CALL it human curiosity, but it is natural to wonder what a pet is thinking, or to ponder, as philosophers and latterly consciousness researchers have, what it is like inside the mind of a bat or a bird or an octopus. We are inching closer to cracking the secrets of animal minds 鈥� and they aren鈥檛 what we expected.
From Snowball the dancing cockatoo to sheep that can recognise celebrities, there are plenty of examples of animals doing clever things. Nevertheless, such antics could be mere party tricks, not a manifestation of something resembling the 鈥済eneral鈥� intelligence that allows us to think our way through life鈥檚 challenges.
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In fact, many biologists have long assumed that animals don鈥檛 do much thinking at all, acting mostly on instinct instead. The idea was so ingrained that our curiosity didn鈥檛 extend to testing it 鈥� until recently.
Obviously, you can鈥檛 put animals through human IQ tests. Nor would we necessarily want to, given that those tests provide only a limited and selective view of intelligence. But with a bit of ingenuity, you can devise a battery of tasks appropriate for a particular species.
鈥淲e search for intelligent life elsewhere, but there is more on Earth than we imagined鈥�
A growing number of animals are passing such tests. These include creatures with tiny brains, such as mice, and others, like ravens, that don鈥檛 even have the brain structures we usually associate with intelligence. Clearly, humans aren鈥檛 alone in possessing a flexible, problem-solving sort of brain 鈥� or indeed attributes that build on that, such as culture.
So we should be careful what traits we describe as uniquely human. But equally we should be careful not to anthropomorphise too much: no one can even be certain that other people think in the same way they do, let alone animals.
These findings raise intriguing questions, such as how animals achieve what they do without language. And they provide further grounds for seeing our relationship with the wildlife around us more as one between equals. Much time and effort goes into searching for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but it turns out there is far more of it here on Earth than we imagined. We must value it for what it is.
