Ideas - Do Dogs Feel Guilt? Animal Cognition Discoveries

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Animals — what on earth are they thinking? A panel of scientists explore the notion of animal cognition from what your dog means when it wags its tail, to the incredible problem-solving skills of crows, as part of the Aspen Ideas Festival. *This episode originally aired on November 5, 2021.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. I went.

Dog. I dog we friend. Yes! That is Bunny the Talking Dog of TikTok, a grey and white sheepadoodle with 7.1 million followers. Since the spring of 2020, Bunny has been amazing her TikTok fans and the scientists at the University of California, San Diego. She uses her paws to press buttons to speak words. Scritches now.

Scritches now. Okay. One. Scritches.. Scritches now. Okay. One. Scritches. Okay, come here. Questions about dog cognition might be as old as humanity's relationship with the animal, but for scientists, it's really a 21st century idea. Psychology Today magazine points to an exponential increase in dog cognition studies since the late 1990s. In this episode, we're playing excerpts from the Aspen Ideas Festival, a week-long event held in

Aspen, Colorado. We'll hear experts on the latest research into animal cognition, beginning with dogs, and then we'll get to the birds. This is a conversation moderated by Ross Anderson, deputy editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He's on stage with Alexandra Horowitz, Brian Hare, Gus, and Maggie. The first two are canine scientists. The second two are canines. Tell us, relative to other animals,

how well do we know the inside of a dog's mind? Well, I wrote a book called Inside of a Dog, so I should be the expert on that, but what I would say that still is a lot we don't know. I mean, the last 20 years have seen a huge rise in dog cognition studies. Both Brian and I do that kind of study where we're looking at what the dog knows or understands. But it's really the last 20 years in psychological history that we've been narrowing in on the dog. Primates got their time.

Dolphins we've investigated. So there's still a lot we don't know about what the full perceptual experience is, what the cognitive experience is, but it's changed and is changing daily. So I'm really excited to be on a panel with two dogs. I just have to say that. It's very helpful. It's because we don't have a panel of two experts. We have four experts.

These guys obviously are the real experts at what it is to be like a dog. And I think it highlights the challenge. The challenge we have is that our job is how can we play games? How can we measure what's going on inside a dog's mind that's potentially unobservable? I'm pretty sure he's trying to communicate to me that he wants a treat. You guys read that. But it is absolutely the case, as Alexandra said, that 20 years ago, dogs were not at the top of the charts of what people were interested in studying. People thought that domesticated animals were sort of impacted by humans, and we want to understand what wild animals do and how wild animals think and behave. But it ends up over the last 20 years

because, first of all, dogs have more jobs than ever. They're very busy people. They're, you know, windsurfing or whatever. But they're also doing things like finding bombs and helping people with disabilities. And so there's been not only intellectual interest in how the dog minds work, but a real need to understand how can we

better work with dogs and place them in the jobs that they might be best at solving the problems they're going to confront. One of my staff writers wrote a story last year about this new emerging research into the initial domestication of dogs, which is thought to have occurred between 15,000 to 25,000 years ago and may have even happened at two separate locations. The kind of standard just-so story of this is that dogs sort of like creep to the edge of campfires looking for scraps, and then slowly were sort of ingratiated into the human world.

That's how I understood it. But Brian has told me that there's a new and much more gross theory that I'd like him to tell you about. So, I mean, really the story that often people tell is that humans domesticated dogs, that dogs are sort of our creation. We created them. We're in control. Yeah, we're in control. We created them in our own image. And so it is backwards, right? If you spell it backwards, it's God.

So what I would suggest to you is that actually instead our best evidence is that wolves domesticated themselves and they were attracted to humans. 50 to 25,000 years ago something remarkable happened as humans started living at higher density. We did what we still do today with great alacrity is produce a lot of garbage. And if you're a wolf, you have the choice of either going in and foraging off that garbage and scavenging, or you can go get kicked in the face and fail at chasing your quarry

that you're competing for against a human super predator that has projectile weapons. So I think some wolves made a pretty smart decision and they started foraging off of human scraps and scavenging. And that set up a selective process that led to dog domestication. But the funny part, I think this is what Ross is getting to, is in the scraps are also the story of your dog's attraction to feces. Because it ends up that probably human feces played a big substantial role in the domestication of wolves because think of human feces as like an energy bar for a wolf.

It's cooked. It's digested. it doesn't run away, and it has more protein than chicken. So we think that's one of the core pieces of explaining why we have dogs in our beds. Having taken us down this scatological route, I wanna bring it back to all the sweet feelings that we have towards dogs. Over the course of these many thousands of years, what may have begun as this transactional relationship for fecal matter has turned into something

that is actually, there's a different sort of biological connection between dogs and their human companions. I don't want to use the word owners. Can you guys tell me about that? Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things that the other, the behavioral component that came along with this attraction to humans was that, that came along with this attraction to humans was that the dogs and humans as species had started to intertwine, and there'd been lots of interesting results with that. The way they began to intertwine

was probably that the less fearful wolves wound up being the one getting closer to humans, getting that nutrient source, getting some protection, maybe getting to live a little longer into adulthood, getting to mate more. And over generations, what happened is this kind of, they selected themselves, or we began selecting them for lack of fearfulness of us,

sort of friendliness toward us. And now what we have is this uber-friendly species, right, who's very responsive to and sensitive to us and doesn't run away, as other predators do, right? They see us as a competitive predator, and so they flee. We fight each other. Dogs got into this niche

where they were less fearful, more friendly. And then there's this interesting hormonal correlate of this, which we're now seeing, which is that, you know, we look at a dog and we have a feeling of great satisfaction and pleasure and it turns out there's actually a hormone oxytocin which i'm sure many of you know about which is billed as a kind of love hormone but it's one something that is produced in the brain when a parent you know sees and bonds with a newborn it's produced i think to encourage that bonding because otherwise you have a newborn. It's produced, I think, to encourage that bonding

because otherwise you have a newborn and they're screaming and you don't want to spend all the time that you need to to actually take care of that human. That first three months is tough. Into adulthood. Well, the same thing happens with dogs now. We look at dogs, we pet dogs, and we get the surge of oxytocin.

So we're getting the feeling, they've kind of hitchhiked onto our feeling towards our infants and they've gotten into that niche. And they get the oxytocin rush too. So with that eye contact that they make with us, which is so special among non-human animals. I mean, you don't want to stare in the face of wolves, by the way. There's a little advice. Even though you love to stare in the face of wolves, by the way. There's a little advice. Even though you love to gaze in the eyes of dogs, don't do it to a wolf. That's a threat, right?

Dogs change from that. And then that's the kind of material on which this hormone can be produced. I want to ask a little bit about how we might be misinterpreting the behavior of our own dogs. And I'll just give you an example. I don't have a dog now, but I've spent much of my life having a dog. And whenever I would come home, I had a boxer. And you do the normal dog thing, right? Like run to the door.

Boxers do this thing where they kidney bean, you know? Like their whole body sort of bends, because they're so excited. They jump up and try to lick your face. And I had interpreted this as being like, you know, a complete display of affection for me personally from my dog. And I'm understanding that that might be a partial illusion. It's funny because a lot of what my research is, and Brian and I are both interested in dogs, we just come at it different, slightly different ways. And mine is largely about like these things

we think we know about dogs that can be tested. They may or may not be true. So one of the things people don't want to hear is that their dog is not greeting them with affection at the door. I'm not going to tell you that, because I do think that's an affectionate greeting. That's the reunion of this social group, right? You've been away, and now you're back. Absolutely, that's affection and love and excitement. It's also probably something else. There's this thing that happens, and maybe your dog gives you kisses. I'm not sure if that ever happened with your kidney bean. And we call it kisses, right?

Dog is licking your face. It's affectionate, and some people endure that, and other people don't. But if you do, it feels very affectionate. But I tried to explain it by looking to their near relative, gray wolves, and looking at what that behavior means among wolves. It's very typical behavior among wolves. When wolves leave the pack and they're hunting, they return to the pack, and they're mobbed by the other wolves who all lick around the face, all excitedly greeting the wolf,

and that prompts the hunter to regurgitate some of the food that they've just consumed. And that's how the pups get food. So the kiss definitely has a kind of request for whatever we need. It is a loving gesture. But they're hoping for a gift. Right. What would happen if you were to just spontaneously vomit?

I think they'd be super fine with that. Finally. They would be like, they finally understood. Ryan, can you think of other dog behaviors that are sort of commonly misunderstood? Well, I think one of the really exciting things in the last 10 years is people have been looking at how people perceive dogs and what are the sort of types of cues that they're picking up on when they're judging dogs for everything from how smart they are to whether they experience pain. People, if you show people pictures of dogs and you ask them, just tell me, you know, is this dog in this picture smart or not? And what they don't know is

that the pictures have been chosen very carefully so the dogs vary by the length of their nose. And it ends up that the main thing that determines whether somebody will say a dog is smart or not is really the length of their nose. And so many of you are wondering now, well, what would it be? What kind of nose is the smart nose? So people actually tend to implicitly judge dogs with medium-sized nose to be the smart nose. So people actually think, tend to implicitly judge dogs with medium-sized nose

to be the most intelligent. So if you have an Afghan hound nose that's very long or a French bulldog pug-type nose, people just, for some reason, think those dogs are less intelligent. So that's one. The other one,

we did a study in our research group just trying to understand how people perceive pain in dogs and do different dog breeds experience pain differently. There's absolutely no evidence that any dog experiences pain differently at all. They have the same exact nervous system, et cetera. But when you ask people, are they extremely sensitive to pain or not? The number one thing that, first of all, there's tremendous variance in people's responses. Some people think some breeds experience pain and are very sensitive to pain.

Other breeds do not. And the number one variable that explains whether people think dogs experience pain intensely is how big they are. So large dogs are less sensitive to pain, according to just the general public, and small dogs are much more sensitive to pain. There's no evidence that that's the case. There's a study mapping out the muscles of the dog face. There's a muscle called the AU101 muscle. There's sort of a baseline rate that dogs use this muscle, and it's what's responsible for this sort of guilty, cute look that's irresistible, that, you know, oh my God, I didn't do it, that look. And when dogs are in shelters, some dogs tend to make that look a lot, and some dogs tend to not make that look,

and that explains the rate at which dogs are adopted out. Dogs that make the guilty look at a very high level are adopted out much faster than dogs who don't make that cute look. So people are judging dogs using the same psychology that we use to judge each other. And so some of the ways that we are categorizing dogs sometimes don't fit with what's really going on in their behavior. Yeah. I really, I mean, that's what interests me so much is that we make these judgments about dogs based on appearance.

Of course, breeds were selected for specific appearances. Partly for function, but when we started doing specific breeding, it was about dogs that looked the way we wanted them to look. We still have a very strong visceral reaction to types of dogs. That affects how we're thinking about them. Interests me as a scientist because I want to say, oh, we think that dog looks guilty, and then we are imputing all sorts of things to them, like that they knew what was right or wrong in the house, and then they're trying to enact revenge on us when we've been gone a long time, right, or feel so sorry.

And as a scientist, I think, well, that's kind of an empirical question. I want to test, in fact, before I say I know that the dog feels guilty or not, whether they do. Brian, give me a sense for how, I know you work with law enforcement and military groups who have these very close relationships with very highly skilled dogs, or highly skilled in our world. Obviously, all dogs are highly skilled. How is it challenging for handlers to toggle back and forth between kind of the human perceptual world, whether that's visual or otherwise, and the olfactory world? Right. So

that's exactly right. So wild dogs have this incredible olfactory experience that's probably beyond what you or I experience. They are very visual creatures as well, as you know. And while their vision is different from ours, they still prioritize vision in many contexts. So, for instance, if they're searching for something, those of you who've been hunting, or if you've just had your dog playing fetch and they're searching for something, they generally will do a visual scan first. Maybe they see the object and then go pick it up. If they don't see it, then they're going to rely on the olfactory information but the other thing dogs will do when they're searching for something especially if a human's involved is they'll ask you they'll say where is it did you tell me like

like you threw it so so my old dog growing up would turn around and start barking at me instead of searching and then i would gesture and he would go orbit in the direction that I'd pointed and he'd generally find the thing. But when you're searching for IEDs and you're walking through a field in Afghanistan or Iraq, you actually want the dog to prioritize olfactory information. You do not want the dog to prioritize visual information or to be using you as the information to then indicate that there's something there. Because there's a really strong bond between handler and dog, but if the dog is trying to make you happy and get the reward and have an interaction with you and they're referring to you too much, then you're in trouble. And so is the dog. So that's

one of the challenges in our research is how do you find the dog who is really excited and has the drive to search and wants to prioritize their olfactory, that full factory information and not rely so much on you in that context. And when you work with service dogs, it's the exact opposite. So the same dog and on the same cognitive test where a military working dog would look unintelligent, those same results in a service dog context would be brilliant because that's exactly the dog you're looking for. I guess it's obvious from the story you told about throwing the ball for your childhood dog that they remember the immediate past. They remember

that you threw the ball, for instance, even if they don't see the ball in the landscape, they're hunting for it. What about sort of deeper episodic memories? Like could we, for those of you that maybe have rescued dogs, is it possible that they remember kind of the day that they were rescued by their human companion?

So I'm a boring scientist, which means when I answer a question like that, I first put on my science hat and I think about, what's the empirical paper that might address that? I can take that hat off and just tell you my personal opinion. Let's go for that. Of course they remember. Okay, but now I'm up here because I'm a scientist,

so I'm going to put that hat on and tell you, okay, what's the paper that I can touch? And there is a beautiful study looking at, not you, Gus, what's the paper that I can touch? And there is a beautiful study looking at, not you, Gus, looking at other dogs. And mother and puppies were separated for two years, and then they were brought back together, and the question was, could the puppies use either olfactory information or visual information

to identify their mother, and actually even their siblings as well? The answer was the puppies who were reunited with their mother mother they could identify her based on what she looked like two years later and on olfactory information the interesting thing was that they forgot their siblings understandable unless unless they had been raised with another sibling then they could recognize the other siblings so so do they have long-term memory where they can remember and encode information for years at a time? I mean, many of you have observations where you're like, of course they can. And there is experimental

evidence to suggest that's the case. I know that both of you are dog owners or dog companions. And I wanted to ask you how your research has sort of, what has it illuminated for you as to your own dogs and their behaviors around the house? What have you learned? So I have two dogs. I have a dog who's probably around the age of Gus here, and I think studying psychology and cognition in dogs has sort of helped me understand that just like in humans there's a life history you start young and you your cognition develops and then you sort of have your you know full wonderful adult life and then you can have cognitive decline and I have an older dog and my dog I wouldn't have really

thought about it I certainly didn't think about it with my older dog and my dog, I wouldn't have really thought about it. I certainly didn't think about it with my childhood dog. And I really, like, you know, I can get upset when I think about the things I should have done for my dog as he was older as my childhood dog that I certainly do for my dog now, now that I know that, you know, he's 11 years old. He doesn't understand the world the way that he used to. He's not remembering things the way that he used to. He's not going to be able to make the inferences he used to be able to make. And so that's really helpful too. The other thing is just knowing that young dogs, like young children, they don't understand everything. And so a lot of the reason that dogs are returned to

shelters, a lot of the time when the human-dog bond doesn't work, it's because some puppy is showing a problem behavior. Often, I think a lot of these problems are going to be things where people don't realize what the dog doesn't understand yet or what's yet to develop. And so that's always helpful. We're involved in raising young dogs right now, and that's been helpful to keep in mind as you have puppies around you. So I think that's the helpful lesson probably. I mean, my work also, I bring it home, right? Like my dogs, Finnegan and Upton, who I live with,

they're just poor dogs. They're under constant scrutiny. I'm just always looking at them. You get a lot of hypotheses based on just observing behavior all the time, full time. And I'm always staring at them. One of the things that I started thinking about with olfaction is, how can I increase just the olfactory world of this dog?

Because I know that since we're in a visual world and we don't emphasize it, they'll just go along with what we do. But I brought one of my dogs to nose work classes. I don't know if anybody does scent games around here, which are basically like the training for a working dog. I know. And where they just try to find things by smell. Dogs are great at this, and they love it.

They start shaking with excitement. And you could do this at home, just like hide a little treat somewhere in the house and get them to go find it. First it's a simple game, and then when they get the game, they realize they can do this. And they won't just find everything in your house and upturn it. They'll know that there's a time when you can play this game. So I really want to indulge that. And I watch my dogs and see how can I let them sniff more? How can I give them something to do when they're alone at home all day because they're so social?

What can I do to enrich their lives? And so I'm always trying things out with them because they're my available guys. And the bond that I have with them, the reality of that, I mean, that's one of the things we really probe as scientists is the makeup of that bond and how we can improve it. I suspect you all might have some questions. But before I turn to you, I want to ask one more question. My wife is in the audience today, and I won't embarrass her by pointing her out. She's the nervous one. Me and my son and my daughter have unionized against her to try to convince her to get a dog.

And so I was hoping that you could. You're bringing out the guns. Yeah, no, now that I have you here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I said she's nervous. I was hoping that you could tell me sort of, you know, we talked about self-domestication of dogs earlier, that dogs sort of wormed their way into our lives. And maybe you could tell me on a macro level, like as a species, but also as individuals, what dogs do for us. I mean, my feeling is that the thing that dogs are doing for us as a species and as individuals is that they really increase empathy.

You know, they are so giving to us to us. They're not judgmental. They're always happy to see us in whatever funky mood we're in. They give us all this love. But it does allow us, their privilege of their company kind of obliges us to try to see the perspective of someone else and create a good life for that dog and for others, right? And it's a way to increase empathy for other people. It's a way to increase empathy for other non-human animals who aren't as charismatic, but we sort of have a responsibility for as a species. So I think that's a great ambassador animal to have in your house. Certainly, there is evidence that suggests that folks who have dogs tend to exercise more, which is one of the most important covariates of explaining longevity in life.

I certainly am excited about new data suggesting that veterans with PTSD are aided tremendously when they have a companion animal. Because of the oxytocin loop that forms, it actually is antagonistic against cortisol. And it also is heavily involved with serotonin and the serotonin system. And so we know that it's having a good impact on folks in that way. And then when it comes to children, just to echo what Alexandra was saying, with my own five and seven-year-old and our two dogs, it is wonderful to have such a fun responsibility of feeding those dogs every night. such a fun responsibility of feeding those dogs every night. And they have to think about someone else that they love that you can really needle them because it's like, you know, come on, you got to feed the dog and allow them to model what it's like to be someone else. So window into not just the mind of other animals,

but the window into just others for children. And it's why, you know, I would not raise children without a dog. Of course not. Who would? I'm so dead when I meet your wife. Alexandra Horowitz and Brian Hare. They were speaking with Ross Anderson at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2018. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM,

in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films, and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper.

And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. The Aspen Institute is a non-profit organization with a campus in Aspen, Colorado. Its flagship event is the Aspen Ideas Festival, and that's where we're taking you in this episode. To a pair of festival events recorded before the pandemic, both focused on extraordinary developments in the field of animal cognition. We turn now from the genius of dogs to the genius

of birds, and especially crows. On stage now, Alexander Taylor, a bird scientist from New Zealand, in conversation with the nature writer Jennifer Ackerman. Her books include The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way. Their event is moderated by Flora Lichtman, host of the podcast Every Little Thing. Jennifer, I want to start with you. When people use the term bird brain, it's not typically a compliment. So has our perspective on bird cleverness, is it shifting right now? Yes. So the misperception of birds as stupid really is rooted in a misunderstanding of the nature and anatomy of the bird brain. So we used to think that bird brains were so small and primitive,

they were really capable of only the simplest mental processes. And most of them, instinctive birds, were basically thought of as pecking automatons. Well, now we know that that is not true. Birds can think logically and reason on par with young children. They can solve complex problems they've never seen before. They can make and use their own tools. They can count. They can understand basic principles of physics, like cause and effect. They can communicate in ways that resemble language, and they can pass along cultural traditions, whether it's modes of song or styles of toolmaking. And birds do all of this with a brain so small it could fit inside a nut.

So the question is, how is this possible? question is, how is this possible? Well, we've known for a long time that the brain size is not the sole or even the main measure of intelligence or the main indicator of intelligence. And the truth is that birds have large brains for their body size. Many birds do. It's just as we do. We have large brains for our body size. It's called relative brain size. And moreover, what really matters in the intelligent brain is the density of neurons. And very recently, a Brazilian neuroscientist named Susana Eculano Uzell counted the number of neurons in the brains of songbirds and parrots. And what she discovered was a real surprise. Bird brains have twice as many neurons as similar-sized primate brains, and four times as many neurons as similar-sized mammal brains. Now, those neurons are organized in a

different way in a bird brain. That's one new piece of understanding. Our neurons are organized into layers, like our cortical layers, like the layers of a lasagna. And the neurons in bird brains are organized into clusters like the bulbs of garlic cloves. But the bottom line is that what we've come to understand is this. In the human forebrain, 75% of our cortex is devoted to complex cognition. Now, that's things like working memory, planning, reasoning, thinking. And now we know that 75% of the bird brain, far from being primitive, is actually capable of this kind. It's a cortex-like material that's capable of this kind of complex cognition. So birds, in fact, have cognitive skills that are in many ways

comparable to our primate relatives and less so to their reptilian ones. Alex, you study, like, I feel like they're like the brainiacs of the bird world. They're often trotted out as the really smart birds. Absolutely. Introduce us to the New Caledonian crows. So the New Caledonian crows are a bit of an oddity. So until recently, they were the only species of crow that we knew that both used and made tools. We've just discovered in the last couple of years that the Hawaiian crow also does as well. And this is just really rare. We don't see any other species of crow doing it

in general. Both tool use and tool manufacture are pretty rare across the animal kingdom. And it's not just that the crows use and make tools. When my colleagues Gavin Hunt first started really paying attention to these crows back in the early 1990s, he kept on seeing them fly around New Caledonia. They weren't just holding sticks. They were holding what looked like sticks with little hooks on their end. And the thing that is really surprising about that is that hooks are kind of a human invention. They might seem quite simple to our modern minds, but not even chimpanzees have invented hooks. And when you look at the archaeological record, you see that hooks only turn up around 100,000 years ago.

around 100,000 years ago. And yet for some reason, here we have this kind of small crow on a couple of islands in the Pacific carving wooden hooks. Are they carved? Are they bent? What they do is, so if you imagine like a junction between two branches, so the crows will chop off one end of the branch here, and then they will carve that junction. They'll take away bark, they'll take away a bit of the the wood and they'll turn the the junction into a functioning hook so it really is in what we term uh imposing three-dimensional form onto a natural material so

this is what we term as uh tool crafting and the only other species that show any type of tool crafting uh ourselves orangutans and chimpanzees but it's only the New Caledonian crows that have gone so far as to make hooks. What are they fishing for? Great question. These grubs, they're called verdobancoul in New Caledonia. They're about the size of your finger. Not particularly tasty if you

eat them yourself, but the crows absolutely love them. And what they're doing is making little holes in big rod and logs, and then they're essentially fishing for these grubs. They're trying to hook the side of their body with their hook and get the food out. Have you seen new Caledonian crows use tools? Well, I have in Alex's aviary set up, but one thing to mention about those grubs, I think, is that they're a super, super rich food source. So they're really worth inventing a tool for.

Yeah, they're super high in protein. Right. So what are you looking at in your aviary? What are you testing for? So we've been really focused on trying to understand how the crows think, and in particular if they have any kind of specialized intelligence because of these really rare tool-making abilities. So one of the kind of

leading hypotheses for how we got smart is the technical intelligence hypothesis. And it really is that our tools in some way made us smart. And we think that maybe it helped with inhibitory control, with planning and these kind of things. But it's really hard to test that. We don't have a time machine to go back and kind of replay evolution and figure out the story of how our minds evolved. This is like a chicken and egg thing. it's a little bit right exactly are we smart because are we smart and therefore made tools or did we make tools and definitely became smart right absolutely because we could have become smart because of like our social environment instead and then done the toy use so the crows are an amazing model species to test this with because we can go and we know they're not particularly

social but they are you know really amazing tool. So what we're trying to do is really understand their minds, understand how they think, and then we could compare their minds to those of other birds. We can try and see if there are differences there. But it's a really hard job because actually understanding how any animal thinks is one that is tricky, to say the least. It's taken a long time already. Yes. Are there other examples of bird behavior that help us get into the minds of birds, Jennifer? Yeah, there are lots of examples. I mean, one that comes to mind is bird song, which we're all so beautifully subject to. So bird song is, birds learn their songs the way that humans learn language. And in fact,

Charles Darwin called bird song the nearest analogy to human language. And he was really right about that. The similarities are just astonishing. Birds learn their songs by listening to a tutor or a model. Then they imitate that tutor or model, and then they practice, practice, practice. Does that mean you can hear them messing up? Absolutely. Baby birds make a mess of it. They have what's called sub-song, which is equivalent to our baby babble. And they're just shooting out random sounds to hear their own voices. to our baby babble. And they're just shooting out random sounds, you know, to hear their own voices. And they begin to put the pieces together. And it's really an astonishing process. And it's called vocal learning. And it's very rare in the animal world. But it's a really great analogy to

learning human language. And once those birds have learned their songs, they're incredibly precise about singing them. Because it's actually the female they're trying to please, or in some cases they're trying to establish territory. They want their song to sound good. And so that first stage of the process, when they're listening, they're really forming in their minds a mental model of a great song. And I sort of think about like a beginning guitarist listening to a Rolling Stones version of Satisfaction. And he holds that in his mind while he makes terrible noises on his guitar trying to figure out how to play it. But that is what these birds are doing. They're holding a mental model of the song that they've learned from an adult tutor. And that is what they're shooting for.

And I'm really excited. Today, Alex actually just published a paper that suggests that New Caledonian Crows actually use a very similar strategy to make their tools and to pass along these toolmaking styles from generation to generation. Yeah, so we just had this. It's a paper they've been working on for a good three years or so now. But we were really curious. I mean, given how birds learn songs, we were really curious as to whether the same kind of mechanism could be explaining what looks like culture in the New Caledonian Chorus.

It's really quite amazing that you see these different tool designs across the island of New Caledonia, and it looks like they've increased in complexity so there's a suggestion that the crows have kind of like built from one generation to next in time in terms of the the designs of their tools over how long we don't know like i mean like so like um we know that the traditions are stable over the like the last kind of 20 or so years since they were first discovered. So there's definitely some stability there. But what you see that is really interesting

is some very simple designs of the southern tip of the island. And then you see a kind of intermediary form that's a little bit more complicated that goes a bit further north. And then there's this one kind of multi-step tool that's a lot more complicated that goes right up the island.

And the idea here is that what happened is the crows kind of like incrementally increased the complexity of their tools as they form this culture and then that allowed them then to kind of go into these harder to live in environments with these more sophisticated tools alex can i just jump in here for a second because um one of the really interesting things about these tools that he's talking about they're not the hook tools the stick hook tools they're made from pandanus leaves and the birds actually cut the shape of the tool out of the pandanus leaf and they do make it it's a very complicated process and they they're very methodical about it and they cut the whole shape out before they remove it from the leaf and so this was the idea i think of the that they had some kind of model in their heads before they actually crafted the tool.

Yeah, absolutely. So in order for this kind of pattern to be a kind of culture and to have improved, the kind of key thing is you need a mechanism. You need some way for the crows to be able to pass on these tool designs from off the ground. What do they look like before we eat? Are these like the steak knives? These are the steak knives. Yeah, this was your analogy. They're step tools.

They look a little... Oh, they're a little like a saw, but they have different levels. And I mean, they're incredibly complex. And the pandanus leaves have little barbs on the edges of them. And the crows use the barbs to latch onto these grubs to stick the the tool in so it's wide at the base narrows in to get into the hole and then has

these little sticky barbs on it yeah absolutely so it's like a kind of step kind of design that they cut into the leaves um and so what we wanted to try to figure out was okay if they if the crows don't have language and they don't appear to, if they don't teach their young, and we have no evidence for that, and also if they don't kind of copy each other's actions, how on earth have they got this culture? How are they passing ideas from one generation to the next? And this is where this kind of analogy to songbird learning coming in,

this idea that the crows could form a kind of mental template of their parents' tools, and then they could kind of reverse engineer their tools from that. They could then go to a pandanus leave and keep on trying to make something that looked like this mental template in their heads. And this is what we've just found some evidence for. We actually created an artificial situation where the crows had to put pieces of card into a food dispenser.

And the pieces of card either were large rectangles or they were small rectangles. And what we did was train the crows on what kind of tool worked. For some crows, that was a large rectangle first. Others, it was the small rectangle. And then just give them a sheet of card and look to see, with no other cues around them, if they could actually hold that image in their head

of the size and the shape of the tool that they needed to make and then go and rip that shape into the piece of card. and the shape of the tool that they needed to make, and then go and rip that shape into the piece of card. And these are what our results are showing. When we train them up that a big piece of card is needed for the dispenser, then they rip that piece of card into a big square. When they're told that a small square is needed, then they do the same thing. They go and they rip that piece of card into a small square. It's like a vending machine that only takes nickels or quarters. Yeah, exactly. Something like songbird learning is being used by the crows in order to kind of create this culture in their population. And then from that culture to actually slowly increase the complexity of their tools.

And one of the things that I was fascinated to learn is that New Caledonian crows have, the juveniles have a very long childhood. They have a long juvenile period when they're hopping along next to their parents, learning how, or watching, I guess, how to make tools. And there aren't ground predators on the island, so they can do this, you know, without fear of being eaten. And so they noodle around for a long time before they actually get good at making the tool. And I guess that the idea would be that they're just watching their parent make good tools, making some terrible tools themselves, and then eventually forming this template.

Yeah, so one of the things we really noticed that led us to this hypothesis is that the parents are really tolerant of the juveniles coming in and using their tools. So the parent can literally be holding its tool and it's just about to get the meat and then the juvenile will come rushing in, grab the tool, the meat drops back in the hole, and then it now starts playing around with the tool as well.

And the parents are happy with that. So what's happening there is the juveniles are getting huge amounts of experience of what their parents' tools look and feel like. And that's where we think they're forming this mental template over all these instances of stealing mom and dad's tools. And that then allows them later on

to kind of, you know, build their own tool to that same template. Alex, are crows going to be running the world in a million years? It would be pretty cool if they did, right? I mean, that would be pretty exciting. They'll be using ATMs. Yeah, you've seen the clip.

Yeah, there's a lovely clip online if you haven't seen it of a crow for some reason trying to put money into an ATM. I have no, in Japan, I have no idea what's going on. I don't know. I have no idea what's going on. But I don't know. I think it's so interesting that, you know, the more we look into their minds, the more it seems that there's a lot going on there and that if evolution put the right pressure on those minds, it seems hard to see, you know, why not, you know,

if they were pushed in that direction. But I think one of the things that sometimes we take for granted is, like, how much, like, our ecology our ecology like has pushed us towards technology and i talked about those stone tools earlier and how hitting one rock into another kind of initiated all technology in humans and that's because we started off with stones that we could bash into each other and you can really do a lot of different types of stone bashing and you can make more and more fine blades and there's lots of things that you can go with but when it comes to you know making tools out of sticks making tools out of leaves there's not of things that you can go with. But when it comes to making tools out of sticks,

making tools out of leaves, there's not that many levels of technology that you can take your tools to. So I do wonder if there's a bit of a cap there because there just isn't anywhere for these crows to go. Maybe we just haven't thought of it. Well, maybe they haven't thought of it as well as the problem. But then I think there has to be, for evolution,

there has to be some kind of selective pressure where you can continually make better and better tools that are helpful in your environment. Otherwise, you just won't develop a technology that's really sophisticated. Are there dumbos of the bird world? Yes, but it all depends on what your measurement is. So in the research for the genius of birds, I spoke with a scientist who invented one of the scales of intelligence for birds. And it was based on a bird's ability to innovate in the wild. And this was Louis Lefevre, who works at McGill University.

75 years worth of ornithological journals looking for reports of innovative, unusual, novel behavior in birds. And then he took all of these, he found 2,300 of them. He took them all. Will you give us a few? Because the anecdotes are incredible. Yeah. So some of the really clever behavior was an eagle in, eagles, a group of eagles in northern Arizona, and they found a cache of dead minnows under, frozen under the surface of a lake. And they, so they chipped holes in the ice, and then they jumped up and down on the surface of the lake, and it forced the dead minnows up through the holes, and then they feasted. And there, you know, there's so many examples. There is the house sparrows in New Zealand who learned how to open and close the door, open the doors of a cafeteria by hovering

in front of the sensor or sort of by leaning, sitting on it, then leaning over until their heads triggered the sensor and open the cafeteria doors and they'd go in and feed on the crumbs and stuff. And the observers who were watching this saw the birds do it, I think, 45 times, 16 times in 45 minutes. So they were having a lot of fun with this. So Louis collected all these anecdotes, and then he sorted them by bird family, and he came up with a scale of bird intelligence. So what were the birds at the top? No surprise corvids. Parrots, birds of prey, herons, gulls, and also some small birds, finches, house sparrows. At the bottom, turkeys, quails,

and the emu, the national bird of Australia, which caused a bit of a stir in Sydney when it was announced the next day. But yeah, so, but that's one measurement. And, you know, it's very possible that turkeys and quails and emus and other birds that look dim in this regard have other sorts of intelligence. Well, this is the interesting thing about trying to talk about bird intelligence, right? Because it's tricky to parse. Like if birds gave us an IQ test about navigation. We'd fail.

We would fail. No, it's really true. And I think it's one of the things that I like to emphasize is that some of the things that we've been talking about, the problem solving, tool making, those are all things that we humans do pretty well ourselves. But birds really have abilities that go way beyond ours. And I think navigation is a great example of that. What about artists? Are there artists in the bird world? This is one of my favorite topics.

So, yes, I think there are. There are birds called bowerbirds that live in Australia and New Guinea. And they have what seems to be quite an astonishing aesthetic sense. So a male bowerbird woos a female by building a beautiful bower. And this consists usually of a little archway made, very symmetrical, made of sticks, and then a platform that's decorated with objects. And...

That's better. So I want to emphasize here, this is not a nest. There's no rearing of young that takes place here. It's purely a stage for seduction. So it's really the platform that the male uses to woo the female. And females are very picky. They really like arches that are perfectly symmetrical and made of hundreds of sticks, all of the same length, and built into this. This is also an example of template matching. The birds go back and forth, putting the sticks in to make sure that it's symmetrical. And then the males

decorate their bowers with objects. And so the female comes into the bower. She sits in this little archway and she observes the male's performance. Now, when she stations herself there, he erupts into this kind of frenetic ballet of hops and skips and jumps. And he flashes his wings and he bulges his eyes. And then he'll launch into this stream of calls, including lots of mimicry. They're very good mimics, so they'll do the kind of crazy laughing call of a kookaburra or the screeching call of a sulfur-crested cockatoo, and making a real show of it. And meanwhile, the female, she's sitting in her little archway, judging all this with a highly critical eye.

So she's gauging his performance based on the performance of other males that she's seen, which is a cognitive skill in and of itself. And only the males that put on the best show and have the best display of objects will actually win a mating. display of objects will actually win a mating. And the different species of bowerbirds have favorite colored objects. So satin bowerbirds love blue. Great bowerbirds like white. They pick up bones and stones and arrange them. And spotted bowerbirds like shiny things. So they usually locate their bowers near Australian dumps. They're called tips in Australia, where they can find all kinds of shiny glinting stuff. And in fact, one spotted bowerbird built its bower near the studio of a stained glass artist. And it picked up the little shards of glass and arranged

them by color. So it had this kind of beautiful mosaic in the end. And the Vogelkopf bowerbirds of New Guinea do the same thing with berries and flowers. They organize them by color. And they are just extraordinarily beautiful. And I think they're works of art in the sense that they're creations designed to have an impact on another being. And to me, that's a pretty good definition of art. Alex, before we leave, I want to make sure we leave with take-home things to look for in our daily life. And most of us don't live in New Caledonia. So is there a chance that a crow I would see around here might be using a tool?

Like, should I be watching them closely? So I don't think it's going to be, as far as we know, it's going to be really rare, if not never, that you're going to see an American crow using a tool in the wild. But I think one of the things that I find really striking is that every time we run these very complicated tests with the New Caledonian crows, other researchers will run them with non-tool-using crows, so like brooks or ravens.

And generally, once you teach non-tool-using crows to use tools, we'll see simple metatool use. We'll see a lot of the same performances that we see in New Caledonian crows to use tools, we'll see simple meta tool use. We'll see a lot of the same performances that we see in New Caledonian crows. So it looks like it's far more like the education of a mind that's important towards tools, as opposed to there's a difference in the minds themselves. So to me, that means that, you know, if you're wandering around and you're seeing an American crow just, you know, rustling in the bushes and going about its business, there's no reason to suppose right now that it's not got that same level of braininess, of cognitive complexity as the New Caledonian crow.

In fact, that seems a lot more likely, actually, than that there's something very special just about New Caledonian crows. So I think for me, anyway, it gives me a newfound appreciation just of birds in general and particularly corvids. It's not just this one species that I work with in New Caledonia, but it just seems much more likely that every corvid has got a lot going on that we're maybe not giving it credit for right now. From the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado,

that was Jennifer Ackerman and Alexander Taylor in conversation with Flora Lichtman. You can find out about their books and podcasts at our website cbc.ca slash ideas. There you'll also find links to information about the dog cognition experts Alexander Horowitz and Brian This episode was produced by Melissa Gismondi, with help from Chris Wadskow and Tom Howell. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Nick Bonin. Web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.