Is The Animal Brain Capable Of Thinking?

In the scientific study of language and thinking, humans have always been the focus point of the attention, but where do animals fit in the scheme of things? Research on animals shows us that animals are often more intelligent than we realize; a baboon is able to recognize everyone's voice within its 70-member troop. Sheep are able to memorize and recognize specific faces. Brain research has even shown that great apes and monkeys are able to form mental concepts. An illustration of this is when monkeys categorize dogs and cats; specific areas in the frontal lobes of their brains fire differently in response to doglike images than to catlike images.

Humans are also not the only ones to display insights (that sudden 'aha' moment). In a cleverly designed experiment, researchers showed that a chimpanzee was capable of creative thinking. The researchers placed a piece of delicious watermelon and a long stick beyond the reach of the monkey, but a short stick was place in the cage with the chimpanzee. After trying to reach for the fruit with the short stick, the monkey, after carefully analyzing the situation, jumped up and used the short stick to reach for the long stick, which he then used to obtain the piece of juicy fruit.

Animals thus exhibit remarkable hidden capacities. They form concepts, and display insights and creative thinking. Greater primates, elephants and dolphins have even demonstrated self-awareness by cleverly recognizing themselves in a mirror. However, do they also exhibit one of our most precious concepts, language?

It can definitely not be doubted that animals communicate in several different ways. These ways can be rather complex; certain monkey species have different alarm sounds related to a specific type of predator; a barking sound for a tiger and a coughing sound for a snake. Honeybees on the other hand, perform a dance that instructs other bees on the distance and direction of a food source. Or think of a dog's amazing capacity to understand human instructions! Record-holder is a bolder collie that has learned to fetch 200 different items by name.

None of this can really be categorized as language though, but nonetheless chimpanzees have challenged humanities claim to be the only language using species by showing the capacity to learn sign language, as was shown by a team of researchers. The capacity of chimps for sign-language is limited though and equals the simple vocabulary of a 2 year-old. Many researchers are skeptical when it comes to the language capacities of monkeys. Some of the concerns exhibited by researchers include:

Monkeys only obtain their very limited vocabularies with great difficultyMonkeys' signing might be nothing more than learning that certain arm movements result in a nice rewardInterpreting monkeys' signs as language might be nothing more than the trainer's wishful thinking.

Regardless, it has definitely been shown effectively that animals are more than living robots without any moral rights. Research has empirically shown that animals have the ability to express insight, altruism and complex communication concepts. Translating these findings into moral implications is work for the future.

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The author writes about various topics related to the brain and cognition. On his blog, the concept of brain science and cognitive optimization is discussed in many different ways.

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