Translator: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
Hello and thank you.
I'm here today to talk a little bit about my lifelong interest
in the subject of animal minds
and most specifically whether it's possible for science, one day,
to quantify the fact that some animals at least have a sense of self-awareness.
The journey started for me at the age of about five, 45 years ago,
with the family cat Fifi.
Thank you for the, "Ah."
(Laughter)
She was a very engaging cat,
and I used to spend many hours chattering away to her quite happily
telling her all my hopes and dreams,
quite confident that one day she'd deign to reply.
My world was shattered when my older brother, Duncan,
who's wise in the world of science,
explained to me that there was no chance of her ever replying,
that cats are just basically stupid.
He said,
"There's nothing going on in Fifi's mind apart from food, stroke, like, dislike.
That's it.
No space for anything else at all."
I was devastated, I thought, "This can't be right.
Surely, Fifi has some internal thoughts of her own.
Surely, she has a will and an ability to reflect on her predicament, at least."
It got me thinking
and it's a thought that I've never let go of over the last 45 years.
A bit later on in my life, maybe as a 16, 17-year-old surly teenager,
I remember I was a punk-rocker.
I went to Brighton dolphinarium.
Very little impressed me in those days,
but I remember looking into the eye of a dolphin there
and getting a jolt that he was looking right back at me
with the same level of understanding, at least, as I had of myself.
It made me think
and reminded me of this idea of the inner lives of animals.
Now, the key word there is "punk-rocker."
Yeah, spiky hair, everything - those were the days.
But I was a very difficult child to teach,
I was expelled from school several times.
And I was very happily working on building sites
in my late teens and early twenties.
One day, I picked up a copy of The Times newspaper,
and on about page seven,
there was an article by a Russian scientist called Dr. Tscharkofsy.
He'd been doing some experiments using dolphins as midwives in human births.
So the idea was that women were lying in the shadows;
the dolphin would echolocate using its sonar on the embryo;
when the baby was born, it nudged up from the water onto the mother's breast.
The most amazing thing to me, though, was that apparently, years later,
when the children that the dolphins had assisted in the birth of
returned to the sea,
the dolphins were able to pick them out of a crowd
of other individuals that they'd never met before.
I remember just being absolutely amazed by this.
I thought,
"This should be on page one of The Times, it shouldn't be buried on page seven,
this is really quite interesting."
This is something that suddenly actually impressed me.
So, I looked at my CV,
I noticed I only had three O levels, so I decided to go back to college.
I did some open university courses.
I went to University College London, studied psychology,
and in my third year I did my dissertation on the evolution of dolphin intelligence.
I then did a master's degree at Imperial College,
in science communication.
And in the same year, there was a national debate,
or an international debate, about the ethics of whaling.
The International Whaling Commission
had just granted Japan limited whaling rights again.
And The Independent newspaper published a leading article
which said that, to that date, there was no known scientific evidence
to tell the difference in mental capacity between a cow and a dolphin.
Therefore, if we could eat cows, we could eat dolphins.
And I remember thinking,
there is a way to tell the difference between these two things.
I'd just done a 10,000-word dissertation on the subject.
So, I was able to produce this article, my first ever piece,
for the science page of The Independent,
explaining the difference between a whale and a cow.
It basically comes down to an encephalization quotient,
or an EQ,
which is a measure of an animal's brain size to its body mass.
Basically, a cow, or a cat, or a seal, has an EQ of 1,
which is just enough brain to run the animal,
nothing left over for any kind of abstract thought or reasoning.
So basically, Duncan, my brother, was right, cats are quite stupid.
But dolphins are not stupid.
Dolphins have an EQ of 5.4,
they have five times more brain capacity
than they need to run a basic aquatic animal.
They live in social groups,
so it makes perfect sense that some of this extra brain power
is used for understanding the relationships within the groups
and possibly reflecting on themselves.
There's a very important scientific paper
called "The Evolutionary Advantage of Being Stupid,"
which shows that no animal carries extra brain tissue
because it's very hard to feed.
Therefore, if there is any extra brain, it must be doing something.
The subject of this piece was exactly that,
speculating that the thing that they must be doing is reflecting on themselves
able to suffer if you harpoon them, etc.
I published the article
and I was quite confident that it would be taken up by animal rights movements
and the international scientists
and the International Whaling Commission themselves,
but total silence, nothing, no effect at all.
So, I found myself as very highly qualified
to write about the subject of animal intelligence,
but not very much else.
So, I became a science writer
and traveled the world as well, doing adventure travel stories.
I badgered the editor of a glossy magazine for two years
and I managed to get him to send me on a trip to Florida
to swim with dolphins.
I argued that it was a lifestyle thing,
everybody wanted to swim the dolphins,
everyone said it was a life-changing experience.
And after two years of badgering, he agreed and he sent me on this story.
That is me being towed along by dolphins.
And it was a life-changing experience for me,
not in any transcendental or mystical way,
but because I got to see dolphins behaving close up.
What struck me most was that there was a particular dolphin
at the Dolphin Research Center, in Florida Keys, called Stanley,
who seemed to be using humor.
Now, before we went in the water,
there were about six of us members of the public
and a couple of journalists
being briefed by a lady who clearly didn't like members of the public or journalists.
These were her dolphins
and we were a necessary evil that brought income to the dolphin program.
So, she was briefing us very strictly.
She had a whistle.
She liked blowing it when we got out of line
and certainly when the dolphins got out of line.
She was telling us what we could and couldn't do.
Now, Stanley was swimming back and forth,
one eye out in the water like this,
blowhole on the water line just looking at us.
Halfway through the briefing, he got a bit bored,
and with his blowhole he went like this.
(Laughter)
Of course we all started to laugh.
The lady didn't like it at all. She blew her whistle, "Stanley, going."
Stanley moved off a bit - like this.
Of course we laughed, it was quite funny.
Discipline was breaking down, though.
The lady got more crossed, we could see this.
Stanley moved further away.
"Stanley, don't come back," she's going like this, blowing her whistle.
Stanley right from the far side of the lagoon - like this.
It was extremely funny.
Stanley went under the waves and that was it.
We thought, "We've now got to be good,
otherwise she's not going to let us go in with the dolphins."
So, we all stood like naughty schoolchildren,
and after about 30 seconds or a minute,
we all got up gathering our composure again.
We heard this other noise
from right underneath the floating dock where we were standing -
like this.
It was cripplingly funny, we were crying with laughter.
And Stanley knew he'd overdone it.
(Laughter)
He didn't come back up to take a bow.
(Laughter)
He'd just gone.
But I was thinking, "Why did he do that? This is really really funny.
Under the water there somewhere is a little animal with a great big brain
trying to tell us something, he's trying to communicate with us.
Why? What's in it for him?"
Conventional science would say,
"Stimulus response. He's got no internal thoughts.
He just associates human laughter with getting fish."
And I thought, "Well, yeah, maybe,
but he's never once been fed fish by a visitor.
He's only ever been fed fish by the lady with the whistle.
No chance of a fish from this lady, now, she's really crossed.
Why did he do that?"
He was using humor.
So I went back home, I wrote my piece and I thought about humor.
I looked up all the literature I could find on the psychology of humor.
Humor is a very interesting subject.
If you can tell a joke to someone, if you can make someone laugh,
you're instantly advertising that you're quite intelligent,
that you have empathy, you have social skills,
and you can manipulate the internal reality of other people's expectations.
That's what humor is all about, it's when two different worlds collide.
It's a carefully constructed subject
where you're deliberately playing with other people's mental states.
One of the most important things about humor is that it means
that you have to have a theory of mind in order to do it.
You have to understand other people have expectations
that you're then confounding.
And humor, when it takes place, can be measured with a brain scan.
If you wear an EEG headgear -
it's basically like an electric shower cap with, you know, electrodes coming off it.
Every time you experience the understanding of a joke,
that sudden realization creates exactly the same brain waves
throughout the population,
it's called a P3N4.
So, you get a joke like:
Horse goes into a bar, barman says, "Why the long face?"
You think, "Long face... Ah, long face!"
So you get P3N4 as you realize like that.
There's no other thing apart from humor that will create this P3N4.
So suddenly, I had a plan.
I had to tell a dolphin a joke,
(Laughter)
whilst it's wearing an EEG headgear.
(Laughter)
What could possibly go wrong?
(Laughter)
I persuaded Penguin that this was a good idea for a book.
They commissioned it and I promptly moved to France to write the book.
It was all going quite well, until in about 2005 my father died.
And my old family decided to regroup and have a good old think.
And logically, obviously, the next step was to buy a broken-down zoo
to save 250 animals who were going to be euthanized.
Now, I was in favor of this
because it was obviously the right thing to do.
And possibly, at some point, we could acquire intelligent animals
and I could sit and play with them and pretend I was working.
But it turned out to be a massive distraction
from my overall plan of exploring animal intelligence.
Being a journalist, I naturally wrote a book about the subject,
called "We Bought a Zoo,"
which was made into a film of the same name.
So, Matt Damon is myself.
Obviously, you can see the striking, striking physical resemblance.
(Laughter)
It was extremely distracting.
Here we are, my family, my little children as they were then,
on the set with Matt Damon, in 2011 or so, when it was being filmed.
My children interestingly pushed past Damon and Scarlett Johansson
to play with Crystal, the monkey, who's there sitting on my shoulder,
who they recognized from "Night at the Museum II."
(Laughter)
The allure of animals.
It's brought other distractions
like the fabulously funny celebrity Ross Noble,
who came to the zoo to do some filming.
Here he's impersonating Scarlett Johansson in the restaurant, next to a poster.
(Laughter)
Cripplingly funny man.
(Laughter)
But anyway, I didn't lose track of the fact
that I'm actually all about exploring animal intelligence,
and I've been reading up over these last few years
in between other stuff on particularly Koko, the gorilla.
Now, Koko is a hand-reared gorilla who's been taught sign language,
American Sign Language to the Deaf,
from a very early age.
At the age of three or four, she had 290 signs;
250 signs would have qualified her to get into primary school.
She's also got -
She's now got a vocabulary of about 800, 900,
which is about normal for a fluent deaf signer
because you have ten or so different modulators for each sign.
So she can say "alligator" or "alligator."
So she has an enormously large vocabulary.
Now, Koko also makes up her own signs.
So she completely understands the concept.
She doesn't like the sign for "brush" so she decided to call it a scratch comb.
Many of these.
She can also talk about her mental states.
She can say, "Koko is sad," "Koko is happy," Koko was sad."
Sorry, this is a picture of Koko with her little pet.
All Ball is the good name of this little kitten,
and Koko was very sad when All Ball was unfortunately run over by a truck.
And she can still refer to that incident in the past tense, "Koko was sad."
So, she understands that she has mental states
and she can communicate this to other people.
Also, Koko has a sense of humor.
There was an anecdote of a researcher who asked Koko
if she could touch her nose, "Koko touch her nose,"
"touch her mouth," "touch her mouth," "touch her ear," no problem.
The researcher gets the video camera out and says, "Okay, Koko, touch your nose."
She goes like this.
(Laughter)
"Koko, touch your mouth."
(Laughter)
"Koko, touch your eye."
(Laughter)
So in the end the researcher got frustrated and said,
"Koko naughty gorilla."
Koko signs, "Koko funny gorilla,"
(Laughter)
deliberately making a joke.
Unfortunately, this is inadmissible to science.
This is all probably stimulus response in some anecdotal hearsay way
and will never affect the rights of animals.
But I'm not giving up.
Now, I'm a zoo director, I have access to other people's primates.
I don't have any big-brained, intelligent primates of my own,
but last week I was able to deliver some touch screens
donated by Panasonic for a research program
involving chimpanzees in a rehabilitation facility in Holland.
Now, these chimpanzees have never seen touch screens before,
but it's well known that they can actually engage with them.
And at the moment it's for enrichment and stimulation,
but I'm hoping
that ultimately we'll be able to build a research program
based on the chimpanzees' direct interaction with these screens.
One of the things I particularly want to do
is to play them clips that they find amusing,
if I can find a clip that chimpanzees definitely find amusing,
and I can get one of them to sit with an EEG headgear on.
(Laughter)
This is basically a P3N4.
So far, there's never been one elicited from any species
other than a human.
I've got a clip in mind, actually.
There's a group of orangutans at Singapore Zoo
who are particularly friendly.
Apparently, they play a game with the visitors
where they hang from a post, a visitor hangs from a post,
and you try to grab a banana off the table with your foot.
Obviously the visitors have a lot of trouble with this.
And when the visitors made a complete fool of themselves,
the orangutan grabs it, peels it, eats it, all with its feet.
Everybody laughs.
I'm sure that the Dutch chimps will find that clip extremely funny.
(Laughter)
Then we're going to get a P3N4 from a non-human species.
When that happens,
I'm going to go and lie down on the beach, put my feet up.
I'm never going do this type of work ever again in my life
and let other people sort out
the scientific and moral and legal implications of that.
But I'd like to end on this slide
which shows the incredible wonder on the face of this elephant,
who is taken by his keepers to the aquarium section of the zoo
to meet the sea lion for the first time, just for some stimulation and enrichment.
It's evident to us in the room it's experiencing a sense of wonder,
but unfortunately there is no scientific evidence
to say that's what's going on.
And so that elephant is legally classed as a property and chattels.
It doesn't have any basic rights.
So -
that's evident to us there's no evidence in actual science,
which is going to be the rest of my life's work,
which I'm hoping to achieve possibly in the next 18 months.
So, thank you very much for listening.
(Applause) (Cheers)