We want to read about your braaaaaaaains!

Welcome to the very special post-resurrection debut of Encephalon, the blog carnival for all things brainy! On the last Saturday of each month, we’ll be bringing you the best writing that the neuro-blogosphere has to offer on that enigmatic pile of delicious goo and the behaviors it drives. Let’s get down to it, shall we?

Scicurious takes us through a study that deals with a subject close to her heart – social rejection. Specifically, on how social rejection affects our physiology in a way that could make us sick.

From a collaborative undergraduate student blog (that I was relatively impressed with,) Mike Pennock showcases a study that attempts to explain how the brain parses some absolutely trippy stimuli (that is, a painting by Salvador Dali.)

The blog “The History of Psychology” lives up to its name with John Wayland’s retelling of the story of Otto Selz, an early and oft-overlooked figure in the history of psychology. I particularly like this blog, so make sure to click around and see some of his other stuff.

Over at BrainBlogger, Julnar Issa gives a run down of the relationship between chronic fatigue and personality – this one also has a long (and at times, very interesting) comment thread. At the same blog, Dario Dieguez talks about the principles of neuro-education. Is this, as a commenter said, overselling neuroscience, or is it a rational next step in developing educational techniques?

Janet Kwasniak covers a piece of research that examines how we represent shapes. It turns out that, with a bit of practice, we can turn sounds into a mental representation of a shape. And my mind is blown.

Now we want to read about seeeeeeeeex!

Well, I can’t deny a horde of zombies. The Neurocritic has had a thing for writing about sex this month, it seems. He brings us two (excellent) posts about sexual “pathologies”. First – what do the brains of women who don’t want to have sex look like? Second – what do the brains of men who are “addicted” to pornography look like? (Spoiler: we don’t actually know.) Be sure to check out the comment threads.

Finally, if that wasn’t enough for you, Sandeep Gautam at The Mouse Trap explains a study that claims that altruism could have evolved by sexual selection. It makes sense – we usually do like to have sex with people that, all other things equal, are nice.

That finishes it up! Next month’s edition will run over at A Blog Around the Clock, so get your submissions for next month to Bora. If you’d like to host an edition (everything after November is open,) leave me a comment, pm me on twitter (@Cephalover), or send me an email at mike(dot)lisieski(at)gmail(dot)com.

Thank you for reeeeeeeeeeading!

Man, everything’s funny when you say it like a B-movie zombie. Happy Halloween, everybody! Have fun and be safe.

Dr. David Edelman

Last (though certainly not least!) in this series of interviews is Dr. David Edelman, a neuroscientist and co-author of the paper “Animal Consciousness: A Synthetic Approach” which discusses some strategies that could be used to study consciousness in all sorts of animals – cephalopods included.

After this weekend, I’ll be back to my normal, sporadic posting schedule. I have posts in the works on the Vibrio-Euprymna symbiosis, some new research that has just hit the presses on squid hearing, and the effects and possible utility of environmental enrichment in captive cephalopods.

I’ll not keep you waiting any longer! As usual, my questions are in plain text, and Dr. Edelman’s responses are in boxes:

Just to get readers oriented, what’s your background and what do you do (professionally and/or otherwise)?

I entered science really late. One of the reasons for that is that I’m the son of a pretty famous scientist, and I really had to think about whether I wanted to follow in the family business, and so I gave pause for a long period of time. By the age of 28 – really late in the game – I said “Well, you’ve got to do something, and science has always been your most important intellectual exercise since you could remember anything.” What I did, being an evolution buff even before my dad was, I started with paleoanthropology – I applied to graduate school in 1987 for some anthropology programs and got into the University of Pennyslvania in their classical sort of anthropology program. I was fascinated with the evolution of the human brain in particular, and I realized quite quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to bring evidence to bear to my satisfaction, by the very nature of what you have to work with [in paleoanthropology.] The best you can do is an endocranial cast, which gives you, if you’re lucky, good impressions of certain major sulci and divisions on the surface of the brain. That’s not a lot to go on. You’re talking about next to nothing. It wasn’t terribly exciting, and I didn’t know if I could build a dissertation on it. So I become a biomechanics person and I put together a project on the evolution of the internal architecture of the hind limbs of hominines and hominids.

The sad part of that era of my life is that where I went with it, or where I didn’t go with it, was dictated very much by the lack of good positions, and so I had to make decisions more or less on the fly. I did a postdoc in transcriptional gene regulation, which was really far afield, especially for someone whose working knowledge of genetics was as vintage as mine. My education in genetics went back to the early eighties, the stone-age of genetics – pre-PCR, even.

So somehow, I ended up at the Neuroscience Institute, and I’m still doing this. I segued into a project that was attractive in the sense that I would be working with living cells, with primary neuronal cultures. It was a way to get back to the brain, which appealed to me. Talking to people at the institute, it became clear that one thing that was not understood was mitochondrial dynamics in the nervous system – how the movement of mitochondria might inform the function of cells – in nerve cells, it might inform or even constrain the electrical activity. We were the first lab to show the link between mitochondrial movement and neuromodulation; specifically that a variety of neuromodulators, for example, serotonin and acetylcholine, acted as signals that effected mitochondrial movement.

The consciousness stuff has always interested me. It went way back to the time I was talking to my father about these things when he was formulating his ideas about consciousness. He’s now very widely published in this area, and his ideas are still very controversial In some circles, but they’re really what got me interesting in this in the first place. About 5 years ago, Bernie Baars became an associate fellow at the Neuroscience Institute and I got an opportunity to get to know him. After a lot of lunch-time conversations we decided to delve into the area of animal consciousness and see what sort of depths we could plumb. About 2 years ago, I started forming a friendship with Graziano Fiorito in Italy. The Stazione Zoologica is this singular institution where they might have 50 or more [octopuses] at one time available to do various behavioral assays on, so you can get very high numbers pretty quickly if you’re doing an experiment. That’s how the octopus project got started. The octopus is a great opportunity in the sense that after J. Z. Young’s work, except for Hochner in Israel and some of Graziano Fiorito’s work, there hasn’t been much in the way of formal neuroscience done in the octopus – this is a pity, but it’s also sort of an opportunity.

What we’re working on right now is a project where we use a back-projection video system to expose octopus to a variety of different video stimuli – salient stuff like crabs and moray eels – and also CGI animations of salient objects. We’re trying to develop a way to manipulate aspects of space and time in ways we can’t do with real images, so that we can slowly extract parts of the image to see what the salient parts are. The brass ring that we’ve been shooting for, since about a year ago, is to set up something that would be akin to an attentional blink experiment for the octopus. In reality, as much as we think of their eyes as being these wonderful examples of convergent evolution (which they are, in fact,) there are some differences between octopus eyes and vertebrate eyes, and we don’t know a great deal about the processing system behind the eye of the octopus.

We started doing these experiments and found that many of the animals didn’t respond to still images right off the bat, even still images of salient objects. We went through a period when we were doing trials where we would show the animals, say, a video of a crab moving where the crab would freeze for a second. Then we’d take a thirty second break, show an image of an empty tank, and then show another image of a crab, which would then freeze for a longer period of the time. At the end of a series of trials the octopus would be exposed to a still image of the crab, and most of the animals did then respond to the still image. We were entraining them to do that, and it was a pretty interesting phenomenon in itself. It was a strange result, and although it didn’t completely dash our hopes for an attentional blink experiment, it did put that on hold while we investigate more simple things. For now, we’re trying to elaborate on this toolkit that we started building about a year ago to test these animals, and I’d expect that the first publication based on what we’re doing now is not going to be out until at least next spring.

Why work with the octopus, instead of another animal?

As you might have gathered, I have a sort of a strange background in the sense that I have not studied animal behavior for a long time. I got into it a few years ago, stemming from an interest in animal consciousness that started about five years ago. Most of my work is at the molecular and cellular level, but I’ve been fascinated with the question of animal consciousness for the past five years and I just had to give myself some experimental chops. The octopus seems like such a savory entrée for this purpose. It’s an animal that represents a choice opportunity to test all sorts of ideas we might have about convergent brain evolution regarding certain kinds of higher functioning in animal nervous systems. Even if the nervous system is substantiated in an entirely difficult way in the octopus compared to the vertebrates (which it is, of course,) there might be functional principles that are adhered to in all such complex, heterogeneous nervous systems. If you wanted to test any invertebrate for what we might call consciousness, the octopus seems like a good bet, with about half a billion neurons in total and many hereogeneous brain lobes. It’s an interesting animal with a very sophisticated set of sensorimotor adaptations, which look like a very good set of constituent elements that would go into a potentially conscious system.

Why should people (scientists or non-scientists) care about research into animal consciousness?

I can understand the inhibitions that some of my colleagues have about using the term “consciousness”. You might say “I want, for the sake of my career and for the sake of contributing something substantive to neuroscience, I’m going to stick to something bite-size [in my work], say, decision-making correlates, or the role of the prefrontal cortex” – that makes a great deal of sense, and I can’t fault it at all. The simplest answer for me, though, is that essentially, if you’re going to take the next step after trying to understand, for example, the vertebrate visual system, I think it’s unavoidable. Conservatively, there are about 70 visual areas in the higher primate, and about half of the cerebral cortex is dedicated to processing vision; but if you asked me to tell you how it all comes together I really can’t say. That remains a great mystery. Well, I think one of the most basal aspects of consciousness (I shouldn’t use the word “basal” when I invoke the term consciousness, but I’ll do it on just this occasion) is the stitching together of either multimodal or submodal sensory properties into a unified scene and then stepping back and watching that scene in a persistent memory. That is the starting point for a conscious state, and if you’re interested in explaining how the world gets stitched together in the sort of heterogeneous nervous system that’s characteristic of higher vertebrates, and us in particular, consciousness enters the story. So if you’re interested in the final aspects of putting the world together internally into some sort of dynamic representation of the world – which is what brains do – and if you want to study the output of these systems with very dense sensorial input, it’s consciousness (at least in the case of mammals and birds, for sure, although don’t have that much to go on.) This is something that’s not very big in neuroscience right now, but I think that it’s one of the big and more interesting questions.

I think people are scared of it. For decades it’s been the purvue of philosophy, and, not to fault philosophers, but I think this has induced a lot of scientists to avoid the issue to begin with, and that’s a mistake. In my own mind, I’ve been trying for years to demystify the conscious process. The notion that you could bring together all kinds of submodal properties of vision and not do something with it that involves the stitching together of it into a coherent scene that is informative in some way seems counterintuitive. I think that eventually there’s got to be some sort of day of reckoning; you can divide up and parcel up aspects of perception all you want, but in essence, when you’re talking about visual perception and you’re talking about a mammal or a bird, you eventually have to talk about the output of all that. There’s no requirement that anybody study consciousness but eventually, sooner or later, especially as the spatial and temporal resolution of imaging technology improve, it will be something that people all but stumble over. A lot of the hesitation has to do with how people feel, how sanguine people are about their own definition (or adefinition) of consciousness, or whether they think that consciousness can be defined at all, but I think it’s inevitable. If you’re going to put together the whole picture, that’s what lies at the end of the road. We might be quite a far ways from it right now, but it’s something we’re going to have to confront sooner or later.

What sorts of projects would you most like to see done (or feel most need to be done) in the field of animal cognition and consciousness?

I think that in the case of animals, there are neurophysiological advances to be made. One thing that we haven’t gotten, even in the human case, is a series of well-defined reproducible experiments to determine all of the correlates of consciousness. I think that’s an area that screams out for some advancement. In the case of non-human animals, it gets even tougher. It’s very difficult to study, unless you’re talking about an animal like Alex the parrot who has pretty good linguistic faculties and can do a form of accurate verbal report, and right now, nobody seems to have a vested interest in doing projects like that. The real problems with animals who are going to help you demonstrate the correlates of consciousness is that, being complicated animals with complex nervous systems, they are a heavy time commitment. Given the way the system works, it’s not going to be easy to get NSF money over multiple years to get animals trained to go after those issues, even though they are paramount in the study of consciousness. That’s a bureaucratic problem, a problem of interest, a problem of priorities. If I had the wherewithal and the resources behind me, and the time, and the help, I would start dissecting the issue of consciousness in African grey parrots – they have this distinct advantage that once you teach them a nice lexicon of terms, they can give you something tantamount to report, obviating the problem that you have in the case of other animals in consciousness studies.
In the octopus, we may not get to the “big C”, but what we will do is attack some questions about the differences between visual perception in the octopus and visual perception in vertebrates, what visual salience means to that animal, and perhaps, if we’re really lucky, how that animal integrates submodal properties of vision or even properties of vision with another modality like touch. These are very rudimentary questions, but they’re important waystations on the path to studying consciousness.

Are there any popular misconceptions about consciousness or cognition, either in humans or in non-human animals that you’ve encountered? What are they, and what would you prefer that people thought?

There is one that has been brewing in my mind for a long time, which is the old idea that we only use a certain percentage of our brain – say, 10%. I love that! If you’re a fan of the idea of natural selection, or any sort of selective system, and you realize that nervous systems work by virtue of large repertoires of possible responses, it’s a silly idea. Any nervous system is going to be dense with all manner of possibility, and the environment or context is going to select out certain functional units to come to the fore in terms of representations of the world in the nervous system at any one moment. It’s a very difficult thing to convey to people, the idea that we shouldn’t consider the brain as this thing that is built from scratch, but consider it as first a repertoire of possible circuits, and then a repertoire of possible traffic-ways on those circuits that’s wired up during development. By virtue of the number of cells in the nervous system and the number of connections between those cells and their neighbors, there are myriad possible ways to represent parts of the world. It may sort of be true that if you look at the brain in terms of active states versus just noise, that it looks like only a certain percentage of the brain is active at a particular time, but you can’t scale the brain down to that momentarily active 10% and have a really well functioning brain.” You’ve just cut that repertoire by 90%.

Here’s another misconception; the idea that a brain is tantamount to a big computer. If you’re an interested, intelligent layperson and you read Discover, or the New York Times science section or something like that, you’ll come across articles talking about computers that are acting brain-like. For example, take Deep Blue – they put basically the entire history of chess into Deep Blue, and Deep Blue had the advantage that it could process certain things much faster than Kasparov could, so Deep Blue was going to win the chess game! But what you did there was put in a very rich but very specific set of historical information into that computer. Chess is just not a very good way to convince me that you’ve come up with a computer that is like a biological organism. This is symptomatic of the notion that’s being pushed even to this day that brains are very computer-like, and do very computer-like operations. They are doing processing operations, there’s no doubt about that, but they’re not doing it the way a digital computer is.
There are even a lot of people who are practicing neuroscience who, though they might not say this explicitly, portray the brain in their work and through the kind of language they use that, if one didn’t know better, one would believe that they are tethered to the notion that brains are merely another form of computer. But they’re not; computers just have been, like the technology of any given day, something that people fall back on to describe the properties of the natural world. Humans are very good at doing this – it’s a very convenient and facile way to render something that seems reasonable in one’s own mind as a model as what goes on in the real world. I think that’s the biggest misconception that I would rage against, if I had to: the notion of brain as computer.

Being a student, I’m interested in the process of becoming a scientist. Do you have any comments or advice for people who might what to pursue research in the area of animal cognition and/or consciousness?

Most of my advice is very practical. Research the graduate program you decide on really well, and talk to the faculty and some students from the program. Following from that, pursue somebody who’s a strong mentor, both in an intellectual and a practical sense. My graduate advisor at Penn was a very smart guy, he was very personable, and I liked him a lot, but he wasn’t an activist advisor. I saw around me, people outside of anthropology, people in biology, their mentor took it upon themselves to help shepherd that person out into the world, beyond simply reading the dissertation and suggesting things, really figuring out how to get that person ensconced or active in the career. This is very important and this is not necessarily that easy to get at, but you can sort of look at people’s track records and see who their graduate students were and what they have done with themselves, and that’s probably a fairly good indication of how active the mentor was in getting them out there. That seems like sort of far down the pipe for any potential graduate student to consider, but the more and more I think about it, the more I believe that that’s an important area to bone up on before you take the plunge.

Thanks for reading!

Dr. Irene Pepperberg

I can’t believe it’s Thursday already! We’re on the home stretch of our series of interviews with researchers in the fields of animal cognition and consciousness.  Today’s interviewee is Dr. Irene Pepperberg, who famously developed a system for communicating with an African grey parrot named Alex, and thereafter used it to study his cognitive abilities. A selection of her papers can be found here, as part of The Alex Foundation‘s website.  I suppose I shouldn’t keep you waiting any longer! My questions are in plain text, and Dr. Pepperberg’s answers are in boxes.

Just to get readers oriented, what’s your background and what do you do (professionally and/or otherwise)?

I received my undergraduate (MIT ’69) and graduate (Harvard, ’71, ’76) degrees in theoretical chemistry, then switched into the field of animal cognition. I now am an adjunct associate professor at Brandeis University and a research associate and sometime lecturer at Harvard.

How did you become interested in language in animals (that is, instead of any other area of research)?

I had parakeets (budgerigars) as pets when I was a child, and found them to be quite smart; in the first few years of childhood, they were my closest companions and probably the creatures with whom I talked the most. Many years later, while in graduate school, I watched NOVA programs on our local public television channel; there were reports about animal intelligence, how birds learned their songs, and how dolphins and apes could communicate with humans–I thought that I could compare parrots to these other species.

How does the study of language use in animals give us insight into animal consciousness? More specifically, what does it tell us that non-linguistic behavior can’t?

Well, to paraphrase Donald Griffin, the person who was the 20th century proponent for the study of animal consciousness, being able to communicate directly with animals gives us a clear window into their thought processes, much as we have with other humans.

Why should people (scientists or non-scientists) care about research into animal consciousness?

That’s a tricky question, because I actually am neither a student of animal consciousness nor do I believe that it is necessarily the most important area of animal behavior for study. Nevertheless, I believe that the more we understand about thought processes—in both animals and humans—the closer we can come to designing experiments to understand consciousness. And, as in many cases, animal models will serve us well, because animal studies have to be extremely carefully designed in order for people to believe the results; that level of carefulness can then be transferred to studies on humans.

A lot of people claim that consciousness is impossible to study, presumably because it doesn’t seem to be easily pinned down to specific physical phenomena. How do you respond to people who say that consciousness is not something that can be empirically investigated?

Well, at the moment, I actually agree with them about empirical investigation; I think that we need breakthroughs in experimental design, and that’s where I think that effort needs to be directed… so I strongly encourage research in the area of design.

What is the most convincing piece of evidence you’ve encountered either for or against the idea that animals have consciousness?

Personally, it was the study in which Alex figured out a zero-like concept… He had previously learned to use “none” for the concept of absence…particularly the absence of similarity or difference between two objects. Without training, he transferred that knowledge to use “none” to describe the absence of a size difference between two objects. When we were doing a study on number comprehension, by asking him questions such as “What color (set) is blue?” to collections of differently numbered objects of different colors (e.g., 3 red blocks, 4 blue blocks, 6 green blocks), he refused to answer one day, and consistenly repeated a number that was not present. When I finally asked him about that number, he spontaneously—that is, without training—said “none”. Note that we called his ability a ‘zero-like concept’, because he didn’t use “none” to respond when absolutely nothing was present. The striking aspect of this event for consciousness was that he had figured out how to manipulate me to get him to ask the question he wanted to answer.

What sorts of projects would you most like to see done (or feel most need to be done) in the field of animal cognition and consciousness?

Considerable work still needs to be done in animal cognition. For starters, we haven’t begun to plumb the depths of intelligence in most species; we are just beginning work on large animals such as elephants and small ones such as spiders [and] we are just beginning to examine how animals literally see the world. With respect to animal consciousness, I think that we need to start looking at areas of visual perception…think about change blindness in humans, for example. We need to figure out ways to test animals on such tasks.

Are there any popular misconceptions about consciousness or cognition in non-human animals that you’ve encountered? What are they, and what would you prefer that people thought?

Many people—even some scientists—still equate absolute brain size and the presence of a mammalian cortical structure with intelligence. There’s an article today (Sept 14) in Science News that seems to perpetuate these assumptions. We need to clarify that brain size itself isn’t important, but rather the relative size of whatever cortical-like area exists compared to the whole brain of the organism. Note that I said ‘cortical-like’ area—we are also beginning to realize that areas of the brain needn’t look exactly like primate cortex in order to work like primate cortex—which is the case with birds—so we also need to discover which bits of brain act like cortex in different taxa.

Being a student, I’m interested in how one becomes a scientist. Do you have any comments or advice for people who might what to pursue research in the area of animal cognition and/or consciousness?

At least do a double major—biology and psychology—so that you learn about both external and internal validity. And think outside the box. Almost everyone working in animal cognition today is someone who dared to go beyond the boundaries that were set when they were being taught.

The paper that Dr. Pepperberg referred to is ”Number Comprehension by a Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus), Including a Zero-Like Concept” (2005) by Pepperberg and Gordon, published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Tomorrow’s post will wrap up the series with a researcher who works with octopodes, so stay tuned. Thanks for reading!

Dr. Colin Allen

Next in this week’s all-star lineup of experts on animal cognition and consciousness is Dr. Colin Allen. Dr. Allen is a prolific writer on a variety of topics related to cognitive science and philosophy, and associate editor of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (where he’s authored, notably, the entry “Animal Consciousness“.) You can find check out his home page for more info and links to his publications. As usual, my questions are in plain text, and Dr. Allen’s responses are in boxes.

Just to get readers oriented, what’s your background and what do you do (professionally and/or otherwise)?

My academic training is in philosophy, and I was initially attracted to philosophy because of its breadth. For example, if you like art you can pursue aesthetics, and if you like science you can pursue the philosophy of science, and if you want you can even combine these in the philosophy of cognitive science by reflecting on what (or whether) the neuroscience of aesthetic judgments can tell us about concepts of art. As an undergraduate I got interested in brains and language, so philosophy of language and philosophy of mind but also logic and philosophy of science were among my favorite topics. And when I got to graduate school in philosophy at UCLA, I also took classes in linguistics, anthropology, biology, and computer science — really designing my own course of study in cognitive science before there even was such a thing available there.

I’m currently a professor in the College of Arts & Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. I have a split appointment between the Department of History & Philosophy of Science (HPS) and the Program in Cognitive Science, and I’ll be the director of the latter when I come off a sabbatical leave in the summer of 2011. IU provides a lot of possibilities for being interdisciplinary. As well as HPS Department and Cognitive Science Program, which are inherently interdisciplinary, I belong to IU’s Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior which brings together biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and the occasional philosopher such as myself.

Generally, I’m interested in almost any topic related to the scientific explanation of behavior and cognition, but I’ve specialized in animal behavior and cognition partly because of being in the right place at the right time at UCLA, and also because I think these areas present very interesting challenges to traditional philosophical approaches to mind and knowledge. The Darwinian perspective from biology is of course important, but it’s one thing to affirm “evolutionary continuity” and quite another to work out what that really means for the evolution of cognition. And I’ve been lucky enough to keep my interest in computers and artificial intelligence going in various ways, including working on interactive websites for teaching logic, becoming associate editor for the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, finishing a book a couple of years ago titled “Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong”, and currently directing a project we call the Indiana Philosophy Ontology which aims to provide a gateway for people and machines into the entire discipline of philosophy.

You’ve published on (what looks like to me, at least) a huge variety of topics. Where does the study of consciousness in animals fit into your work, and why?

At UCLA I wrote my doctoral dissertation about intentionality and communicative meaning in the vocalizations of monkeys, and for the first few years after that, I rather avoided the topic of consciousness because I thought it was (a) very hard to say anything new and (b) too much of a distraction from other areas concerning the scientific study of animal minds that deserved more attention from philosophers. I still think that these are both true. But when I wrote “Species of Mind: the Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology” with the ethologist Marc Bekoff I knew that we had no choice but to write a chapter on consciousness or risk being accused as too timid — something that Marc would never be accused of on this subject! Donald Griffin, who invented the term ‘cognitive ethology’ had insisted on putting animal consciousness front and center, and while he did much to advance the field there were also many reasons to be dissatisfied with his specific ideas about consciousness which did not necessarily withstand philosophical scrutiny. As a result, criticism of Griffin’s ideas was often used to attack cognitive ethology as a whole, so Bekoff and I wanted to steer the conversation about cognitive ethology towards more tractable topics such as the cognitive aspects of topics like animal communication, social play, and anti-predatory vigilance, and away from the easy dismissals of cognitive ethology as romantic anthropomorphizing. Nevertheless, we included a chapter making some tentative suggestions about animal consciousness and placed it (some might say buried it) as chapter 8 (of 9) in the book. Subsequent to writing “Species of Mind” I got interested in pain research and have written about what it might tell us about consciousness in animals, and I have written and maintained the entry on animal consciousness in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has required me to keep abreast of the relevant scientific and philosophical literatures. So, animal cognition generally is my original line of academic work, and animal consciousness is an unavoidable subtopic within that. But it also connects to my interests in machine intelligence since there are many similar questions.

Why should people (scientists or non-scientists) care about research into animal consciousness?

Lots of reasons, not all of which will appeal to everyone. But the primary one, for me, is the intellectual challenge it poses — understanding for the sake of understanding. Secondly, of course, many people are motivated by the ethical implications of such work. Third, there’s a human-centered motivation of studying animals in order to develop insight into the mechanisms underlying human consciousness. I realize that some people think that scientific or philosophical skepticism about animal consciousness is a kind of ostrich-like refusal to see what’s obvious. But I think that scientific and philosophical challenges to common sense represent a long and distinguished tradition that can sometimes produce completely new ways of seeing the world, but even when reaffirming common sense leads to a better understanding of these “obvious” truths. Some people want all research to have immediate practical applications, but I think such an attitude is always short-sighted. Who would have predicted that the research of logicians into the foundations of mathematics over a hundred years ago would eventually lead to digital computers and the Internet?

A lot of people claim that consciousness is impossible to study, presumably because it doesn’t seem to be easily pinned down to specific physical phenomena. How do you respond to people who say that consciousness is not something that can be empirically investigated?

One thing to say is that consciousness is being studied empirically, so the question has a false premise. There are lots of empirical studies of human consciousness, and for animals one can point to such things as the study of sleep in a variety of animal species, or of blindsight in monkeys. These people you refer to may respond that they meant some other sense of consciousness that is untouched by those studies. Of course, someone might define consciousness in such a way that makes it impossible to study empirically, but why should we accept such a definition? I also ask them what do they know that I don’t know? I don’t think we know enough to say that it is impossible to study consciousness empirically. One of my undergraduate teachers was Colin McGinn, a philosopher of mind who has claimed that for us to understand consciousness (human or animal) is probably like asking a dog to understand calculus. We are too stupid to figure it out. But I think we are perhaps too stupid to know whether or not we are too stupid to figure it out. I don’t see how any a priori argument could establish the claim, since it would depend on knowing already exactly what it is that we are unable to grasp. There’s another kind of challenge which simply says that people been trying for ages with little progress, but even if it’s true that there has been little progress (which I would dispute), for similar reasons I think it’s prematurely defeatist to say that progress is impossible. The only way to find out is to keep trying.

What is the most convincing piece of evidence you’ve encountered either for or against the idea that or non-human animals have consciousness?

More than any one thing, I think it’s an accumulation of multiple lines of evidence. Neuroanatomy, physiology, and behavior all reveal similarities that are relevant to consciousness, and scientists are also learning more about different kinds of learning. Some take place implicitly and without conscious effort (although perhaps requiring much repetitive training), while more flexible kinds of learning seem to depend on explicit awareness of the relevant stimuli. Simply piling up a list of similarities between animals and humans can, however, seem weak — arguments from analogy are never conclusive — so that’s where more theoretical ideas about the role of consciousness in decision making and learning can help make the specific case for animal consciousness. It is necessary, also, to distinguish different ideas about consciousness — some people want to equate that term with a fully reflective self-consciousness, which as adult humans permits us to think of ourselves as beings in time with determinate births and deaths and a range of projects to carry out in between (when we are not otherwise occupied with simply getting through the day, that is.) I doubt that any non-humans have such a beginning-to-end self-conception. But more basic forms of sensory experience, memory, and anticipation, involve various degrees of integration of information over time and space that allow animals to flexibly adapt their own behavior to novel information and new goals. Nicky Clayton’s work at Cambridge University springs to mind here, with her experiments on the ability of scrub jays to remember where, when, and what kind of food they hid, and also to decide what to hide for tomorrow based on what they were deprived of today.

What sorts of projects would you most like to see done (or feel most need to be done) in the field of animal cognition and consciousness?

Although the situation in animal cognition studies is much richer than it was just 15 years ago, it still seems to me that too much current work focuses on what I call “trophy hunting” — the attempt to show that one’s favorite species can do something regarded as clever when humans do it: recognizing themselves in mirrors, using human language, predicting how others will behave given only information about what they have seen, and so on. Instead of taking a few studies and over-generalizing them to entire species, we need to be much more careful to find out what it is in the individual lives of animals entering these experiments that supports their success or leads to their failure. For instance, it is practically dogma that apes can recognize themselves in mirrors and monkeys “never get it” to quote one widely replayed public television documentary. But an article published in the journal PLoS ONE in June 2010 reports on rhesus monkeys using mirrors to inspect themselves. Now, let me hasten to add that this research, which was a side project involving monkeys who had received surgical implants in their heads, may offend some readers because of the surgeries involved, and I don’t want to deny that concern. We also should always be cautious of any new scientific result that has not been replicated by another lab (which is not a demand for more surgery to be done on monkeys either). But what it indicates to me is that we shouldn’t assume that the failure to get monkeys in previous studies to show self-directed behavior in mirrors may have as much to do with the prior experiences of the monkeys as to do with a perhaps mythical ape/monkey discontinuity. All in all we need a more developmental approach to animal cognition, one which investigates the way in cognitive development is cumulative, [the way] earlier experiences affect later cognitive outcomes. For example, another 2010 study, this one in PLoS Biology showed that cichlid fish who experienced a change in food levels during early development were better learners later in life. It didn’t matter whether the food supply went from low to high, or high to low — simply that there was a change. We have only begun to think about how early life experiences affect later cognitive abilities.

On the consciousness front, I think that’s a harder question. I’ve had a few ideas aimed at trying to get at whether animals can switch flexibly between how things appear to them and how they really are. The basic idea can be explained using the example of visual illusions, which come along with a certain conscious experience but also the knowledge that the experience is inaccurate. We know that many animals are subject to the same illusions as humans, but what we don’t know is whether they are capable of recognizing that their experience is illusory. However, experiments to test this would be tricky to set up, and very time consuming. It’s a big risk for scientists who face constant pressure to produce publishable and fundable research to invest a lot of effort into an experiment that might not work. Nevertheless, as I said earlier, there’s a lot of work going on in the neural and behavioral sciences that helps support the idea that the basic brain architecture that supports human consciousness is present in other mammalian species too. And we are finding out more about the interesting brain structures that have evolved in non-mammalian species, for instance the mushroom bodies of honey bees and the area VL of octopus brains, that seem to have similar structural organization and play a similar role in cognitive flexibility as the mammalian and avian hippocampus systems. This kind of comparative work will continue and become more detailed. And there are even people currently working on techniques for measuring the brain activity of rats and birds using non-invasive functional MRI, although I don’t think anyone has a plan to try it on an octopus … yet!

Are there any popular misconceptions about consciousness or cognition in non-human animals that you’ve encountered? What are they, and what would you prefer the public thought?

It seems to me that there are misconceptions in all directions here, ranging from the fabulous — psychic pets, or scheming, vengeful predators — to the willingly ignorant — painless castrations of bullocks, or emotionless reptiles. But I think that the one idea I hear most often that I would like to change is that there is a simple linear scale of consciousness or intelligence with humans at one end (or the top) and worms, or perhaps sponges, at the bottom. Going along with that is the comparison of various animals to human children at a certain age. A chimpanzee is not a furry four year-old, and there is not a simple scale according to which dolphins fall between (say) dogs and chimpanzees. Evolutionary adaptation and the processes of individual development conspire to produce sets of capacities that may be variously enhanced or lowered in different individuals and different species. Gaining an appreciation for this complexity and a fascination for the sheer variety of life and cognition strikes me as one of the best things we could convey to the public, with the hope of fostering the desire to know more instead of being satisfied with simplistic “pigeon-holing” of species according to their perceived intelligence.

Do you have any comments or advice for people who might want to pursue scientific or philosophical research in the area of animal cognition and/or consciousness?

Despite the explosion of interest in scientific studies of animal cognition, there are still considerable pockets of skepticism out there. Rightly so, in my opinion, since science generally thrives on skepticism: trust but verify! To be able to convince skeptics from whatever direction, you need to know where they are coming from, and to speak the languages of these different disciplines. For this it is necessary to obtain a broad background in neuroscience, biology, psychology, and philosophy — the cognitive sciences more generally. If your initial motivation is a desire to work with one of the “glamour species” — dolphins or the great apes — realize that there’s an extreme competition for that kind of work, so you may want to broaden your horizons and think about what could be accomplished with different and more accessible species. A lot of great work has been done in recent years studying crows, ravens, and jays, and there is an explosion of work currently using pet dogs as subjects. Even rats and pigeons have a lot to offer. After years of taking goldfish as the representatives of fish in general, scientists are starting to look at other species and finding some surprisingly sophisticated abilities. To be sure, we must not forget the cephalopods either! But no matter how many species have been studied or will be in the next few years, we will only have scratched at the diversity of cognitive abilities that biology has to offer.

The studies that Dr. Allen referred to are:

“Planning for the future by western scrub-jays” (2007) by Raby, Alexis, Dickinson, and Clayton (and similar works,) “Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) Do Recognize Themselves in the Mirror: Implications for the Evolution of Self-Recognition” (2010) by Rajala et al., and “Environmental Change Enhances Cognitive Abilities in Fish” (2010) by Kotrschal and Taborsky.

Thanks for reading!

Today’s piece in our week-long series of interviews takes a step away from cephalopods; we’re talking to Dr. David Smith, a researcher whose work focuses on metacognition in non-human animals (more specifically, how some non-human vertebrates monitor and respond to their own uncertainty – for a review of this topic check out his 2009 paper, “The study of animal metacognition.”.) Let’s get right down to it, then! My questions are in plain text, and Dr. Smith’s responses are in boxes.

Just to get readers oriented, what’s your background and what do you do (professionally and/or otherwise)?

I received my B.A. (Anthropology) from Yale University (1975), my M.S. Ed. from the Bank Street College of Education (1977), and my Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Pennsylvania (1982), where I attended graduate school as a Danforth Foundation fellow. I served in the Teacher Corps from 1975-1977, teaching pre-kindergarten, fourth grade, and sixth-grade science at P.S. 179 in Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem. I was a professor of psychology at the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research (1982-1991), and I am a professor at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York (1992-present) where I am also a member of the Center for Cognitive Science. With my colleagues, I inaugurated a new area of inquiry in comparative psychological research, demonstrating that some nonhuman animals have capacities for uncertainty monitoring and mental-state awareness that have strong parallels to those in humans. My current research in this area is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. I also have strong research interests in the cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience of human and animal category learning. My current research in this area is also funded by the National Institutes of Health.

How did you become interested in the study of cognition and metacognition in animals (that is, instead of any other area of research)?

I became interested in these areas from the perspective of human cognitive development. Developmental theorists were then supporting the idea that metacognition (MC) is one of the most sophisticated and late-emerging cognitive capacities in humans. However, it appeared that partly this was because the paradigms they were using to measure MC were highly verbal, introspective, and requiring of the child’s self-report. My thought then was that we should build simpler, purely behavioral, non-verbal paradigms for studying young humans. Then, it emerged as an equally productive avenue that one could apply these paradigms to the study of MC across species.

Your research seems to focus on vertebrates, specifically on mammals and birds. What do you think about the study of consciousness and cognition in other groups of vertebrates or invertebrates like cephalopods?

I think the phylogenetic distribution of awareness and reflective mind across many species, and the evolutionary emergence of these distinctive cognitive capacities, are among the important issues within comparative psychology today. For many reasons—species availability, research tradition, cognitive-evolutionary assumptions, commonalities in perceptual systems/brain organization, comparative researchers have focused on rats, pigeons, nonhuman primates, and undergraduates for their research. However, there is no reason why the current cognitive and metacognitive paradigms should not be applied as broadly as is feasible, with scientific open-mindedness.

Why should people (scientists or non-scientists) care about research into animal consciousness?

I can speak to why people should care about research on animals’ cognitive self-awareness and MC. The question of animal MC is intrinsically important because that capacity is one of humans’ most sophisticated cognitive capacities that could be unique to them. Studies of animal MC complement other measures of reflective mind and awareness in animals, and allow important evolutionary conjectures to be tested about when reflective mind emerged and how broadly it is distributed phylogenetically. Studies of animal MC help sharpen the theoretical constructs surrounding MC in human psychology, given the conservative standards in interpreting animals’ behavior. For example, if animals show MC capacities like those in humans, those results call into question the language basis for humans’ MC. Animal studies can provide animal models for humans’ MC, and allow the study of neurochemical facilitation that could benefit cognitively aging populations. These studies also have significance for expanding the range of behavioral metacognition paradigms available for testing very young human children and special-needs populations of various kinds. They could reveal more basic forms of cognitive regulation that could be preserved or fostered in children who are challenged in the highest-level components of metacognition that feature introspection, explicit verbal report, conscious self-regulation, theory of mind, executive attention, and so forth. Finally, studies of animal MC could help reveal the phylogenetic roots of human MC, which might have implications for understanding how or why cognitive awareness and cognitive regulation came to be such a crucial aspect of humans’ cognitive system.

A lot of people claim that consciousness is impossible to study, presumably because it doesn’t seem to be easily pinned down to specific physical phenomena. How do you respond to people who say that consciousness is not something that can be empirically investigated?

I try to avoid even using the word consciousness. It is broad, intimidating, it has many meanings, and it inflames passions unnecessarily. I talk about declarative cognition, cognitive awareness, and so forth. These are narrower, nearer to my research, and slightly safer. Humans apparently have this extra hierarchical layer of monitoring their cognition, guiding/directing, it, evaluating it, and so forth. They can tell you about it, sometimes they talk to themselves about it. One can ask whether nonhumans share these capacities, with the proviso that of course they will not talk about it, but perhaps they can behave about it. One doesn’t have to get bound up in all the baggage about consciousness, its physical instantiation, its metarepresentational feel, or anything else. The question is a testable one about cognitive organizations and cognitive capacities. Then, one can consider whether, if animals have the same architecture and organization, it may or may not feel the same to them experientially.

What is the most convincing piece of evidence you’ve encountered either for or against the idea that non-human animals have consciousness?

I can speak about the evidence for animal MC. My macaque monkeys have met almost every test of animal MC that I have given them. In my research, I give animals an uncertainty response with which they can choose to decline any trials they want to, and they choose to decline the most difficult trials that they will likely be wrong on if they try. Animals can make uncertainty responses in many task contexts at once, essentially metacognitively multi-tasking. They can make uncertainty responses on the first trial of new tasks, when no training has taught them to. They can make uncertainty responses when direct reinforcement (food rewards and timeouts for right and wrong answers) is removed from their immediate performance. They can make uncertainty responses when they don’t remember what they saw. It is equally interesting that some species—that is, capuchin monkeys and especially pigeons—do not show robustly this uncertainty-monitoring capacity. This also suggests that animal MC is a high-level capacity that some species evidently lack. It is the totality of the evidence, not any single finding, that supports the idea that nonhumans share with humans a basic metacognitive capacity, though animals may not share every aspect of the human capacity.

What sorts of projects would you most like to see done (or feel most need to be done) in the field of animal cognition and consciousness?

I can speak to constructive projects that might be done in the field of animal cognition and metacognition. Our research has shown that animals’ uncertainty responses are not conditioned, are not learned, and are not dependent on reinforcement. They are different than that, and more cognitive than that. Now, the field is moving toward studies that analyze the actual processes that animals may be using as they evaluate trials and respond to their uncertainty about them. Are they actively holding information in working memory? Are they using attentional resources? Are there prefrontally based hypotheses under review in animals’ minds? These studies will bring us closer to testing whether animal MC really is the explicit, declarative report about mental states that it is in humans.

Are there any popular misconceptions about consciousness or cognition in non-human animals that you’ve encountered? What are they, and what would you prefer that people thought?

There was the historical misconception by strict behaviorists that metacognition and even cognition were humanly unique, so that no nonhuman possessed these capacities. There is the more recent misconception that if these capacities extend beyond humans, they only do so narrowly to the few species of great ape. The evidence is thin for this proposal, and, in fact, substantial research speaks against it. However, the research does not yet say that these capacities extend all the way to the cephalopods. Notice—when I say all the way to the cephalopods—I betray comparative psychology’s assumption that they are a long way away. I would prefer that people understand that many species are definitely cognitive. Moreover, some species have important functional parallels to human MC—that is, they behave just as humans do in MC tasks.

Being a student, I’m interested in the process of becoming a scientist. Do you have any comments or advice for people who might want to pursue research in the area of animal cognition and/or consciousness?

Starting out, I would recommend joining someone’s laboratory for an internship, to gain experience and contacts in your field. Many laboratories at UB encourage students to come in and do research internships. We host 3-4 students every semester.

Thanks for reading!

Dr. Jennifer Mather

A fair few weeks ago, I wrote a series a series of articles on the possibility of consciousness in cephalopods. People seemed to be interested in it, and it generated as much commentary and spin-off articles as this blog ever has. Consciousness being a somewhat slippery subject matter, and myself being rather ill-acquainted with the field, I didn’t feel like I could do the topic justice in those articles; what the discussion really needed was some input from experts on the subject. Towards this goal, I’ll be publishing an interview with a researcher who studies consciousness and cognition each day this week.

The first interview of the series is with Dr. Jennifer Mather, author of (among many other research publications on octopus behavior) the paper “Cephalopod conscioussness: behavioral evidence“, which I relied on heavily when I was learning and writing about the possibility of consciousness in cephalopods. Without further ado, here it is (my questions are in plain text and Dr. Mather’s answers are in boxes):

Just to get readers oriented, what’s your background and what do you do (professionally and/or otherwise)?

I’m a university professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Why so far from the sea? They offered me a job 25 years ago. Besides, even folks at universities near the sea often find they have to travel to do their research. Professors teach courses and individual students, do service (I’m the chair of the Animal Behavior Society’s Education Committee, for instance), research, go to conferences and write papers.

How did you become interested in cephalopod behavior (that is, instead of any other area of research)?

I started out way back as a kid mooching around the shoreline in Victoria, BC, Canada, dropping things into sea anemones, collecting shells and being fascinated by molluscs. My roots are as an ‘old-fashioned naturalist’, a background that children don’t get much anymore and that is important to understanding the animal. I knew I wanted to study the whole animal and it wasn’t until my fourth undergraduate year that I discovered behavior and knew this was what would do that. I was hooked, but the molluscs that had the interesting behavior were the cephalopods, so I switched my fine focus to them. I did my Master’s in Biology and my PhD in Psychology. That’s a good educational combination with the focus on the animal’s ecology but also on the behavioral concepts. People didn’t apply the ideas I heard around me (think of play and personality) to animals like octopuses, but I was there, thinking about that intersection.

Why should people (scientists or non-scientists) care about research into animal consciousness?

From an intellectual standpoint, because it results in fascinating questions, though not easy ones to answer. From a practical one, we need to know and respect the beings that we share the planet with, and we do this when we ask what they ‘think about’.

What special place do studies on cephalopods have in research on cognition and consciousness? Why not use more accessible and familiar experimental animals?

Ah, but they represent a different model of cognition. We can study non-human vertebrates like monkeys and crows, and we should, but they represent steps in the evolution of cognition that can be directly compared with what we humans have accomplished. It doesn’t work that way with an octopus, it’s not related at all to us. So we can learn how else cognition and consciousness might have evolved; they are a different model. Then we can look for similarities and say “This might be necessary for the evolution of high intelligence and cognitive ability. See, the two groups have it.”

A lot of people claim that consciousness is impossible to study, presumably because it doesnt seem to be easily pinned down to specific physical phenomena. How do you respond to people who say that consciousness is not something that can be empirically investigated?

It certainly can’t be studied directly, except, you might argue, for the primates that have mastered sign languages. They can ‘tell us what they are thinking’. We have to be pretty smart about designing studies that ask for more, like the ones that test for ‘theory of mind’ in monkeys and crows. We have to be careful, too, the mirror test is held up as the most important one, but lots of animals don’t use visual representations like mammals do.

What is the most convincing piece of evidence youve encountered either for or against the idea that cephalopods have consciousness?

Way back in the 1980s I was observing juvenile octopus in the field in Bermuda (with a big team because we followed them all day). I remember watching one animal. It had been out hunting, eating the flesh off the mollusc prey and spitting out the shells onto its garbage heap. What they usually did next was sleep. But this one sat at the entrance of its home and then suddenly jetted out and down about a meter and picked up a small rock. It put the rock down in front, then went out again to pick up another rock and yet a third. Then it pulled the rocks up like a wall in front of it, pulled back into its home and went to sleep. I had done studies of what kind of homes octopuses liked when I was a graduate student. I knew they preferred those with a volume about their size and a small opening. This octopus didn’t choose, it constructed. It must have somehow had an ‘image’ of what it ‘wanted’ in a home and it must have ‘known how’ to get the material to make it that way. Octopuses don’t choose ready-made homes to hide in, they choose possible ones and clean them out and set up barriers so they are suitable–or leave and find another. Later on I did a more detailed study of home construction. It turned out there was a high correlation between the area of the home entrance and the number of rocks and shells that octopuses brought to block it up, so they also ‘knew what they needed’. This is also tool use (by the standard definition of Beck), both the rocks and the water jets they used for cleaning out.

What sorts of projects would you most like to see done (or feel most need to be done) in the field of animal cognition and consciousness?

Well, I think we should move past standard test that try to evaluate all animals–like the mirror test. We should pay more attention to what sensory cues each animal species uses and how, so that we can test that species better. Someone did a book collecting accounts of animal cognition based on the situations that particular animal was specializing in, that’s very important. Octopuses aren’t dumb monkeys, parrots aren’t displaced ones either, and dogs are specialized for communication with us.

Are there any popular misconceptions about consciousness or cognition in cephalopods (or non-human animals in general) that you’ve encountered? What are they, and what would you prefer that people thought?

I think the general public veers between thinking that animals have llttle or no cognitive ability and taking specific instances and believing that they have much. Look at octopus Paul! Of course it didn’t have ESP to predict the outcome of Germany’s World Cup soccer games, but it made such a good story. We have to know that of course they aren’t as ‘smart’ as us, but in their own way they have simpler abilities suited for their lives and brains.

Being a student, I’m interested in the process of becoming a scientist. Do you have any comments or advice for people who might what to pursue research in the area of animal cognition and/or consciousness?

If you are a high school student or an undergraduate, go get involved with animals. You need to have a firm grounding in maths and English, but you also need to get good grades because graduate schools care about that. As an undergraduate, get involved in research, doesn’t matter what kind as long as you can see how inquiry works. As a graduate student or a beginning professor, you need patience and persistence. There are a lot of good people in animal behavior and not a lot of jobs. At the same time, you have to see what you want to do and believe in it…and just go do it. Off the wall ideas might not work, but no one but yourself is going to try yours. And others will help you if you persist.

The home-building behavior Dr. Mather referred to is reported in the paper ’Home’ choice and modification by juvenile Octopus Vulgaris (Mollusca:Cephalopoda): specialized intelligence and tool use? (1994), published in the Journal of Zoology.
Thanks for reading!

You know you’re a blogger when you write your first post about blogging. I guess it was inevitable.

I came upon Dr. Royce Murray’s article “Science Blogs and Caveat Emptor” today (via Chembark via Everday Science, and also covered at In the Pipeline, Terra Sigillata, InSightu, with a great comment by B. Penders, and Science 2.0). Needless to say, it rubbed me a bit of the wrong way, and before I knew it I had typed up a response. Here’s the email that just left my tower and headed for his inbox:

Dear Dr. Murray,

I came upon your article in the most recent edition of “Analytical Chemistry” today via Paul Bracher’s response to it at his website (http://blog.chembark.com). As a student, a scholar, and a science blogger, I was a bit chagrined to read your pessimistic characterization of science blogging as an enterprise (and by extension, of science bloggers as information producers.) In particular, you imply that science bloggers write “without the constraint of truth,” in contrast to more “traditional” forms of public science communication whose writers, you seem to presume, are primarily driven by their noble intentions to impart accurate scientific knowledge to the public. In truth, however, this is a broad mischaracterization of science bloggers, who are for the most part very concerned with the truth and completeness of what they write (and are in many cases disillusioned with the popular press’s coverage of science, which is often sensationalist, vague, incomplete, or downright wrong.)

That most bloggers are not professional journalists, and almost all “traditional” science journalists are (importantly, they professional journalists and not professional scientists) is, if anything, a factor that constrains the world of science blogging more closely to scientific veracity that the world of “traditional” science communication. Because science bloggers generally do not sell their work (in fact, many that I’ve encountered consider this antithetical to the activity of blogging,) they are under little pressure to sensationalize the topics they cover, or to leave out important information that might be considered to complicated or too uncomfortable to include in “traditional” science media. Because there is no other way to assess the qualifications of a blogger, it is a common (though not ubiquitous) practice for science bloggers to be very transparent about their identities and qualifications, as well as their sources. The conclusion that this diminishes the credibility or trustworthiness of bloggers is based on a misunderstanding of how blogs (and blog readers) actually work.

When viewing blogs, readers are encouraged to understand the source of their information (often in the form of links and references to scientific publications) instead of just accepting it as truth because a journalist has told them that it is true. If “traditional” media outlets did this as a rule they would be, by economic principle, damaged; by giving up their place as the public’s ultimate source of information, they give up some portion of the salable value of their services. Science bloggers, on the other hand, whose work is valued in terms of its circulation among readers, its esteem among fellow bloggers, and the feedback it garners from readers, have everything to gain by providing correct information, specifying where they got it, and accurately describing how the scientific method was used to produce that knowledge (and often, how it failed – something “traditional” science communicators stay almost completely silent on.) Because there are few financial incentives to keep science bloggers blogging, the community of science bloggers is made up of people who do what they do because they are committed to providing quality information about science to the public (or some segment of the public.) Bloggers are held accountable to the reasonableness and truth of their portrayal of science, because accuracy and informativeness are the capital of the blogging world. Fact-checking is done by bloggers, and then again by their readers (many of whom are also bloggers.) In the end, sources are provided, so that readers can easily do their own fact checking. It is this attitude, one of healthy skepticism, transparency, and reference to the scientific process, that science blogging engenders in its readers – this contrasts with the general lack of effort in “traditional” media to actively engage their audiences in the knowledge they present rather than maintaining an unquestioned, one-way flow of information from the publication to the reader.

In sum, I support your conclusion – information consumers do need to question the source of their information. I believe, however, that science blogs offer an accessible public forum where information consumers can question the sources of the information that they would otherwise only get in the form of brief, often sensationalized press-release and popular newspaper and magazine articles. As evidence by your support of the peer-review process, you seem to have great faith in the power of transparency and debate to generate reliable information – it puzzles me as to why you are so suspicious of this same process when it is enacted in public, where there are no formal restrictions determining who can participate, and where there are, if anything, fewer competing financial and professional interests than in either the world of science journalism or the world of professional scientific publishing.

I will be publishing this letter in full on my blog ( www.cephalove.southerfriedscience.com ) . If you decide to respond and you would not like your response published, please state as much.

Thanks for your time,

– Michael Lisieski

www.cephalove.southernfriedscience.com
mike.lisieski (at) gmail.com
xxxxxxxx (at) buffalo.edu
(xxx) xxx-xxxx

Encephalon is the (off-again/on-again; currently on-again) psychology and neuroscience blog carnival. As well as curating its current incarnation, I’m hosting the 81st edition of Encephalon on the 25th, and I have frightfully few submissions so far! Please send me links to your submissions, either as comments here, via a PM @Cephalover on twitter, or by email at mike.lisieski (at) gmail (dot) com . The new encephalon homepage is up, so you can check that out – I’ve compiled links to all of the older editions there. If you’d like to host an edition in the future, there are lots of slots open – just let me know!

As far as content goes, anything psychology or neuroscience-related is fair game. I understand that the “old” Encephalon was focused on neuroscience in humans. I’d like to break from this tradition, and so I am opening up the carnival to include writing on any species. If it’s psych- or neuro-related, it’s on the web, and you wrote it, feel free to submit it!

An update on upcoming posts – a series of interviews with scientists who study animal cognition and/or conscious will be up next week (these I decided to do in response to the great reception that my series on cephalopod consciousness got.) I won’t give away the lineup just yet, so make sure to tune in next week and read all the interview-ey goodness.

A post on the biochemistry of the Vibrio-Euprymna symbiosis (specifically, the possible use of nitric oxide as a signal between the host and the symbiont) is in the works, too – it probably won’t be out until after the interviews, so don’t hold your breath.

Thanks for reading!

After a moray eel attack (the octopus footage starts about 5 minutes into the video):

I wonder how that octopus coped afterwards. It seems to be swimming just fine, but it’s likely that, even if it could still function, it would get an infection or fall prey to another predator it was no longer strong enough to get away from. Thanks to Glenn Patton for that great video!

Next on this week’s cephalopod video revue, Let’s take a look at some cuttlefish. I never get tired of watching these guys change color.

Both of the users who posted these videos (ScandanavianDiveTeam and Tmukouhara) have a bunch of other dive videos, so click through and check them out.

Finally, the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago just posted a neat video starring one member of the cephalopod family that never gets enough attention: the nautilus.

An article came out this week in the US News and World Report covering research being done on Humboldt Squid populations off of the Pacific coast of the US (including some quotes by newly-named MacArthur fellow and oceanographer Kelly Benoit-Bird.) They mostly avoided the “vicious man-eater” stereotyping of the squid that I so deplore, but managed to squeeze in a toned-down version of it that I found quite funny:

Mexican fishermen call them diablos rojos, or “red devils,’’ because they are extremely aggressive. “I don’t think I would choose to get in the water with them when they are actively feeding,’’ Benoit-Bird said, noting, however, that they lose their propulsion when captured. Even so, “you don’t want to stick your fingers in their mouths,’’ she added.

Pretty much any animal is dangerous when you stick your fingers in its mouth. I have 2 pet rabbits – cute little fluffy bunnies – and I wouldn’t recommend sticking your fingers in their mouths, especially while they are eating. Somehow, this testimony doesn’t quite convince me.

Another recent news story on the Humboldt (from The Globe and Mail): after “invading” northern waters, it has apparently left almost as quickly as it came.

Finally, I’m still looking for submissions for Encephalon , the psychology/neuroscience blog carnival. Drop me a line on twitter ( @Cephalover ) or via email ( mike.lisieski (at) gmail (dot) com ) to submit a post!

Thanks for reading!

I’ve recently gotten into microbiology (I got a book on protozoans, and I’m hooked,) so I decided to try to find something microbiological to write about. Lo and behold, after a few Pubmed searches, I came upon some papers about an bioluminescent bacteria called Vibrio fischeri. Of course, not just any bacteria would do for a blog post – this one is special. It lives inside the Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes, in two special light organs. There, it finds a nice comfy home, and the squid can use the bacteria’s light-producing ability for countershading, so that it is harder to catch and eat. It is easy to see how this is good for both the squid and the bacteria.

(As a brief aside, the genus Euprymna is among the cutest cephalopod taxa. Go ahead and do a Google image search for the string “euprymna”, if you don’t believe me.)

The squid houses its tiny symbionts in a set of paired organs called the light organs (there’s a nice, straightforward anatomical term for ya!) These organs contain many convoluted cavities lined with epithelial cells in which the bacteria live. They connect to the inside of the mantle cavity (which is actually the outside of the body, as the mantle is open to the seawater through the funnel,) through ducts, so that the inside of the light organ is actually continuous with the squid’s mantle epithelia. Vibrio fischeri infect young squids by making their way through these connecting ducts and colonizing the cavities in their light organs. This process has been the subject of a number of very interesting studies; I’ll come back to this later, though.

At the present moment, let’s forget about the bacteria and consider the light organ from the squid’s perspective. The light organ’s structure was described in 1990 by McFall-Ngai and Montgomery. They found that the organ had a structure that was specialized for the projection of light downwards from the squids body. Specifically, the organ is set up so as to maximize the amount of light that leaves the squids ventral surface (its belly, or underside.) In addition to the cavities for the light producing bacteria to live in, the light organ contains a specialized “reflector” that helps to prevent light from escaping from the top of the organ, and a clear lens beneath the light organs to allow light to exit the squid’s body from the bottom. These structures are closely associated with the animal’s ink sac, which it has muscular control of, and so the shape of the reflector and lens can be changed by the action of the squids muscles. This allows the squid to adjust the characteristics of the light that leaves its light organ – specifically, it allows the squid to control how much light leaves the light organ. This is very important, as it’s what makes the light organ useful.

This image shows the light organs of the Hawaian bobtail squid. They are the pair of white and black organs below the eyes. From McFall-Ngai and Montgomery, 1990.

This is a cross section of the light organ. For orientation, imagine that the squid in the above photograph was lying on a table, and we cut it in half horizontally through the light organ, so that one half had the head and tentacles and the other half had the tip of the mantle. From McFall-Ngai and Montgomery, 1990.

How do we know what the light organs are used for, though? They look a lot like they would be used for countershading – that is, the lightening of an animals downward-facing side that prevents predators below them from seeing their silhouette against the light from the surface. Suggestive anatomy is not enough to make a firm conclusion about their function, though – we have to show that the light organs actually function to provide counter-shading.

Let’s fast-forward to 2004, where after stepping out of our Scienterrific Time-Travel Machine (TM) we will crack open the current issue of the journal “Marine Biology” to find an article by Jones and Nishiguchi that purports to show that the bobtail squid really does use its light organs for counter-shading. Successful bioluminescent countershading requires that the animal be able to regulate the amount of light it gives off in response to the amount of light that falls on it from the surface. In this way, it can match its appearance to that of the surface light, and blend in.

To demonstrate that the bobtail squid can do this, Jones and Nishiguchi used the following procedure: A squid was placed in a small container, slightly larger than its body, to prevent movement (the small size of the apparatus may have interfered with the results by stressing the animals, but after removing animals who appeared to be distressed by the experimental procedures, they got consistent results.) Then, a light was turned on at the top of the container. A fiber optic probe placed at the bottom of the container allowed the authors to measure the amount of bioluminescence the squid generated.

They found that the amount of light the squid’s light organ released was proportional to the amount of light they hit its dorsal surface (the upward-facing surface of the squid.) This is pretty good evidence for active counter-shading (also called counter-illumination.) This is the benefit that the squid derives from the symbiosis – it can more effective hide from predators below it. This at first seems a bit puzzling, because the bobtail squid spends much of its time buried in the sand. On those occasions when it leaves its sandy hiding place, however, it is very vulnerable, and these are the times when light organ really, *ahem*, shines.

Now, let’s speculate a bit about the evolutionary history of the light organ (in very general terms, of course.) We have a mechanism for selection: both the squid and the bacteria benefit from the symbiosis. The squid gets a counter-shading mechanism that allows it to escape being eaten, and the bacteria gets a reliable and fertile place to grow and reproduce. But what is the cost of evolving this symbiosis? For one, when they evolve specialized mechanisms for coexisting with their host’s immune system, the bacteria might give up the flexibility to live in other environments (this is not the case in this symbiosis, as there are both free-living and symbiotic forms of V. fischeri, but it is a general problem in the evolution of symbiosis.) The squid’s immune system, following the same tack, had to evolve special mechanisms to allow the bacteria to colonize it, which may have fitness-reducing side effects. Furthermore, being part of a symbiosis makes the animals dependent on each other (in this case, perhaps not entirely dependent upon each other, but at least dependent upon each other in terms of achieving optimal fitness.) As a symbiosis evolves and becomes more completely co-dependent, the organisms involved are increasingly restricted to only those habitats and conditions that their symbionts can also live in. Nevertheless, this symbiosis has evolved, indicating that such problems are not actually detrimental enough in this case to preempt the beneficial effects of the symbiosis.

The ways that the bacteria and the squid have evolved live together on a molecular level are manifold and complex. One particular problem sticks out like a sore thumb: how is colonization of the squid’s light organ so selective? The squid has these nice little crypts that are apparently well-suited for bacteria to live in, and yet they are only colonized by a single species of bacteria. In fact, this problem has been extensively studied. It turns out that, during colonization, the V. fischeri and E. scolopes are engaged in a sort of biochemical dance (if you will excuse a student’s romanticism,) mutually sensing and reacting to each other, and putting out chemical and physical signals in a coordinated fashion to successfully live together. This actually presents many problems: the bacteria must be plentiful, but stay contained; they must survive exposure to the squid’s immune system, but not be allowed to infect the squid as a whole. Other bacteria must be excluded from the crypts. The initial colonization must take place, with the bacteria finding the right place on the squid to enter and moving through the ducts of the light organ to its crypts. This process is of interest to molecular biology because it is a case where molecular signals between an endosymbiont and its host have been identified, leading to its use as a model system for the development of such symbioses in general.

I know, I know, you want to hear about the molecular biology, but it’s already the end of the article! Don’t worry – I’ll get to that in a dedicated post soon enough. It’s a complicated subject, and it’s far enough out of my area of knowledge that I’ll need a little time to learn about it before I can write about it. For now, thanks for reading, and stay curious!

For more info on the Bobtail squid-Vibrio symbiosis, check out this great page by J. Graf. Also, as always, I encourage you to find and read the studies I cited for yourself.

McFall-Ngai, M., & Montgomery, M. (1990). The Anatomy and Morphology of the Adult Bacterial Light Organ of Euprymna scolopes Berry (Cephalopoda:Sepiolidae) Biological Bulletin, 179 (3) DOI: 10.2307/1542325

Jones, B., & Nishiguchi, M. (2004). Counterillumination in the Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes Berry (Mollusca: Cephalopoda) Marine Biology, 144 (6), 1151-1155 DOI: 10.1007/s00227-003-1285-3