Yale: A new Yale study suggests that, in a sense, mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are even born.
Animal minds
At Scientific American: Why elephants play
Caitlin O’Connell: The unwritten code of conduct surrounding play lets them explore many possible outcomes.
Researchers: Spiders use the same cues as vertebrates in distinguishing living vs. non-living things
Researchers: Complex vision evolved independently in vertebrates and arthropods and so the ability to distinguish living from non-living motion using the relative positioning of the joints has most likely arisen convergently in the two groups of animals.
At Mind Matters News: Why do dogs understand people better than wolves?
In the study, the wolf pups were raised so as to trust humans and the dog pups were not. Yet the wolf pups did not trust humans — but the dog pups did.
At Oscillations: Information on the Linnean Society Virtual Meeting (June 28–29)
Oscillations is science writer Suzan Mazur’s blog. Mazur draws attention to the Linnean Society’s virtual conference, Evolution ‘On Purpose’: Teleonomy in Living Systems: “Living systems exhibit an internal teleology, the full implications of which have not been explored. This meeting will address various aspects of this phenomenon, including its scope and meaning, and its many forms and facets.”
Birds: Magnetic field reception for navigation is a complete mystery
But it may be a quantum mechanical phenomenon, researchers say — thus solvable, as long as we are willing to work with quantum mechanics.
Yes, plants remember things – they seem more like animals the more we learn
People are becoming, more and more obviously outliers all the time. The pop science prediction had been “less and less.”
Sentience: Is it wrong to boil a lobster alive?
In Switzerland, it is now illegal to boil a lobster alive. Are the Swiss right? Is it cruel? The question bears on the concept of a self.
Can octopuses really feel pain?
The brainy cephalopods behaved about the same as lab rats under similar conditions, raising both neuroscience and ethical issues.
At Mind Matters News: Do any dogs go to heaven? If so, why?
Neuroscientist Christof Koch was troubled as a child by the Catholic tradition that dogs like his beloved Purzel did not go to heaven. Ironically, human exceptionalism, which Koch decries, holds out the possibility that some beloved animals may indeed share immortality with humans.
Do we really understand what intelligence in life forms is?
Thinking about Jeff Hawkins’s new book, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (Basic Books 2021), championing the mammalian neocortex, for example, one might ask, what does the iconic mammalian neocortex do that equivalent systems in birds and octopuses can’t do? That’s not clear. And human intelligence is something different again.
Some features of bird brains are remarkably similar to those of mammal brains
Are certain brain structures are essential for high animal intelligence or will alternative structures work?
How exactly do one-celled life forms learn?
Where do they store memories? New thinking is, changes in the state of the life form, resulting in changed behavior — which amounts to learning — need not “be someplace” or weigh something, for the same reasons as a full USB stick doesn’t weigh any more than an empty one.
Human exceptionalism: You can be a good or a bad human but you can’t just be an animal
When we try to escape into being animals, all that happens is that we reason badly and become bad humans. And the moment we even bring reason into the discussion — well, that’s precisely what human exceptionalism is about!
Kin selection? The selfish gene? Researchers ponder why animals adopt other species’ orphans
Human exceptionalism is never more obvious than when humans are offering rational-sounding arguments against it.