thing about this
Speaker 1: shell that's so fascinating is when we think of shells,
Speaker 1: we think of just pure defense. We think of the
Speaker 1: hard shelter that has grown out of the animal that
Speaker 1: the animal may retreat into. Right, But they're in the
Speaker 1: common name the paper nautilus. It implies that the shell
Speaker 1: is very delicate. Yeah, it is not a defensive structure,
Speaker 1: at least not in the same way that a true
Speaker 1: shell is. I mean it is you can't argue that
Speaker 1: it is protected for the young that reside within it,
Speaker 1: because it is a very slim barrier between them in
Speaker 1: the open ocean, and you know, keeps them close to
Speaker 1: the female. But mainly it is the means by which
Speaker 1: this particular type of octopod returned to the open sea
Speaker 1: as its skin had largely evolved for sea floor life,
Speaker 1: and left the open waters to the squid. Okay, so
Speaker 1: the octopus is generally going to be found, uh, I
Speaker 1: don't know, along the bottom or maybe hiding along along
Speaker 1: a reef or something like that. But this one just
Speaker 1: takes out to the open waters with a flotation device
Speaker 1: of its own, making like one way. And this is
Speaker 1: you know, an elaborate and probably a little poetiquet to
Speaker 1: think of it. But you can think of the squid
Speaker 1: as the angel, and the octopus is the fallen angels
Speaker 1: has lost its wings, but this particular octopod has I
Speaker 1: guess Miltonian aspirations and or or is or is you know,
Speaker 1: lined up with the thinking of data lists and icarus,
Speaker 1: and it is building its own shell that will that
Speaker 1: in this case, we'll will allow it to ascend up
Speaker 1: in the water towards the surface. Now there's another thing
Speaker 1: I want to throw in as a when you get
Speaker 1: into the sexual dimorphism here, the females are up to
Speaker 1: six hundred times the weight of the males. Uh. And
Speaker 1: again the males do not engage in this kind of
Speaker 1: shell construction and growth. But a great deal of mystery
Speaker 1: remains about how the argonaut lives its life and and
Speaker 1: indeed how they even evolved. Uh Neil Monks and Sea
Speaker 1: Phil Palmer, authors of the two thousand two Smithsonian book Ammonites.
Speaker 1: They have suggested that these ancient octopuses might have depended
Speaker 1: on the discarded shells of ammonites in prehistoric times and
Speaker 1: use their abilities to mend the shells. So the idea
Speaker 1: might be that originally they stole shells from a now
Speaker 1: extinct animal and then use these uh uh, these abilities
Speaker 1: to to patch them up and make them fit, to
Speaker 1: customize them a little bit, but still largely depend on
Speaker 1: the stolen shell. Interesting, I mean, there is a physical similarity.
Speaker 1: If you haven't seen ammonite shells that they tend to
Speaker 1: be spiral shaped there at some point in the past.
Speaker 1: I talked about our recent trip to Lime Region us
Speaker 1: in uh in the UK, where on the beach you
Speaker 1: can find fossils of ammonites from you know, hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions of years ago, and there are these colossal serial
Speaker 1: killer spirals etched into the rocks. It's very very cool.
Speaker 1: But yeah, at some point the ammonites disappeared, So they
Speaker 1: went extinct in the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction event. And so
Speaker 1: what what do you do if you depend upon that shell?
Speaker 1: So the idea here is that the the ancient paper
Speaker 1: nautilus is then had to use their mending skills to
Speaker 1: just create a shell of their own in order to
Speaker 1: do the same sort of things that they did previously.
Speaker 1: So what they what they once used to repair, they
Speaker 1: had to create from scratch. Yes, that's that's at least
Speaker 1: one one theory that's out there. It's also highly possible
Speaker 1: that we're just talking about covergent evolution here and the
Speaker 1: paper nautilus is eggshell just happens to resemble that of
Speaker 1: an ammonite. Sure, but it really does look similar, but
Speaker 1: then again you can see other signs of similar types
Speaker 1: of possible convergent evolution. I mean the nautilus, not the
Speaker 1: paper nautilus, but the animal just normally called the nautilus
Speaker 1: is like the a marine mollusk has a shell that
Speaker 1: sort of resembles an m nite shell. Also, yeah, absolutely
Speaker 1: still a fascinating creature and also definitely a creature worthy
Speaker 1: of poetic consideration. Speaking and speaking of poetry. They also
Speaker 1: show up in in other works of literature, including twenty
Speaker 1: thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: a there's a section in it where they are, uh
Speaker 1: there they are aboard the nautilus, the submarine, and uh
Speaker 1: they are They've come up to the surface and they
Speaker 1: observe these creatures. They observed the paper nautilus, the argonaute
Speaker 1: in action. So here's a quote from the book. Quote. Now,
Speaker 1: it was a school of argonauts then voyaging on the
Speaker 1: surface of the ocean. We could count several hundred of them.
Speaker 1: They belong to that species of argonauts, covered with protuberances
Speaker 1: and exclusive to the seas near India. These graceful mollusks
Speaker 1: were swimming backwards by means of their locomotive tubes, sucking
Speaker 1: water into these tubes and then expelling it. Six They're
Speaker 1: eight tentacles were long, thin and floated on the water,
Speaker 1: while the other two were rounded into palms and spread
Speaker 1: to the wind like light sails. I could see perfectly.
Speaker 1: They're undulating spiral shaped shells, which Cuvier aptly compared to
Speaker 1: an elegant cockle boat. It's an actual boat. Indeed, it
Speaker 1: transports the animal that secretes it without the animal sticking
Speaker 1: to it. The Argonaut is free to leave its shell,
Speaker 1: I told Consil, but it never does not, unlike Captain Nemo.
Speaker 1: Conseil replied sage Lee, which is why he should have
Speaker 1: christened it his ship, the Argonaut. Oh that's good, it's
Speaker 1: a shell of his own design. Yeah. So now they're
Speaker 1: also referring in this passage to this um, this myth
Speaker 1: or this outdated idea that they could use their arms
Speaker 1: as sails and sail across the top of the water,
Speaker 1: and that the shell is like actually a boat, and
Speaker 1: it really in some sense as it is, because it
Speaker 1: aids the creature in it's in its buoyancy. But anyway,
Speaker 1: that's just a fun little literary usage of the argonaut,
Speaker 1: and it also alludes to that fact that yes, it can.
Speaker 1: It can technically leave the shell, because it doesn't actually
Speaker 1: grow that the shell. It kind of makes it. But
Speaker 1: if if you were to remove the species from it,
Speaker 1: shall it typically dies. This is such a cool animal,
Speaker 1: And I like the idea that Jules Verne was like
Speaker 1: halfway through writing twenty Leagues and he discovered this animal
Speaker 1: and He's like, oh, I should have gone back and
Speaker 1: named it the argonaut from the beginning, but I'd take
Speaker 1: too much revision. I'll just plow ahead and I'll have
Speaker 1: a character acknowledge, like it really would have been better
Speaker 1: if it was called this other thing. But anyway, I
Speaker 1: wanted to come back to the ending of the poem
Speaker 1: by Marianne Moore. This powerful ending is what got me
Speaker 1: really thinking about the subject for today's episode and the
Speaker 1: next one. This idea of this eight armed cephalopod clutching
Speaker 1: at its egg case, as if each of its arms
Speaker 1: knew that love is the only fortress strong enough to
Speaker 1: trust too. Does the paper nautilus feel love? Do the
Speaker 1: coiled arms of the argonauts simply clutch or do they embrace?
Speaker 1: Do they hug? With all the emotional and you know,
Speaker 1: the baggage that comes with that. I think most everyone
Speaker 1: would probably I think the gut response that people are
Speaker 1: generally gonna have is no, You're gonna think, no, a
Speaker 1: a paper nautilus is not going to be capable of
Speaker 1: of love. Love is what humans do. And you know,
Speaker 1: maybe specific animals that we uh live closely with that
Speaker 1: we anthropomorphize enough into, but not the not the octopi,
Speaker 1: not the not the the world of invertebrates. Well, I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's I mean, people would I think you'd
Speaker 1: encounter a lot of divergent opinion about that. On one hand,
Speaker 1: you can say, yeah, I mean, of course you're gonna
Speaker 1: have a problem of if you believe that an octopus
Speaker 1: can love? I mean, how could you prove that? Uh?
Speaker 1: And so? And we'll address questions like that as we
Speaker 1: move on. But more broadly, I guess, can you can
Speaker 1: you imagine invertebrates in general feeling anything analogous to the
Speaker 1: kind of plain, familiar emotions that we name in poems.
Speaker 1: You know, does a does a crab feel fear? Does
Speaker 1: a bumblebee feel hate? Uh? Does a snail feel discussed
Speaker 1: or jealousy? Or joy or you know, is it as
Speaker 1: you're sort of suggesting folly to meaningfully apply these words
Speaker 1: outside of humans, and maybe they're more closely related vertebrate relatives. Well,
Speaker 1: but then the other side to look at it, and
Speaker 1: this is something we'll continue to discuss as well, is
Speaker 1: that you bring up poetry, and poetry is very much
Speaker 1: a part of the and I love poetry, but it
Speaker 1: is part of the cult of human emotion indefinitely places
Speaker 1: things like love on a golden pedestal. And and so
Speaker 1: there's kind of a push and pull here when we
Speaker 1: look to the world of animals. We have to be
Speaker 1: willing to throw our emotions off of that golden pedestal
Speaker 1: and and look at what they really are from you know,
Speaker 1: psychological and even biological standpoint. And at the same time
Speaker 1: we have to be able to look to the animal
Speaker 1: world and be willing to attribute these uh, these knockdown
Speaker 1: emotions to them as well. Well, yeah, I mean that
Speaker 1: that's the other side of it. I mean, some people,
Speaker 1: I think would say you're being stingy if you say
Speaker 1: that that an argonaut can't love. But then I think
Speaker 1: there are also people who would say, like, you're really
Speaker 1: you know, degrading my feeling of my relationships and and
Speaker 1: my love. If you say that, an octopus can do
Speaker 1: the same thing, right, So it gets it gets complicated,
Speaker 1: and there's plenty of room to be piste off on
Speaker 1: both sides. So hopefully we'll piss everyone off as we
Speaker 1: proceed here. Well, maybe we should take a break, and
Speaker 1: then when we come back we can try to address
Speaker 1: the thorny difficult question of what our emotions than. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back, So to proceed here, we're going to have
Speaker 1: to take a quick stab an exceedingly huge and complicated question,
Speaker 1: which is what our emotions. Obviously this is something we
Speaker 1: can't answer adequately in a subsection of one episode, but
Speaker 1: we'll do our best to try to to hint at
Speaker 1: the broad picture of what this question entails. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: can be so tricky to even contemplate this because because
Speaker 1: and one of the big things is that emotions are
Speaker 1: the tumultuous, see that we're constantly immersed in that where
Speaker 1: we feel cast about in you know. And this is
Speaker 1: again this gets into poetry as well, Right, how many
Speaker 1: poems are about you know, the mail storm of emotion,
Speaker 1: you know, and and and how we just feel like
Speaker 1: we're just a victim to them. Well, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: we we often think of emotions as being something that's
Speaker 1: inside us, but it's almost more apt to think of
Speaker 1: us as being inside them. Like we can't see the
Speaker 1: whole thing, We don't have perspective. We're it's more like
Speaker 1: a c on which we are floating. I think that's
Speaker 1: a great metaphor. And yet at the same time we
Speaker 1: are the sea, you know, Like we often fall into this, uh,
Speaker 1: into this model that I think is largely what you
Speaker 1: see in the work of some of the you know,
Speaker 1: the classic philosophers of logic and emotion, and then like
Speaker 1: logic is the domain of you know, logic and reason
Speaker 1: on one hand, and then they're the the enemies of
Speaker 1: passion that uh that that tear us apart, the Apollo
Speaker 1: and Dionysus model exactly. Yeah, and so it's easy to
Speaker 1: fall back on that. It's just baked into so much
Speaker 1: of our culture. Yeah, And and just in general, emotion
Speaker 1: is just something we're too close to. I sometimes feel,
Speaker 1: I feel that emotion is like a cantalope, you know,
Speaker 1: like when you buy a cantaloupe, when you cut, you
Speaker 1: don't know what it's gonna be you cut into it, though,
Speaker 1: and when it's great, there's nothing else like it. It's amazing,
Speaker 1: And when it's bad, it's just the worst. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I feel this way about candle up, I
Speaker 1: feel this way about tomatoes. Yeah, tomato. My favorite food
Speaker 1: in the world is a really good ripe summer tomato.
Speaker 1: And there's nothing worse than a meli off season tomato. Yes,
Speaker 1: the tomato is also a great example of human emotion,
Speaker 1: and I think a lot of our meditative and monastic
Speaker 1: traditions are ultimately aimed at fostering as much as possible
Speaker 1: a dependable honeydew melon mental state, something where you know,
Speaker 1: you cut into it and it's not gonna be just
Speaker 1: it's not gonna knock your socks off, but it's also
Speaker 1: not going to discuss you. It's going to be a nice, pleasant,
Speaker 1: dependable experience right there in the middle, calming the seas,
Speaker 1: eliminating the highs and lows, creating equanimity. So this is
Speaker 1: this is where we are. You know, we're feeling creatures,
Speaker 1: for better or worse. But we've always tried to figure
Speaker 1: out emotions. We've tried to figure it out for for ages,
Speaker 1: the greatest thinkers, philosophers, artist, scientist sages. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: religious leaders throughout history have contemplated their nature and formulated
Speaker 1: various theories. And we could easily do a multi part
Speaker 1: series on the question of human emotions. But the short
Speaker 1: view is that we have basically three ways of considering them.
Speaker 1: First of all, there's the idea of emotions as feelings.
Speaker 1: The way they feel is what they are, so it's
Speaker 1: a subjective state. And in that sense, the only emotion
Speaker 1: you can ever really know is your own, Like you
Speaker 1: cannot share in anybody else's. You can think you do,
Speaker 1: but you can't know for sure. I mean, does somebody
Speaker 1: else's sadness feel like yours? Does to somebody else's happiness
Speaker 1: feel like yours? Does you know it's it's you? You
Speaker 1: are trapped with your subjectivity here, right, And then when
Speaker 1: you get into theory of mind, I mean, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a whole issue there and itself, like, to what
Speaker 1: what degree do we attribute the same level of emotional
Speaker 1: investment to others? And in what cases are we attributing
Speaker 1: too much emotion to this individual and less emotion to
Speaker 1: this individual based on a whole host of reasons. Well so,
Speaker 1: But if emotion is just subjectivity, it seems hopeless that
Speaker 1: you could ever try to study it in animals. Right,
Speaker 1: If it's just a subjective experience, we have no access
Speaker 1: to it whatsoever, right, and and and that would be
Speaker 1: the danger, right if it was just perpetually tied up
Speaker 1: in the other human concepts of say like consciousness and
Speaker 1: u uh in theory of mind, etcetera. But then we
Speaker 1: have these other two categories. First of all, emotions as evaluations.
Speaker 1: Emotions are evaluations of the primary circumstances that we're dealing with. So,
Speaker 1: you know, a huge tie to the environmental stimuli, situational
Speaker 1: stimuli all around us. So emotions are ways of reacting
Speaker 1: to the world that their internal states that signal a
Speaker 1: certain response to what you're seeing or dealing with. Right,
Speaker 1: go through a haunted attraction around Halloween, and you you
Speaker 1: feel something like fear or that sort of related safe
Speaker 1: feeling of fear, whatever however you want to categorize it. Uh,
Speaker 1: That is a product of the environment you thrust yourself into,
Speaker 1: all right, And if these are internal states that are
Speaker 1: products of evaluating an environment, you could then start to
Speaker 1: look at patterns about what the what the features of
Speaker 1: those internal states are, what do they do to the brain?
Speaker 1: What do they cause? How do they cause you to react?
Speaker 1: And I guess that would bring us to the next
Speaker 1: way of looking at it, right, Yes, emotions as motivations.
Speaker 1: Emotions as primarily motivating states. So basically this would be
Speaker 1: a situation of where I am angry and therefore I
Speaker 1: strike out at somebody. It causes you to act in
Speaker 1: a certain way. So there's a lot more to it
Speaker 1: than this, but these are those sort of the three
Speaker 1: basic pillars that are often discussed. So seemingly, you know,
Speaker 1: we can strike because we are angry, we're angry because
Speaker 1: we strike, and then we also just feel angry, and
Speaker 1: it all becomes this kind of cat's cradle of um
Speaker 1: of physiology, behavior, and situational context. Another way to think
Speaker 1: of emotions is this UH. This is a definition that
Speaker 1: is often used conscious mental reactions that we subjectively experience,
Speaker 1: and these strong feelings are typically directed towards a specific
Speaker 1: object or person, resulting in or caused by UH or
Speaker 1: certainly accompanied by physiological and behavioral change. However, as we'll
Speaker 1: discussing these episodes, throwing consciousness into it rather complicates things
Speaker 1: when we look to other animals, because while emotions are
Speaker 1: certainly tied up in the human conscious experience, is consciousness
Speaker 1: really required to have emotion? I think there's an extremely
Speaker 1: strong argument that it is not. Well, you can certainly imagine, say,
Speaker 1: a robot that models emotional states without being conscious, right right,
Speaker 1: and and so you don't know if that's the case
Speaker 1: for any other animals. You don't know to what extent
Speaker 1: they're subjectively feeling emotions like you and I do, or
Speaker 1: like you resumably do. The robot could still act angry,
Speaker 1: and it would still do all the things that an
Speaker 1: angry person would do. Or a robot could act sad
Speaker 1: and still have all the reactions a sad person would have.
Speaker 1: Like if again, if you're coming back to emotions as evaluations,
Speaker 1: you could consider a screensaver on a This is a
Speaker 1: very simple model of it, but a screensaver on a
Speaker 1: computer screen is a response to um to what's going
Speaker 1: on in the world. Like nobody's using the keyboard right now,
Speaker 1: somebody's away from the machine. Uh so a relaxed date
Speaker 1: comes into place. There's a paper we're gonna look at
Speaker 1: later in the episode. Well, we'll come back to it
Speaker 1: in a bit, But it's by a Clint J. Perry
Speaker 1: and Luigi Battia Donna that tried to put together all
Speaker 1: all of these disparate ways of looking at emotion into
Speaker 1: a single definition that could be used for objective research purposes,
Speaker 1: and it comes out with something that will really make
Speaker 1: your heart burn. Is just you know, full of feeling. Quote.
Speaker 1: Emotions are transient central states comprising subjective, cognitive, behavioral, and
Speaker 1: physiological phenomena that are triggered by appraisal of certain types
Speaker 1: of environmental stimuli. On one hand, I think that's great
Speaker 1: because it really does capture all the things you'd be
Speaker 1: looking for if you're trying to study emotions in a
Speaker 1: scientific way. On the other hand, that just sounds hilarious.
Speaker 1: I think that's that sentence is a great It is
Speaker 1: a great example of why you need those three categories,
Speaker 1: because if you run it all together there it just
Speaker 1: sounds it's a little overwhelming. But if you break it
Speaker 1: down into three definite, definite categories of consideration, I feel
Speaker 1: like it it makes a lot more sense, at least
Speaker 1: to me. Yeah, well, we'll come back to another pretty
Speaker 1: similar way of breaking it down. When we actually look
Speaker 1: at the study. But first I wanted to come back
Speaker 1: to the eight armed world where we started, So we
Speaker 1: started off talking about the paper Nautilus, the also known
Speaker 1: as the argonaut, this great octopus that the builds a
Speaker 1: fortress of love. I think the octopus world is a
Speaker 1: great place to start if we're looking for what would
Speaker 1: be the clearest, easiest examples to find of something that really,
Speaker 1: at least intuitively looks like emotions in the invertebrate world.
Speaker 1: Because of course that's it's long been a debate about
Speaker 1: whether thoughts and emotions can be said to exist in
Speaker 1: animals other than humans. You know, a lot of scientists
Speaker 1: would take issue with saying that there are emotions in
Speaker 1: any non human animals because they would say, well, if
Speaker 1: we use human terms like happy and sad, that's just
Speaker 1: anthropomorphic projection, there's no way to prove it, and so forth.
Speaker 1: But I really think intuitively, most people are comfortable with
Speaker 1: the idea that some analogs to human emotions exist in
Speaker 1: other animals with complex brains, like mammals and birds. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean again, I think part of the whole exercise
Speaker 1: is is casting emotions down from that golden pedestal, casting
Speaker 1: away the poetry and and thinking again about what they
Speaker 1: actually are. And certainly it's I imagine that a duck
Speaker 1: is not it never finds itself feeling sad about being
Speaker 1: sad or something, so you know, conscious as the human model,
Speaker 1: but something like sadness that we feel, you you can
Speaker 1: certainly imagine it in a duck or a cat or
Speaker 1: or any of these. Certainly, these these higher organisms that
Speaker 1: come to mind. I mean, it's really easy to see
Speaker 1: things that at least really intuitively look like emotions, whether
Speaker 1: we're interpreting them right or not. In social animals like dogs,
Speaker 1: it's really hard for me not to look at my
Speaker 1: dog and think, my dog is happy right now, or
Speaker 1: my dog is angry or something right. I mean, with
Speaker 1: all the complexities that come with with with making those
Speaker 1: kind of statements about an animal, of course, because again
Speaker 1: we can know we can never deny the power of
Speaker 1: anthropomorphism exactly. But one of the first places I wanted
Speaker 1: to go here with invertebrates is that I think what
Speaker 1: I just said about my dog, this powerful intuitive sense
Speaker 1: of my you know, day to day experience with a canine,
Speaker 1: that this animal does feel emotions that are in some
Speaker 1: way similar to the emotions. I feel if you wanted
Speaker 1: to look for this pattern of intuition outside of our
Speaker 1: relationships with mammals, I think the octopus is a great
Speaker 1: place to start. So a couple of years ago, one
Speaker 1: of the books that I recommended in our summer reading
Speaker 1: episode was a book by an author named Psi Montgomery
Speaker 1: called The Soul of an Octopus, which is sort of
Speaker 1: a cross between a zoology book about the octopus and
Speaker 1: a memoir about the author's personal experiences with octopus minds
Speaker 1: and the people who study and care for octopuses. And
Speaker 1: that book, really it still sticks with me today, and
Speaker 1: one of the main reasons is that she presents in
Speaker 1: it all of these anecdotes that look like genuinely powerful
Speaker 1: emotional connections and interactions between humans and cephalopods. It reflects
Speaker 1: this steady, unshakable sensation that many people who work with
Speaker 1: octopuses get, which is, on one hand, they see this strange,
Speaker 1: alien kind of intelligence, but on the other hand, they
Speaker 1: see a very familiar human kind of intelligence and even
Speaker 1: emotion at work. Of course, again with all the caveats
Speaker 1: that these impressions, you know, they could be anthropomorphic projection.
Speaker 1: I think it's at least worth looking at the types
Speaker 1: of encounters that lead to this sort of thinking, whether
Speaker 1: the thinking is correct or not. Yeah, yeah, I agree
Speaker 1: that the octopus is a great example to look to
Speaker 1: because it checks off so many opposite boxes. You know.
Speaker 1: It is uh, it is a it is a solitary
Speaker 1: creature that that lives in in a different environment than
Speaker 1: we do, that has as a totally different structure to
Speaker 1: its body. It's it's like an alien compared to us.
Speaker 1: Distributed intelligence. Also, I mean, the intelligence of an octopus
Speaker 1: is not just central in its head. It's it's it
Speaker 1: appears to be able to think with its arms in
Speaker 1: ways that you know, if we can do something like that,
Speaker 1: it's in a much more limited sense. So to cite
Speaker 1: a couple of the many anecdotes and examples that appear
Speaker 1: in the book, the first one is that at one
Speaker 1: point she's sharing a story from a biologist named Scott Dowd.
Speaker 1: So Doubt is working in an aquarium where one of
Speaker 1: his jobs is taking care of a dwarf Caribbean octopus
Speaker 1: who lives in one of the small display tanks, and
Speaker 1: one morning Dowd comes in to find this octopuss tank
Speaker 1: overflowing onto the floor, and the octopus itself seems to
Speaker 1: have vanished. It's not anywhere to be seen, and eventually
Speaker 1: he finds it. He finds that it has managed to
Speaker 1: squeeze itself into the tiny pipe that recirculates water in
Speaker 1: the tank. This pipe is only about half an inch wide.
Speaker 1: So obviously there's a problem because the water can't recirculate
Speaker 1: because the octopus is clogging the pipe, and you need
Speaker 1: to get the octopus out of the pipe. So what
Speaker 1: do you do? I have no idea what you'd even
Speaker 1: begin to do to get something out of an aperture
Speaker 1: that's small without harming it. But Dowd in this moment
Speaker 1: he remembers having seen a National geographic special about fisherman
Speaker 1: in Greece who were catching octopuses by setting out in
Speaker 1: four a pots in the ocean is traps, and the
Speaker 1: octopuses would squeeze themselves into these pots, which seemed like
Speaker 1: perfect dens for them, only to then get hauled up
Speaker 1: to the surface by the fisherman. But how do you
Speaker 1: get the octopus out of the pot without breaking the pot? Well,
Speaker 1: there was a very simple solution. These octopuses were saltwater
Speaker 1: creatures and the fishermen would pour fresh water into the pots.
Speaker 1: H So the octopus is obviously being, you know, evolved
Speaker 1: for a saltwater environment. They don't like this at all,
Speaker 1: and they would immediately slither out of the pot and
Speaker 1: be captured. All right, That that makes sense. So of
Speaker 1: course dow didn't want to kill and eat the dwarf
Speaker 1: octopus in the tank, but he figured that the same
Speaker 1: process might work to get it out of the pipe,
Speaker 1: and it did. Uh. He flushed it with fresh water
Speaker 1: and the octopus came out. Now years later, he tried
Speaker 1: the same trick to subdue a misbehaving female giant Pacific
Speaker 1: octopus that he's working with. And a lot of the
Speaker 1: emotional connections that people have with octopuses in this book
Speaker 1: are with these giant Pacific octopuses. They've they've got a
Speaker 1: lot of personality. But the story goes that dowd would
Speaker 1: you know, he was dealing with this octopus. He would
Speaker 1: lift the top of the tank up to feed it,
Speaker 1: and and she would put her arms out and attach
Speaker 1: herself to his hands, and he would be unable to
Speaker 1: get her to let go. And if he managed to
Speaker 1: peel one of the creature's arms off, of him. She
Speaker 1: would just instantly wrapped two or more, you know, around
Speaker 1: the same hand. Again, So like, how do you get
Speaker 1: this octopus off of you? Well, he remembered his earlier
Speaker 1: experience with the tiny octopus in the fresh water, so
Speaker 1: he got the idea to repel the larger octopus the
Speaker 1: same way. He filled up a picture in the sink
Speaker 1: and he poured it over the octopus clinging to his hand,
Speaker 1: and again, at first it worked. The octopus let go
Speaker 1: of him and recoiled sharply, and Dowd said, for a
Speaker 1: moment he was proud of himself for having rediscovered this
Speaker 1: useful trick and outsmarted this crafty creature. But then to
Speaker 1: read the next section from Montgomery's book, But the octopus
Speaker 1: was incensed. Quote she got scarlet red and really thorny.
Speaker 1: It was a heated moment. What I didn't notice, he said,
Speaker 1: was she was blowing herself up. She siphoned up a
Speaker 1: massive load of water and gushed a major surge of
Speaker 1: salt water onto my face. As he stood there dripping,
Speaker 1: Scott noticed the octopus had the same look on her
Speaker 1: face as I must have had on mine when I
Speaker 1: thought I had outwitted her. Now, which part of the
Speaker 1: octopus is the face? Now here? Here you may be
Speaker 1: onto something. I don't know. How do you find the
Speaker 1: octopus is face? I mean, it's got eyes, but they're
Speaker 1: not really front facing, are they. I mean we can easily.
Speaker 1: I mean again, our anthropomorphic powers are such that we
Speaker 1: can easily devise one. I believe there was a wasn't
Speaker 1: there recently an issue with the masters of emoticons. They
Speaker 1: made an octopus emoticon that rearranged the anatomy to make
Speaker 1: it look more face like, and I believe a biologist
Speaker 1: corrected them on this. Oh wait a minute, though, I
Speaker 1: know that you find an octopus face sometimes when you
Speaker 1: look into your environment, because when you see the forked
Speaker 1: coat hook on the door, you see the boxer octopus. Yes,
Speaker 1: but I see a cartoon octopus, and cartoons are human
Speaker 1: and have faces. Cartoon animals are generally of animals that
Speaker 1: have been made human. Okay, I guess you're right about that.
Speaker 1: But coming back to the story about about Scott doubt
Speaker 1: in the octopus, that there is something about this kind
Speaker 1: of apparent anger and reciprocal vengeance that feels very much
Speaker 1: like an analog of complex human emotion. Again, maybe you know,
Speaker 1: we're maybe we're just overreading into a single anecdote, but
Speaker 1: the book is full of anecdotes like this where people
Speaker 1: really feel like they're having these emotionally charged interactions with
Speaker 1: these eight armed critters. Yeah, Like a defensive display is
Speaker 1: essentially what we're talking about here, um and and like
Speaker 1: that does have an emotional resonance, Like if you see
Speaker 1: a cat with a defensive display, a horse, a dog,
Speaker 1: et cetera, Like you know what they're about, that there's
Speaker 1: a message they are sending. Then there is a presumed
Speaker 1: emotional state behind it. And you know, we we we
Speaker 1: get it. We don't even have to be able to
Speaker 1: put it into words to to know what that state is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the really interesting part is not that it was
Speaker 1: a defensive display when something was about to happen that
Speaker 1: the octopus didn't like. It happened after like he poured
Speaker 1: the fresh water on it, then it went back in
Speaker 1: its tank. Then it puffed up and got red and
Speaker 1: shot him back. Like isn't that much more interesting than
Speaker 1: if he had been like coming at it with something
Speaker 1: it didn't want. But there's another part of the book
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about real quick. That speaks of
Speaker 1: how persuasive the octopus's behavior was in convincing the people
Speaker 1: who worked with him that they had character, personality, and
Speaker 1: something like an inner life quote. The students were supposed
Speaker 1: to refer to their animals by numbers in their research papers,
Speaker 1: but they ended up calling them by name jet Stream, Martha, Gertrude, Henry, Bob.
Speaker 1: Some were so friendly. A researcher named Alexa said they
Speaker 1: would lift their arms out of the water like a
Speaker 1: dog jumps up to greet you, or like a child
Speaker 1: who wants to be lifted up and hugged. And then
Speaker 1: there's a there's one more story from Alexa in there,
Speaker 1: uh where she says quote. And then there was Windy.
Speaker 1: Alexa used her as part of her thesis presentation. It
Speaker 1: was a formal event that was videotaped, for which Alexa
Speaker 1: wore a nice suit. As soon as the camera started rolling,
Speaker 1: Wendy drenched the student with salt water. The octopus scurried
Speaker 1: to the bottom of the tank, hid in the sand,
Speaker 1: and refused to come out. Alexa is convinced the whole
Speaker 1: debacle occurred because the octopus realized in advance what was
Speaker 1: going to happen and resolved to prevent its crafty. Now,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, I think we need to recognize
Speaker 1: that the subjective impressions of people who work directly with
Speaker 1: animals are probably going to be prone to all kinds
Speaker 1: of biases. I mean, even people who work with robots
Speaker 1: tend to attribute lots of essentially human qualities of mind
Speaker 1: to those robots. They name the robots. They think of
Speaker 1: the robots as having personalities and intentions apart from their
Speaker 1: explicit programming. You know, I often think Johnny the room
Speaker 1: bas is being jive us. He's chasing me around the
Speaker 1: house or around the kitchen right now. Uh, And yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not tempted to actually think those impressions are telling
Speaker 1: it telling us anything real about the emotions of robots. No,
Speaker 1: but I mean to whatever extent it would be useful
Speaker 1: in dealing with robot or or more you know, realistically
Speaker 1: an animal. Uh. Then we see the usefulness of that anthropomorphism. Um,
Speaker 1: like the you know, the classic example being like, if
Speaker 1: you're dealing with an animal that could be dangerous when
Speaker 1: it's uh, when it's in a defensive mood, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's not so much about like the
Speaker 1: detail of the emotion that you were you were imagining
Speaker 1: in its head. But but it's more about the degree
Speaker 1: to which it matches up with how it may act
Speaker 1: and then allowing you to respond appropriately or or to
Speaker 1: not respond at all. Like this, this animal is mad,
Speaker 1: this animal is aggressive. I should not get close to
Speaker 1: it right now. But you know, it's it's one thing
Speaker 1: for a scientist, Tom, you know, to have to avoid
Speaker 1: intentionally inserting their anthropomorphic feelings into a study. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: but our but again, our theory of mind powers are
Speaker 1: useful in our relationships with animals. And I think you can,
Speaker 1: you can, you can, you can state that they would
Speaker 1: be useful in interactions with animals even in a study,
Speaker 1: provided that you could still separate those feelings from the data. Sure,
Speaker 1: I mean I would say that they would be useful
Speaker 1: insofar as they accurately predict outcomes, right, which sometimes they can.
Speaker 1: So again, I think it's it's important for us to
Speaker 1: be able to to take human emotions off of the pedestal,
Speaker 1: uh and and think more about what they are and
Speaker 1: and and stating that okay, um, you know the mind
Speaker 1: of an animal, the mind of an octopus or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know, their mind is a vessel that cannot hold
Speaker 1: the shape of our own emotional states. But our experience
Speaker 1: plus theory of mind allows us to have this instantaneous,
Speaker 1: you know, almost translate equal understanding of the basic properties
Speaker 1: of the other's emotional state. Yeah, I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: anytime we're trying to study emotional states, whether that's in
Speaker 1: animals or really even in other people, I mean, you
Speaker 1: have to accept the subjective disconnect, that you're not necessarily
Speaker 1: talking about the same things in terms of subjective feelings,
Speaker 1: but that once you get into these subjective criteria that
Speaker 1: we alluded to earlier, and I guess what we're coming
Speaker 1: back to now, um, you can start to look for
Speaker 1: behavioral and cognitive analogies. Another way of thinking about it,
Speaker 1: to go back to my earlier metaphor of the cat's
Speaker 1: cradle of you know, of getting some yarn and weaving
Speaker 1: it between your your fingers and creating a pattern. Right, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, criss crossing array of string casts between the
Speaker 1: fingers of two hands. Ultimately, fewer or more fingers are
Speaker 1: not going to make it any less a cat's cradle. Right,
Speaker 1: So if if you know, if five fingers are the
Speaker 1: shape of human cognitive complexity. There's a certain emotional um
Speaker 1: web that we can weave and that we're trapped in
Speaker 1: most of the time. But you know, animals say they
Speaker 1: just have the have three fingers to cast that web with.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're still casting the web, and then we
Speaker 1: might easily conceive what would it be like to to
Speaker 1: cast a cat's cradle if you had seven fingers on
Speaker 1: each hand. Uh, it would it would be more complex,
Speaker 1: It might be difficult for us to imagine what that
Speaker 1: would be like cognitively, emotionally, or what have you, but
Speaker 1: it would still be something that is relatable to that experience. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe we should take another break and then when we
Speaker 1: come back we can discuss relating the human experience of
Speaker 1: emotions to analogous uh, behaviors and cognition and animals. Than alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. We've been talking about emotion. We've been talking
Speaker 1: about emotion in animals and what exactly we would be
Speaker 1: looking for in trying to find that emotion, especially emotion
Speaker 1: in invertebrates. Because people are generally, I think more comfortable
Speaker 1: with the idea that we see something strongly analogous to
Speaker 1: human emotions and other animals like say, you know, mammals
Speaker 1: with complex brains, social mammals and stuff, right like not
Speaker 1: not only is everyone, I think pretty on board with
Speaker 1: the idea to say dogs have emotions or even cats
Speaker 1: have emotions, it would be it would almost be socially
Speaker 1: dangerous to suggest otherwise. Are you saying you want to
Speaker 1: suggest otherwise? No, you're afraid No, no, I think, especially
Speaker 1: again going back to the idea of taking the human
Speaker 1: poetic idea of emotion and bringing it down to a
Speaker 1: more realistic level, stripping the poetry away from it. I
Speaker 1: think without a doubt dogs and cats and and other
Speaker 1: organisms we might even sometimes not not wish to think
Speaker 1: about having emotions, such as pigs and cows, um, you know,
Speaker 1: they definitely have emotional states. Uh so yeah, I would
Speaker 1: not be the one to suggest that dogs don't have emotions,
Speaker 1: And I pity the person who does make that suggestion
Speaker 1: because they will be attacked on the street. Well, let's
Speaker 1: see if we can start some street fights about crowd ads. Okay,
Speaker 1: so for the next for the rest of this episode
Speaker 1: and then for most of the next episode. Also, I
Speaker 1: think we're going to be looking mainly at this one paper.
Speaker 1: It was A good paper I found published in seventeen
Speaker 1: in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Clint J. Perry
Speaker 1: and Luigi Battia Donna, called studying emotion in invertebrates what
Speaker 1: has been done, what can be measured, and what they
Speaker 1: can provide uh. And so these two researchers I believe
Speaker 1: are both at Queen Mary University of London, and this
Speaker 1: is not a single study but large review of existing
Speaker 1: research on invertebrate emotions. There actually aren't that many studies
Speaker 1: on invertebrate emotions. It's a fairly recent field, but what
Speaker 1: is out there is, at least in my mind, very interesting. Now.
Speaker 1: The authors point out that invertebrates have long played a
Speaker 1: role in the history of neuroscience. It was researching invertebrates
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that taught us
Speaker 1: what neurons were and how they were structured. UH. Insects
Speaker 1: are often believed to lack the structural neural complexity necessary
Speaker 1: to generate complex states like emotions. The people think their
Speaker 1: brains are just too simple. You know, when you've got
Speaker 1: a brain that structurally simple, with you know, such a
Speaker 1: few number of neurons, they just couldn't have a complex
Speaker 1: state like a persistent emotional state. Uh, And their behavior
Speaker 1: is often characterized in terms of simple sense or emotor response.
Speaker 1: So a snail or a spider might have an automatic
Speaker 1: response that causes it to retreat from a hot match,
Speaker 1: but the animal isn't feeling anything that could reasonably be
Speaker 1: called called, you know, anger or fear a persistent emotional state.
Speaker 1: That that's often the view. But the authors think this
Speaker 1: old view is due for revision due to this growing
Speaker 1: body of research showing various invertebrates, not just octopuses like
Speaker 1: we were just talking about, being capable of mental phenomena
Speaker 1: previously considered unthinkable, including all kinds of stuff concept learning,
Speaker 1: numerical cause mission, cultural transmission, and so forth. So in
Speaker 1: order to study emotion and animals, we need to land
Speaker 1: on a definition that that makes emotions susceptible to external detection.
Speaker 1: And that's where that definition that I mentioned earlier in
Speaker 1: the episode comes in again. It is quote, emotions are
Speaker 1: transient central states comprising subjective, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological phenomena
Speaker 1: that are triggered by appraisal of certain types of environmental stimuli.
Speaker 1: So something in the environment causes it. The animals appraisal
Speaker 1: of that thing in the environment triggers an internal state.
Speaker 1: And these internal states have subjective, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological effects.
Speaker 1: And when you break it down like that, uh, I
Speaker 1: feel like you have a model then that you can.
Speaker 1: You can you can certainly, you know, informally attribute to
Speaker 1: a wide variety of organisms. But more to the point,
Speaker 1: you can you can potentially test for it exactly. And well,
Speaker 1: you can definitely test for like three of the four effects.
Speaker 1: You can't test for subjective states. We don't get. That
Speaker 1: goes back to the three examples we had are earlier
Speaker 1: that feeling is what it feels like. Yeah, you can't
Speaker 1: do that, but the other three you can. So emotions
Speaker 1: are thought to have cognitive effects. Emotions affect how you
Speaker 1: think and how you perceive. They have behavioral effects. Emotions
Speaker 1: affect what you do with your body, and they have
Speaker 1: physiological effects. Emotions affect unconscious or involuntary reactions within the body.
Speaker 1: So just for example, to use fear, there is of
Speaker 1: course the subjective experience of fear, and we can only
Speaker 1: know this in the first person. You just assume by
Speaker 1: analogy that everybody else feels a similar subjective experience when
Speaker 1: they're afraid. But external observers, you know, could document cognitive
Speaker 1: changes during fear, such as increased awareness of sensory stimulized
Speaker 1: signaling danger. Maybe for example, when an animal is feeling fear,
Speaker 1: it is more likely to notice movement and its peripheral
Speaker 1: vision in the state. You could notice behavioral changes such
Speaker 1: as threat displays or retreat behaviors. You could notice physiological
Speaker 1: changes such as increased heart rate or the release of
Speaker 1: fight or flight hormones like epinefn or epernefer and and
Speaker 1: all that. You can notice dilated pupils, relaxation of the bladder, etcetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we've to to go back to episodes that
Speaker 1: we've we've done on human fear and like the nature
Speaker 1: of fear. Uh, it's uh, it really change. It kind
Speaker 1: of changes who you are. It always makes me think
Speaker 1: of the hunter S. Thompson quote. You're a whole different
Speaker 1: person when you're scared. Uh. You know, we think we
Speaker 1: know how we're going to behave in in a situation
Speaker 1: of real fear, but we can't always be sure unless
Speaker 1: we have sort of you know, performed enough exercises and
Speaker 1: fear if you will and even then there may be
Speaker 1: unknowns well. Of course, so fear, like other emotions, has
Speaker 1: cognitive and behavioral effects, in some cases very strong ones.
Speaker 1: What is who you are, It is your how you
Speaker 1: think and how you act. Yeah, I mean there are
Speaker 1: studying again, these are human studies, but there, you know,
Speaker 1: there are studies that have looked at how fear and
Speaker 1: uncertainty affect our politics, you know something, as you know,
Speaker 1: generally we think of as very very complex and nuanced
Speaker 1: and based in ideas and very stable. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: based on what we believe in a kind of permanent
Speaker 1: or semi permanent way. But no, I mean people's political
Speaker 1: opinions appear to fluctuate based on their their emotional states
Speaker 1: day to day, moment to moment. Yeah, which of course
Speaker 1: should not come as a surprise if you're you know,
Speaker 1: aware of the degree to which emotions are manipulated by politicians.
Speaker 1: But but but yeah, like you you add, you change
Speaker 1: the emotional state, you change how the animal behaves and
Speaker 1: perceives the world. Right, So I think in the time
Speaker 1: we have left to in today's episode, we've got time
Speaker 1: to look at the first one of these, the cognitive
Speaker 1: tests for invertebrate emotions. And we'll have to save the
Speaker 1: other types of tests for the next episode. But to
Speaker 1: look at the cognitive tests, one of the things that
Speaker 1: you can do to study emotions in UH, in humans,
Speaker 1: of course, but also in other animals is something known
Speaker 1: as a judgment bias test. So imagine what is meant
Speaker 1: by a test phrase. Here's a test phrase, the doctor
Speaker 1: examined little Emily's growth. Al Right, Well, that that just
Speaker 1: brings to mind that the clear image of little Emily,
Speaker 1: and like a Norman Norman Rockwell painting, be exam being
Speaker 1: examined by the doctor, and the doctor finding this grotesque
Speaker 1: mass on the back of her neck. Well, it turns out,
Speaker 1: so this is an ambiguous phrase. People interpret it different ways,
Speaker 1: and at least in some studies, people with some conditions
Speaker 1: negative emotional conditions like depression or generalized anxiety were more
Speaker 1: likely on average to read this ambiguous statement as being like,
Speaker 1: what you're talking about about some kind of disease growth,
Speaker 1: People with without anxiety or depression, or people who had
Speaker 1: formerly had these conditions and are now considered cured or
Speaker 1: in remission, UH, we're more likely to interpret it as
Speaker 1: measuring normal growth in childhood. He as in he measured
Speaker 1: her height. Yeah. So um So, first of all, I
Speaker 1: have to say, so, so the way that I answered
Speaker 1: it in the show here is also the way I
Speaker 1: responded to the text when I read it for me
Speaker 1: to so, and it is it is is entirely possible
Speaker 1: that that it comes from me having just a generally
Speaker 1: anxious a depressed state. However, I do have questions about
Speaker 1: to what degree this test phrase is weighted, because if
Speaker 1: you simply add and development to the end of this
Speaker 1: test phrase, granted, it makes it more specific and it's
Speaker 1: less ambiguous, but then but there also means there's no
Speaker 1: question if you say the doctor examined a little Emily's
Speaker 1: growth in development, you're not going to say, oh, he
Speaker 1: he was the doctor was looking at not only the
Speaker 1: weird thing on her neck, but also how she's developing.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Oh, I feel like that would just
Speaker 1: make it not ambiguous anymore. Yeah, it's true, but I
Speaker 1: also just it just feels it feels manipulative that that
Speaker 1: phrase to me. So I was looking around a little
Speaker 1: bit about this to see if anybody else had any
Speaker 1: problems with this. Uh, And it does seem as if
Speaker 1: the depression link negative interpretation bias findings are not without
Speaker 1: at least some criticism. Uh. Claire Lawson and Colin McLeod
Speaker 1: bring it up in Depression in the Interpretation of Ambiguity
Speaker 1: in and they pointed out that we could be talking
Speaker 1: about more about like a depression link response bias, reflecting
Speaker 1: an elevated tendency for depressives to admit or endorse negatively
Speaker 1: toned response options. So so under this model, it's possible
Speaker 1: that depression maybe just is affecting more like what you're
Speaker 1: likely to say to other people rather than what you're
Speaker 1: actually likely to represent internally. Yeah, and I guess in
Speaker 1: this we're getting into the complexity of of language and
Speaker 1: social interaction on it, you know. Um. Also, others have
Speaker 1: argued that interpretation biases and depression might be limited to
Speaker 1: interpretations for the self. So unless you are little Emily, uh,
Speaker 1: there perhaps wouldn't be that much of an impact here. Um.
Speaker 1: You know. So it's in a way, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like self deprecating humor, you know, like it's it's it's
Speaker 1: more about how you were feeling, and it's about the
Speaker 1: the stuff in the world that's directly affecting you. Which
Speaker 1: makes sense because these emotional states are largely going to
Speaker 1: be connected to you or things of value to you,
Speaker 1: not some random little girl in a you know an
Speaker 1: example phrase. Well, I wouldn't want to put too much
Speaker 1: on that one example phrase. Maybe that's not a great example.
Speaker 1: Well it's it's probably the better. I found a couple
Speaker 1: of phrases as well that we're used in other studies,
Speaker 1: but that one was still the best and one that's
Speaker 1: frequently cited um elsewhere. I found a two thousand seven
Speaker 1: study published in Cognition and Emotion from Bison and Sears,
Speaker 1: and they found no negative interpretive bias in their studies.
Speaker 1: But that's not to say that an emotional state won't
Speaker 1: just generally influence how information or stimuli is received. A
Speaker 1: loving touch may startle you and spin you around in
Speaker 1: a defensive stance, if you are primed for a hostile
Speaker 1: physical encounter. Well yeah, I mean there there could be
Speaker 1: very sale criticisms that I'm not aware of. I thought
Speaker 1: I understood like that, it's pretty well documented within humans
Speaker 1: and animals that yeah, that like negative mood does tend
Speaker 1: to bias perception. So when you encounter something ambiguous, if
Speaker 1: you're feeling angry or sad, you're more likely to interpret
Speaker 1: the ambiguous thing in a pessimistic way. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: think that that is definitely the case. I guess the
Speaker 1: main thing I wanted to drive home is I didn't
Speaker 1: want anybody to engage in this sort of exercise with
Speaker 1: us here and have the same knee jerk reaction that
Speaker 1: we did and then immediately assume that that means that
Speaker 1: they have an anxiety problem or or in a depressive state. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, even if you did react that way, and
Speaker 1: even if the test is generally valid, it would just
Speaker 1: be like one answer, you'd have to like do an
Speaker 1: average of a bunch of different things to figure out
Speaker 1: what's you know, more likely the case. Yes, but you know,
Speaker 1: we're humans and we tend to jump to conclusions and
Speaker 1: engage in I guess, um, what is the the X
Speaker 1: Men personality test that we've factor that we've discussed in
Speaker 1: the show before X Man, I don't remember this, well,
Speaker 1: the name is eluding me at the moment, but you know,
Speaker 1: when you you engage it, like the fortune cookie scenario
Speaker 1: or the uh the astrological charts scenario where the future
Speaker 1: is read and it's just a little piece of paper
Speaker 1: telling you something random, but you immediately identify things about
Speaker 1: yourself in that safe release the horror effects, yes, the
Speaker 1: Barnum effect also, yes, yes, a little something for everybody. Well,
Speaker 1: I think we we can certainly log possible criticisms of
Speaker 1: the judgment bias effect and keep them as an asterisk
Speaker 1: over what we're about to read, which you know it
Speaker 1: may in some ways be undercut by any weakness in
Speaker 1: the inherent paradigm. But in some existing research on animals,
Speaker 1: we people have tried to use judgment bias tests to
Speaker 1: see if there is cognitive evidence of emotions and animals.
Speaker 1: And you can do this in some animals, like if
Speaker 1: you take rats and you train them to distinguish between
Speaker 1: two different tones, say a high pitch tone and a
Speaker 1: low pitch tone, And then in the enclosure with the
Speaker 1: rats is a lever that they can press. So if
Speaker 1: they press the lever when they hear the high pitch tone,
Speaker 1: they get a food pellet reward, but if they press
Speaker 1: the lever when they hear the low pitch tone, they
Speaker 1: get an unpleasant blast of white noise. So they learn
Speaker 1: and they get good at telling the difference when the
Speaker 1: high pitch tone plays, they are quick to press the
Speaker 1: lever and get the food reward. When the low pitch
Speaker 1: tone plays, they hang back. They either take a long
Speaker 1: time to press the lever or they don't press it
Speaker 1: at all. And it turns out you can manipulate something
Speaker 1: like the rats mood or emotional state you know, asterisk
Speaker 1: with all the caveats that are implied there to bias
Speaker 1: their judgments about new ambiguous stimuli. So what happens when
Speaker 1: you play a tone in between the two tones that
Speaker 1: the rats have been trained on? The studies show that, say,
Speaker 1: if you tilt the rats housing up at an angle,
Speaker 1: or if you wet the rats betting or introduce an
Speaker 1: unfamiliar rat to the group, when the ambiguous tone plays,
Speaker 1: the rats will be much more avoidant of the lever
Speaker 1: in response to this this ambiguous stimuli than rats in
Speaker 1: a control condition with normal stable housing conditions, which are
Speaker 1: more likely to interpret the ambiguous tone optimistically and run
Speaker 1: and press the lever. So what this looks like again,
Speaker 1: And of course you know we could be overreading into it,
Speaker 1: but it looks like if you put rats in something
Speaker 1: like a bad emotional state by making them uncomfortable and uneasy,
Speaker 1: they're going to interpret unfamiliar information in a pessimistic way,
Speaker 1: whereas quote, happy rats are more likely to interpret unfamiliar
Speaker 1: information in an optimistic way. So it's an emotional state
Speaker 1: based on experience that is preparing the rat to deal
Speaker 1: with um, with with incoming stimuli or or incoming environmental situations. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it looks like a quote bad mood puts
Speaker 1: the animal in a kind of defensive posture, or it's
Speaker 1: less likely to explore an experiment and it's less likely
Speaker 1: to to take a risk. It's more just kind of
Speaker 1: hunkered down, right, Yeah, So it's you know, it's like um.
Speaker 1: And again, I think this helps to demystify the human
Speaker 1: experience of some of these emotions, even though these emotions
Speaker 1: could arguably more complex when you bring in human language
Speaker 1: and so forth. But if every time in the past
Speaker 1: that I've gone to a specific fast food restaurant I
Speaker 1: have I've gotten ill, then in the future when I
Speaker 1: go back, I am going to be on guard against
Speaker 1: incoming illness of course. Yeah, I mean that's like classical
Speaker 1: conditioning one totally. So I mean, really that's that's what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here. Um, you know, and I do
Speaker 1: think it does serve to demystify something like fear, but
Speaker 1: really any of the emotions, even the you know, the
Speaker 1: loftier emotions like uh, like you know, like love, uh,
Speaker 1: that you know, we need to to to take bring
Speaker 1: them to bring them down a few steps anyway, so
Speaker 1: that we can attribute these things to animals as well. Yeah. Now, obviously,
Speaker 1: I think, as you and I have discussed before, it's
Speaker 1: more difficult to study some emotion than others. So you'll
Speaker 1: find more studies on on invertebrates. We're about to get
Speaker 1: into an invertebrate example on things like aversion and anxiety
Speaker 1: and fear than you will in invertebrate love. Though there
Speaker 1: are some with invertebrate positive emotions that I think are
Speaker 1: very interesting. We'll get to one and just it's generally
Speaker 1: easier to take an animal out of its natural habitat
Speaker 1: and study it by making it feel anxious and afraid
Speaker 1: as opposed to making it feel at home. I mean, really,
Speaker 1: that's one of one of the problems and some of
Speaker 1: these studies that have been conducted with um specifically, I
Speaker 1: guess I'm thinking of rats and addiction, right, like are
Speaker 1: you are you testing for the response to these substances
Speaker 1: under you know, ideal sort of ambiguous circumstances, or is
Speaker 1: it within the world of a rat prison that you've
Speaker 1: created in a room somewhere, yeah, or is it unnatural
Speaker 1: within the rat prison. But the results are useful to
Speaker 1: us anyway, because the rats and the rat prison are
Speaker 1: kind of analogous to the way humans live. Now yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like I said, it's it gets complicated. But anyway,
Speaker 1: to to move to invertebrates with the idea of the
Speaker 1: judgment bias test, At least three studies so far have
Speaker 1: shown possible evidence of the judgment bias effect in bees. Bees.
Speaker 1: You know, this is there's another example of an animal
Speaker 1: that we generally don't we don't attribute a lot of
Speaker 1: personality to or certainly emotional states. But they are they're
Speaker 1: complicated organisms. They're they're they're fascinating creatures. Yes, well, let's
Speaker 1: take a look and see what we think. So the
Speaker 1: authors here site two studies Bates and at All in
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven and Schloons at All in two thousand
Speaker 1: seventeen that studied this effect the judgment bias effect in
Speaker 1: honey bees or APIs mallifera. So bees were trained on
Speaker 1: two different kinds of chemical odors that they sensed with
Speaker 1: their antennae, which were associated with two different sugar solutions
Speaker 1: that they could extend their probosis to taste. So when
Speaker 1: odor A was sensed, that was associated with a sweet
Speaker 1: sugar solution, and when odor B you was since, that
Speaker 1: was associated with a bitter quinine solution, which the bees
Speaker 1: did not like tasting. So if you train them on this, right,
Speaker 1: once they smell odor A, they're going to be like, oh, boy,
Speaker 1: sugars coming and that you know, that's the condition response.
Speaker 1: When they smell odor bee, they're going to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's the bitter quinine and I don't want any of it.
Speaker 1: They get conditioned like this. And then the manipulation came
Speaker 1: when the researchers would go and shake the bees housing
Speaker 1: vigorously for sixty seconds. And this was supposed to simulate
Speaker 1: a natural attack on the colony by a predator such
Speaker 1: as a honey badger and to quote here. After the
Speaker 1: shaking manipulation, bees were tested with ambiguous odor mixtures intermediate
Speaker 1: between the two mixtures used for training in both studies.
Speaker 1: Honey bee subjected to the shaking were less likely to
Speaker 1: respond to the ambiguous odor mixture closest in ratio to
Speaker 1: the oder mixture associated with quinine during training, suggesting that
Speaker 1: shaking induces a negative cognitive bias to ambiguous odor cues.
Speaker 1: So when the the odor was somewhere between the other
Speaker 1: two odors chemically, especially when it was closer to the
Speaker 1: bad odor, the bees that had been shaken were more
Speaker 1: likely to say I don't want any of that. Again,
Speaker 1: this looks like a pessimistic bias. Yeah, clearly, and it
Speaker 1: seems like a clear case. Uh. Now, the authors do
Speaker 1: offer an important caveat here. They say quote however, it
Speaker 1: has been argued that shaking may cause bees to become
Speaker 1: better discriminators. Shaking increased hemolymph concentrations of octopamine, which can
Speaker 1: modulate sensory function. And hemolymph again is like insect blood
Speaker 1: than of blood. They have hemio lymph, this other circulatory fluid,
Speaker 1: and so it increased this uh, this thing called octopamine,
Speaker 1: which is similar I believe to nora adrenaline and in
Speaker 1: mammals and humans. Uh So, remember that the shaking really
Speaker 1: seemed to make a difference when the odor was ambiguous
Speaker 1: but closer to the odor associated with the bitter food.
Speaker 1: So maybe shaken bees are just better at sensing that
Speaker 1: closeness to the bad outcome because is of non emotional
Speaker 1: physiological reasons. That's also possible. But this isn't the only
Speaker 1: test of judgment bias effect in bees period. All In
Speaker 1: also studied the same thing, but in the opposite direction,
Speaker 1: optimistic bias created by pleasure or happiness, or at least
Speaker 1: what you might call an analog of pleasure or happiness
Speaker 1: in bumble bees. So again there was a similar type
Speaker 1: of setup. They would train bumble bees to respond to
Speaker 1: two possible visual cues. There would be a green card
Speaker 1: on the left that has a cup of sugar water
Speaker 1: solution underneath it. This is the reward cue, and then
Speaker 1: a blue card on the right that has a cup
Speaker 1: of regular water underneath it, and this is the control que.
Speaker 1: Trained bumble bees would learn to go straight to the
Speaker 1: green card on the left when it was present to
Speaker 1: get the sugar they you know, they don't bother with
Speaker 1: the blue card on the right. Now, what happens when
Speaker 1: you put a bluish greenish card in the middle of
Speaker 1: the two positions, Well, the study showed that if you
Speaker 1: give the bees a little bit of sugar reward before
Speaker 1: the test, they approached the ambiguous new stimulus the blue
Speaker 1: green card in the middle position faster than if you
Speaker 1: don't give them any sugar. And so the authors hearsay quote.
Speaker 1: Control experiments showed that after consumption of the small unexpected reward,
Speaker 1: bees did not increase their flight speed and we're not
Speaker 1: more likely to explore novel stimuli, suggesting that the small
Speaker 1: reward did not simply increase the bees general activity or exploration,
Speaker 1: but was indeed due to changes in their decision making
Speaker 1: processes under ambiguity, thus resembling optimism in humans. Uh So, again,
Speaker 1: there could be something wrong here that we're that we're missing,
Speaker 1: but at least it on the surface, it looks like
Speaker 1: the bees are just expecting better outcomes with ambiguous possibilities
Speaker 1: when they've had a little bit of sugary treats. Right. So,
Speaker 1: I think one of the big takeoffs from this is
Speaker 1: that it is going you have to think of emotion
Speaker 1: is being tied to how we navigate the war world,
Speaker 1: and we are not the only organism that has to
Speaker 1: navigate a world of changing circumstances. And and because clearly
Speaker 1: the bee has to do that as well, and it
Speaker 1: has similar abilities that result or our and our and
Speaker 1: or are caused by emotional states. Yeah, but I think
Speaker 1: we've got to call it for this first episode, and
Speaker 1: we can come back and explore some more research along
Speaker 1: these lines next time. In the meantime, if you want
Speaker 1: to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
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