Science Friday - Frans de Waal, Inactive Ingredients, Street View, and Gentrification. March 15, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

Primatologist Frans de Waal has spent his lifetime studying the lives of animals, especially our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. de Waal has observed their shifting alliances and the structure of their political ranks. He has seen bitter conflicts break out, only to be mended by peaceful, respected mediators. And he has witnessed chimpanzees grieve for, and attempt to comfort, their dead and dying. But one of the most touching reflections in his new book, Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, is the story he tells of a female chimp who didn’t produce enough milk to feed her young. When de Waal taught her to feed her baby with a bottle instead, she repaid him with what most of us would recognize as gratitude: holding both of de Waal’s hands and whimpering sadly if he tried to leave. The book explores many stories of animal emotions from across the animal kingdom, and it might leave you wondering how unique humans really are. Gentrification happens when a previously low-income or working class neighborhood sees an influx of well-off new residents. Rents go up, new development sets in, and the neighborhood’s original residents may be displaced by those with more money. Cities who can recognize gentrification in progress can take steps to prevent displacement and funnel resources, or even slow the neighborhood’s changes directly. But while a new yoga studio or fancy coffee shop may be one obvious sign of rising rents, there are earlier indications that might help cities fend off some of the side effects sooner—building improvements like new siding, landscaping, and more go markedly up as new money arrives. Writing in the journal PLOS One this week, a research team at the University of Ottawa describes one new tool in the toolkit: they turned to Google’s Street View, and taught an AI system to recognize when an individual house had been upgraded. Putting those upgrades on a map revealed not just areas the researchers already knew were gentrifying, but also other pockets where the process had begun unnoticed. Michael Sawada, a professor of geography, environment, and geomatics at the University of Ottawa, explains the big data approach to catching gentrification in action. Anyone who has glanced at the back of a bottle of aspirin or a box of allergy tablets has seen it: the “Inactive Ingredients” list. All medications include compounds that help stabilize the drug or aid in its absorption. They aren’t given a second thought because they’re “inactive,” which suggests that these ingredients don’t do any harm. But in fact, according to a new study out this week, over 90 percent of medications have inactive ingredients that can cause allergic reactions in certain patients, including peanut oil, lactose, and gluten. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You know that your pet can express emotions, right? Well, later in the hour, we'll be joined by primatologist Franz de Valle to talk about the world of animal emotions. And why blushing, and why blushing? And why blushing actually says a lot about our human evolution. But first, how do you know if your neighborhood is gentrifying? Well, the rents are skyrocketing. Businesses are closing. A new fancy coffee shop is moving in. A new high rise goes up. gentrification can be bad news for neighborhoods' original inhabitants.

It can mean they are forced to move or suffer greater economic hardship. But if caught in time, cities can try to soften the negative consequences or make choices that slow the gentrification process. So how do you catch gentrification in action? How about Google Street View? Researchers at the University of Ottawa tested that big data approach and here to explain it, is Dr. Michael Sawata, Professor of Geography and Environment and Geomatics at the University of Ottawa. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira.

So gentrification is a word that evokes a lot of different things for different people. So do you have a scientific definition of what it is? Yes. In fact, it's quite simple. The idea of gentrification pretty much is defined as when a more affluent user group or a more affluent group of people move into, a less affluent area of the city and displace the residents that are there, simply because the rents become higher and the property prices become higher. And what is the usual way to measure? Well, measurement is very important, as you know, in science.

We need to be able to measure things in order to have a common frame of reference to talk about or define various processes. Gentrification is one of those things that's been measured in more. anecdotal ways in the past. So anecdotally, through interviewing people about their motivations for the gentrification of a particular region or whether they like it or dislike it. And in the end, it's come down to using census data largely. And of course, by the time you can detect gentrification with census data, it's often over because censuses are only taken every five to ten years in North America, for example. And you can miss the process entirely. Yeah, yeah. It's not really good.

It's got a lot of holes in it, is what you're saying. Exactly. And your team thought that if we could literally see it in action, you could measure it better, and you used Google Streetview data. Sure. Well, we thought, you know, what we're looking at, gentrification as a process, largely involves the updating, usually, of people's properties. It's one of the ways more affluent people express their wealth, for example,

is through material means, and that's where they live. So they'll update the facades of their properties, the siding, maybe even tear down an old house and put in a new one. And we can see that now with Street View. We've had this intersection of technology in the past couple of years whereby we have about 10 or 11 years of Street View imagery archived by Google, and anybody can go through that and look at them. And at the same time, we've had mega advances in deep learning,

the ability to go through these large, numbers of images with artificial intelligence. Right, right. And so when you went through known places and compared them to what you were discovering with the Google Street View and the AI, how accurate did that turn out to be? It was remarkably accurate. So firstly, we found that our model detected the gentrification that we knew anecdotally was taking place in two of the major regions of Ottawa.

One region is an area which is very popular with a hipster culture, and kind of down the street from that is another area. And these two neighborhoods have been undergoing gentrification in the past 10 years, and we were able to see that right away in our model. These were the hottest of the hot spots of gentrification. So it confirmed that our model was working in detecting what we thought it should. And where you were able to find places where gentrification was sort of high. fighting out that no one had seen before.

Yeah, and I think that's the real advantage of the approach that we've put together is that by looking at every single buildings street view sequence of images over time in a large city, we were able to find pockets of gentrification that nobody was really talking about anecdotally or otherwise. Interesting. So how do you make use of this new tool and this new data that you have? So one of the things that we're able to do is that we can now have maps, detailed maps, at least of our city where we've done this and shown that it works. So far, we have detailed maps of gentrification happening, where it's happened, where it's happening, and how intense that process is.

So we're now able to measure it right down to the property scale. And this is very important for a lot of different reasons, foremost being, of course, it provides city, administrators, managers, the zoning office, the permit office with critical information about where there's been large dynamic urban change taking place, but also where it's starting. So they can then decide, well, should we let this go uncontrolled in a capitalist type of way? Or should we step in and try and mitigate the process so that we ensure there's equitable housing and things like that? Yeah. So can other people make use of the Google Street View for other purposes? Oh, definitely.

And that's something, you know, we're doing right now. We're using Street View to map out two major things in Ottawa, just as a proof of concept, again. One is walkability. And that's, again, a very, you know, something you like or dislike where you want to walk. You look at a couple pictures, and we ask people, do you want to walk on the left picture or the white pitcher, which one we would rather walk on, and we can train then a machine to go through Street View and say, well, these are the most walkable areas.

And you could discover what are unfriendly to people, either senior citizens or people with abilities, challenges, right? To get around. Definitely, we've just put in a grant proposal, hopefully it'll be funded, to look at the age-friendliness of our entire city using AI and Google Street View again. So using these same big data deep learning techniques can open up a lot of opportunities to target inequalities.

How easy is it for you? You go to Google and say, hey, I want to use your Streetview for urban planning research. You're going to give me the stuff? Does it work that easily? Well, there was before July 18th of 2018, it was much easier. Google just gave away Street View 25. thousand images a day for free. Then on July 18th, overnight, they increased their price for Street View by 3,000 percent. And now it would, you know, so now we get 25,000 free images

per month instead of per day. And otherwise, it's about $7 an image, seven dollars per thousand images after that. So this type of work is going to be a little bit more difficult for researchers like me or non-profits or even city governments that don't have the means to pay the exorbitant cost of Street View now. What does an exorbitant cost? Okay, so let's say for a city, the size of Ottawa, to get the street view image archive, would cost probably about $20,000 or so,

which is a lot of money for a researcher, at least in Canada, where we don't have quite the same funding structure as in the U.S. institutions. So that's exorbitant for us. And that means that there's kind of an advantage given to, say developers, real estate developers, or other types of real estate interests in being able to pay for the information, run models like ours, because ours is open and free, and get that information for themselves to get a competitive advantage before even the city knows or most people

know that gentrification is happening. Or if you wanted to push back, let's say if Amazon wants to move into your neighborhood and you need some data about the neighborhood, you'd have to spend your own money to push back on that. Well, that's just it. And, you know, there are these things called carbon gentrification that's happening now, particularly in areas of the U.S. where you have big centers like Amazon in downtowns, where, of course, the people who work there want to bike to work or walk to work. And so they're tending to then buy up real estate and whatnot in regions that are close to their Amazon headquarters or Google or whatever it might be. And therefore, people that used to live there can no longer. or afford to reside. So gentrification, do you say in general a gentrification is a bad thing, or, you know, it's a mixed bag of things?

Well, it's one thing that everybody has an opinion on, and opinions are valid about gentrification. There are advantages to it in terms of urban renewal, particularly when it's happening in, let's say, a place that's known for high crime or drugs that's run down with a lot of abandoned houses. Well, gentrification is great because it's going to improve the safety, the visual quality of that neighborhood. But in some cases, it's not so good, such as when you have carbon, let's say, people trying to reduce their carbon footprint and buying up homes in established neighborhoods or even climate gentrification where people are on higher ground in Florida. Higher ground areas are being bought up by more affluent people. and that then makes more vulnerable populations to everybody else. You know, if you sit down and you think about,

there's probably whole bunches of uses you could make with this data. You haven't even thought about it yet. Well, that's the exciting thing about it. You know, we're just at the cusp now, you know, of deep learning, big data, and what we can mine from visual imagery like Street View. Yeah, so this is kind of exciting big data for urban planners. Definitely.

Yeah. I imagine it's a growing field. This is something if you're studying to be an urban planner. You want to know more about it. Yeah, I would certainly think so because it's the future. You know, as the tools, these deep learning tools, these artificial neural networks become more commonplace. And in a couple years, you won't have to be able to even program to use them.

You'll be able to go online and ask your question, put in your street view data and get answers back. that's one of the things, you know, that will be happening for and putting it in the hands of everybody quickly, like urban planners and whatnot. What about Google's competitors? Apple's view or whatever? Well, I don't know that Apple has a view. Microsoft tried one, Microsoft Streetside for the tried to compete with Google Street View.

It lasted very, for a few years, but now it's just relegated to some major U.S. cities, and it's no longer a global effort the way Google has undertaken it to create the data set. Thank you very much, Dr. Suwata, for taking time to be with us today. Thank you, Ira. Michael Suwata, Professor of Geography and Environment and Geometics, just a little north of us at the University of Ottawa. When we come back, we're going to take a break, and we're going to talk about the last time you studied the inactive ingredient list on your pill bottle.

And then a little bit later on, Franz de Wall is going to be here with his new book, Mama's last hug, animal emotions and what they tell us about ourselves. We all know that animals have emotions, right? Yeah, we'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Inactive ingredients, you've seen them on the back of that bottle of aspirin, you have at home,

or a box of allergy medication you're purchasing. Your eyes zoom right by them, right, as you're looking for the dosage or a list of side effects. You don't give them a second thought because of what they're called. Inactive ingredients. That means they don't do anything, right? Well, a lot, look a little bit closely at those inactive ingredients, and you'll find they include things like peanut oil, lactose, and gluten. And in fact, as a new study out this week shows, over 90% of medications have inactive ingredients that are really active. They can cause allergic reactions in certain patients. Here to tell us what to make of all of this is one of the authors of that

study, Dr. Giovanni Traverso, assistant professor at Brigham Women's Hospital, Harvard Med School, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering and MIT. Dr. Traverso, welcome back to Science Friday. No, thanks so much, Ira, for having me. So what else is my blood pressure medication, not that I'm doing for me besides the medicine itself? What compounds kind of compounds you find in these inactive ingredients? I mean, I think it's really fascinating. I mean, what we find, and this was sort of, you is something that, you know, I came across a few years ago.

And, you know, one of the things that we set out to do in the study is really analyze exactly what else is in there. And, you know, on average, we find that about 75% of tablets and capsules are actually occupied by these inactive ingredients. And, you know, typically, on average, there are about eight other, you know, ingredients in that capsule and sometimes up to 35. And as you mentioned earlier, you know, there are ingredients like lactose, sometimes starch, which can be wheat derived. and so hence, you know, the potential for gluten, in some instances, also even peanut oil. But, you know, many other, you know, there are over a thousand chemicals that one can choose from, you know, to really help make that capsule. So why do the pharmaceutical companies, if they know this kind of stuff, I mean, they know that people are allergic to lactose and wheat and peanuts, why do they put them inside the pills? Yeah. So, you know, I think one thing to really emphasize here is that these inactive ingredients are actually,

really important. So I think by no means are we suggesting that they be removed. And they play a critical role with respect to the stability of that tablet or capsule, you know, the appearance, potentially, you know, modulating taste or even enhancing absorption or even, you know, providing tamperproofing. And, you know, likely the reason that we have some of these ingredients is, you know, for historical reasons where we've seen some of these work to actually, you know, facilitate those, you know, those parameters in the pills. But certainly as awareness increases, it's something that I think we're all starting to appreciate hopefully more and more.

And, you know, I think hopefully we're getting more focus around what should be included. And can we find alternatives in some situations? And you think that there are alternatives that could be used? Absolutely. And if you take drugs, you know, drugs that are now generic, for example, on meparazol, which is used for the treatment of reflux, or ulcer treatments, you know, there are many different formulations of ammeprosol. So, for example, you know, as a physician, like I will prescribe, let's say,

omeprosol 20 milligrams once a day or twice a day. But at that dose, you know, there can be over 30 or 40 different formulations of ameprosol, 20 milligrams. And by formulation, I mean, you know, the composition of the inactive ingredients. So one might find ones that have lower amounts of lactose or no lactose and others that may have lactose. And so, you know, certainly there are alternatives. And, you know, for some drugs, there are many alternatives. For others, there are a few. You know, sometimes when I go to the drugstore, and I have a medication that I'm getting, and the drugist says, you know, I have a different

manufacturer making that same drug, and we're using that now. That could have other ingredients in it that I'm not used to from the first drugstore, from the first pharmaceutical company. That's exactly right, you know, and then I think, you know, I mean, myself included, and calls, colleagues, you know, we've seen situations where, you know, similar experiences have, you know, that our patients have had, where exactly as you mentioned, you know, the manufacturer changes and actually they're manifest and actually new symptoms potentially. And I think that's hopefully by raising awareness that, you know, there are inactive ingredients in these pills and capsules that they may be the culprit, you know, behind some of those symptoms.

Speaking of your colleagues, when you found out that 90% of the medications had these ingredients in them. What was your reactions from your prescribing colleagues to this news? Yeah. So I think, though, you know, just to take a step back on the 90% piece, so one of the things that we recognize of these inactive ingredients is that they can cause adverse effects, and generally we group them into two groups. One is, you know, allergic reactions of those sort of frank allergies as we recognize them today, whether it be in the extreme, like an anaphylactic reaction or a rash, and then on the other side is sort of intolerances, like GI intolerances. On sort of the allergy side, what we had identified in the

study from the literature is that there are 38 ingredients have been associated with allergies. And if one asks the question, you know, what percentage of capsules contain at least one, the answer is indeed, you know, over 90%. But I think one thing to emphasize is that, you know, those events are rare. But nevertheless, you know, they are out there. But they are. But they are. rare. So, you know, I think people still recognize that these events are rare, but, you know, I think just, again, I think it's all about raising awareness both at the patient level and at the health care provider level. And I think, you know, it's changing, I think, how we think about the prescription process and access to the information. So let's say I'm a concerned consumer.

Is there any place online that I can check out what I should be worried about? Is there a resource? Absolutely. So I think you mentioned at the beginning, certainly in the drug insert. So you could sift through the text and you will find some of that information. There's also a database out there called Pillbox that has some of that information. But for both, you know, there are a few steps to go through to at least arrive at that. And so one of the things that we see is, you know, potentially helping both patients and health care providers is developing

tools to just make it easier to really help identify those ingredients very quickly, and even help quantify the total amount of an ingredient. So, you know, let's go back to lactose if someone is taking, let's say, 10 tablets to at least quickly, you know, figure out how much lactose that person is consuming, you know, from their, medications alone. And so that's one of the next things that we're starting to look at. You said developing tools. What do you mean, like, an app or something like that?

Exactly. I think it's apps. It's also systems to interface with the electronic medical record systems, you know, to really start to help quantify, you know, the inactive ingredient components. Interesting. Thank you for taking time to be with us today, Dr. Traverso. Well, thank you, IRA for having me on the show. You're welcome. Have a good weekend. Likewise, thank you. Giovanni Traverso is a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. at MIT, so he works both MIT and Harvard at the same time. My next guest, primatologist Franz de Wall, has spent his lifetime studying the lives of

animals, especially our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. He has observed their shifting alliances, their political ranks. He's seen bitter conflicts break out, broken up by peaceful, respected mediators. And he's witnessed them grieve for an attempt to attempt to comfort their dead and dying. But one of the most touching stories in his new book, Mama's Last Hug, is the story he tells of a female chimp

who didn't produce enough milk to feed her young. When Franz taught her to feed her baby with a bottle instead, she repaid him with what most of us would recognize as gratitude, holding both of his hands and whimpering sadly if

he tried to leave. It's just one of the many fascinating stories of animal emotions he writes about in his new book, and I might leave you wondering like me how unique we humans really are. Friends of the Wall is a primatologist and professor at Emory University in Atlanta. His new book is

Mama's Last Hug, Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, and you can read an excerpt at Science Friday.com, Last Hug. And you can also call us if you have a question. 844-724-8255. 844-8-25. You can also tweet us at SciFri. Good to see you.

I think last time we talked, we were always on the other end of a phone and I never get to... I'm not sure, yeah, I'm not sure anymore. We are. Let's talk about Mama's last hug. Who was Mama? Mama was the alpha female of a very large chimpanzee colony at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, who I had known for 40 years. A very central figure.

She was not physically dominant over the males, but she was certainly more powerful than most males in terms of her political connections. and her skills of bringing parties together and so on. And Mama's last hug refers to her encounter with my professor, Jan von Hov, who's 80 now, who went into her night cage to say goodbye when she was dying. And so she embraced him. She actually calmed him down because I think he was a bit nervous going in there. We never normally would go in with an adult chimpanzee.

So he was a bit nervous and I think she calmed him down, which was typical of her. kind of behavior. So always that last hug lie. You described it in the book? Well, she embraced him and then tapped him on the back of his neck and his shoulders and she had a big smile on her face and she made some

sounds. And actually people were first of all very moved by that encounter because it has been seen by I think 200 million people on the internet. So they were very moved and I can understand that. But people were also very surprised. And that surprised me. Why are people so

surprised that a chimpanzee may express emotions in a very similar way similar gesture, similar face as we do, because chimpanzees are our closest relative, so of course everything they do is extremely similar to what we do. And so I felt I needed to explain about

facial expressions and about sounds that chimpanzees make. And so I took that as the starting point. Yeah, and you verified for everybody who has a pet that animals really do have emotions. Well, that's interesting, is that you say that because the pet owners usually

they, as soon as you say, do animals have emotions, they say, my dog and they go on and on. But in science, we have been extremely reluctant, unfortunately. I think we went through a very dark period in the previous century where a group of scientists, the behaviorists, we call

them, had decided that the inner lives of animals, but also actually humans, the inner lives were irrelevant. So for humans, for example, it's only in the 1960s that we started to talk about the intelligence and emotional states and so on. And in animals, for sure, there was an enormous taboo that we lived under.

And so I learned as a student that you shouldn't be talking about emotions. It's a word that you should not even mention. Yeah, in other words, if you saw a facial gesture, it was not an animal smiling. You would just describe it as how the muscles move, right? Yeah, yeah. So if you tick a, let's say, a chimpanzee and the chimpanzee laughs, which they do, they have laughing sounds like, uh-uh, type sounds. they would say, why don't you call it vocalized panting?

So they would look for words that make the connection with humans obscure. You write in the book that some psychologists have argued that the emotions we feel must be more nuanced than those of the animals, because we have language to describe what, 12 different shades of anger, for example. It's pleasure, fury, resentment, just to name a few. What's wrong with that? That's based on the idea that language is at. the root of things. And I don't think.

I think language is a very late-appearing phenomenon in our species. And also in the development, you wouldn't say that a child who cannot speak has no emotions. So language is sort of irrelevant. Language is something we use to describe our feelings and to talk about them. And I can explain to you why I took a certain decision and how my emotions figured into that. So language is very good to talk about emotions, but they're not at the root of the emotions.

844-724-8255 is our number if you'd like to join in the discussion with Franz de Wall author of Mama's Last Hug on Science Friday from WNYC Studios What's been the reaction to you talking? I mean, this is one of your main themes And it's been for a while that the animals have emotions And you talk about in the book about tickling a rat on its tummy

And it's really laughing Yeah, yeah, yeah And all these different animals and horses and things like that Well, the reaction is, of course, of the general public is obviously they don't they assume emotions and animals even though the animals that we eat

they often don't talk about but anyway the animals that we keep they would say but in science of course that has been an extreme reluctance and even though I have always worked on let's say conflict resolution and reconciliation and that kind of things or empathy where emotions clearly play

a role even there the word emotion is often not used for animals because we I think we confuse emotions with feelings and people wanted to stay away from that. And you writes a really an interesting section about Charles Darwin's book called The Expression of the Emotions and Man and Animals. And you write, it's the only major book by Darwin that after its initial success was promptly forgotten. Yeah, because it was taboo. Because he had talked about frisky cows and how they looked happy when they were released in the spring.

and this was considered so unscientific that that book was forgotten. And has it come back? Has it been resurrected? Oh, yeah. I think so. It has come back with the world of Paul Ekman. When he started working on the facial expressions of humans, it came back. And now in animal research also, it's back, I think.

How important was Conrad Lorenz back in the 60s? Yeah, Lawrence was quite a bit more open than the behaviorists about this kind of issues. And he kept a lot of animals and talked very freely and very beautiful. He wrote beautifully about them. I think he was very much focused on aggressive behavior, and that was a bit of a problem, because after World War II, everyone was focused on aggression for obvious reasons. And so a lot of the research started to zoom in on these negative sides of animals. And so we got an enormous amount of research on aggression, but anything affectionate, like if you talk about empathy or bonding or love even between animals, was really not accepted. He discovered bonding, didn't he, with birds?

He did the imprinting work from birds. You write in the book that you've always been fascinating with observing others, even from an early age. So what led you toward primatology in particular? That's almost like an accident. As a child, I collected all sorts of water animals because Holland is full of water, and so salamanders, fish. I also collected birds and mice and frogs and all that kind of things. And then when I went to the university, I wanted to study animals. and I became a biologist.

But in my first university that I went to, they only worked with dead animals that you cut open. I found it extremely boring. So I went to another university where they did animal studies, etology, and that's how I rolled into animal behavior. And the primate work is almost like an accident. I could have ended up with fish or with birds or whatever.

I love animals. And so for me, it doesn't make so much of a difference. But if you want to make comparisons with humans, of course, than the primates are ideal. You ever bump it to Jane Goodall? Yeah, of course, also, yeah. She's very much out there in the field looking at this kind of stuff also.

We're going to take a break and come back and talk lots more with Franz de Wall, primatologist at Emery, and author of Mama's Last Hug, very well written. It's almost like a personal... But it's more than just about apes and chimps. It's about other animals and their emotions.

I tried to cover many, yeah. 844-7-24-8-5-5 is our number. also tweet us at SciFry. We're going to take a quick break and be right back with Franz DeWall. Stay with us. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday with my guest, Prematologist Franz de Wall, author of the new book,

Mama's Last Hug, Animal Emotions, and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, Our number, 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFry. Lots of people want to talk about it. Let's go to the phone. Let's go to Grania in Houston. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira.

Thanks so much for taking my call. Go ahead. And thank you. And it's wonderful to hear you, Dr. Ball. I've enjoyed your work over the years, and I look forward to reading the new book. I just call as a behaviorist, perhaps, to offer a correction or clarification. I don't think it's true to say that behavior has said that emotion is irrelevant. I think throughout the history of behaviorism, we said that emotion as an internal experience is difficult to study scientifically, but as we have improved our methodology and have developed ways of studying it, we've been able to study it, but we've never said it was irrelevant.

And as a field that's often misunderstood, I just felt like I'd like to get that clarification out there. Okay. Well, Skinner has literally said emotions were relevant to human behavior, but apart from that, I should say emotions can be studied objectively. The feelings behind the emotion, certainly for animals, I have no access to feelings. And so I can guess at feelings, and I assume that the feelings or the experiences, the inner experiences, so to speak, of a chimpanzee are probably similar to ours. But I have no way of knowing that for sure. But I should also say for humans, I have trouble getting at the experiences. So, for example, Ira can tell me that he was sad at a funeral,

but that still doesn't know, I still don't know if he felt the same way as I feel when I'm sad. So feelings remain largely inaccessible, but the emotions are expressed in the body, in the face, in the voice, in the sweat, in the breathing, in the heart rate. And so the emotions are always expressed in the body, and the emotions are perfectly measurable. Right. Thanks for your call. You go through so many different emotions. I mean, you talk about bereavement, you talk about funerals that the chimps have for each other.

Tell us about some of the more interesting ones that you've discovered. Yeah, so one of the emotions I went through is disgust because psychologists have recently declared disgust a uniquely human emotion, maybe based on moral disgust when we are disgusted by the behavior, let's say, by people who get their kids into schools, by illegal means, for example. So we discussed about the kind of things.

And so they have declared disgust uniquely human, but disgust is a very old emotion that serves to keep contaminants and parasites out of your body, and we see it in many species. How does it manifest? So, for example, dogs are often said to be

lacking in disgust because they lick their testicles and they eat feces and stuff like that, and people use them as an example. But dogs are very disgusted by citrus, for example. If you cut open a lemon and you shouldn't feed it to your dog, exactly poisonous to them. But you hold it in front of them, they will show a full-blown disgust response. They will.

What does that manifest? They actually flick with their tongue and they shake their head as if they're shaking something out of their mouse. Chimpanzees in disgust displays, they have a face very similar to the human disgust face where we curl up the lip and bring the upper lip close to the nose. You write in your book that despite her age and Mama, who's the topic of the book, became the most son-after female of the group, and you quote you in the book, the biggest sex bomb of the chimp group. Yeah, that's sort of amusing with chimps, is that the older females are actually sexually more attractive to the males than the younger ones.

People are always surprised by that. So Mama, when she was maybe 40 or something, so an older female already, If she sported one of these genital swellings, the males would go crazy and they would not eat for days and go after her. Whereas if an adolescent female was like that, they would totally ignore her. So the males in chimpanzees, they go for the older ones. You talk about the genital swellings, which don't look attractive to we humans. No. You compare them to what would look attractive to humans.

Well, humans cleavage and breasts and men fall for breasts. And so I always meet people who say, how can the chimps like this? these big ping behinds, but at the same time they're staring at Cleavich, and I don't think that's so terribly different. And you also talk about chimps caring for each other when they're ill, and they bring blankets for the dead. And who would have thought that? You would have.

Yeah, yeah. So we had a male at Jerkish who was dying, and we kept him apart, and we kept the door a little bit open so that the others could access him. And he was in a very bad shape, and the females would actually bring straw to him, and shoved behind his back, he was leaning against the wall. The way we do when we go to a hospital and put pillows behind people.

Because you study chimps and you find these emotions and behaviors that other people would not have found, do you think that we are misinterpreting the intelligence and possibly the emotions of Neanderthals? Oh, I'm sure the Neanderthals have been downplayed by our species for ages. the Neanderthals must be stupid and backward and so on. I think all the evidence that we see is that that's not the case. The Neanderthals actually had brains slightly larger than our brain, and so I think we have totally underestimated the Neanderthals. And we carry also, as you know, we carry 4% of the genes of them.

A tweet coming in, how about reading horse emotions when working with that? Yeah, I'm not a horse person, so I know less about horses, but horses have a lot of muscles in their face, and so they have an enormous range of facial expressions. They also can move their ears, which we cannot do, and chimps cannot do, but horses have very expressive ears also. And so horse emotions are just as clearly expressed, I think, as in the prime age.

It's just incredible how many expressions they have. But let's go to the phones to Matt in Bigghamton, New York. Hi, Matt. Hi. Go ahead. Hi. Are you there? Yes, go ahead.

Yeah, I'm in New York a couple years ago, I witnessed a squirrel. You'd hit by a car, and there was a whole bunch of other squirrels who was in the fall. And I was just amazed by the reaction of the squirrels. They all came back to try to attend. It was like if a kid got hit in the street. And I just wondered if you had ever seen anything like that before. Well, many of the mammals, of course, they have attachments. And so maybe this squirrel had certain individual.

that were close, like siblings or parents or others that were attached to it. And they probably also come to inspect what is going on. They may try to help if that's a possibility. But I think there's an enormous amount of curiosity if one of them dies. And so I'm not sure that what you saw was necessarily grieving or something, because I would need to have more details about it. But certainly there's a curiosity about it. You mentioned in your book how many so-called animalistic things here.

humans do without realizing that we do it. I'll give you an example, sniffing our hand after we shake hands with somebody. Yeah, they found that on hidden cameras. They had filmed a lot of people greeting each other, and they found that when people greet someone by shaking hands of the same gender, they tend to bring their hand to their nose, and they're probably not even aware that they're sniffing the other one, but they're doing that. A tweet coming in, what research is they're regarding the response to music in animals? What if any music appears to generate or reflect mood?

Well, there is research now on that. Increasingly, for example, whether animals can follow the rhythm of music or follow the rhythm that you as a human present them with. And some animals are actually quite good at that. It's like parrots are good at it and pinny pets like the sea lions are good at it. We also did experiments where we present music to apes and see what they like and what they don't like. We found, I believe, that Indian music. was really liked by chimpanzees.

So people do experiments on this. Whether they experience emotions similar to the ones that we experience with music is hard to tell. All we can measure is do they want to listen to it or not want to listen to it. One of the funniest ones was a very old experiment on starlings

in a cage which could hop from one perch to another one. And one perch produced Mozart and the other one produced Schoenberg. And the starlings clearly preferred. Mozart, as you might expect. So you can't tell

if certain music is soothing or if certain music is excitatory. Yeah, maybe there are ways of telling that apart, but for the moment we just look at preferences. All right, let's go to the phone. To Matthew in Denver. Hi, Matthew. Hi, Matthew. Hi, go ahead.

I was wondering, Franz, how you've seen the veterinary world change with regards to animal emotions being more accepted and maybe primates used in research? Well, I think the veterinary schools, they need to do more on

behavior. They very often ignore behavior. There are some, I know some, that have behavior classes for the students, but they very often ignore the behavior of animals and that includes also the emotions and the expression of emotions in animals. And so I think the vet students need to learn a lot

more about that. As far as primates in research you know probably that in chimpanzees that is sort of ended. Chimpanzees are not really used for biomedical studies anymore. And the other primates that are being kept, like macaques are still kept in many facilities, I think

should all be housed socially. My view has always been that you cannot keep these monkeys in single cages, as they often still do. And I don't know why they still do that because it's really not necessary and they can keep them in social groups and that would be so far better than what they do at the moment. So, tweet in

from Susan who says cats have been recognized often as aloof and uninterested in humans owners may disagree discuss I happen to be an owner I've had cats all my life and I think cats are just very

variable there are cats who are loners yes they exist but there's also many cats who are very social if you have like I always used to have four cats if you move from one room in the house to the other room in the house all the cats would move to the room where you are, because I think they like variation and they like your presence,

and actually cats are much more sociable than people often assume. You write that the emotional lives of birds are on par with mammals. Tell us about that. Yeah, birds have these very strong attachments. So, for example, if you talk about grieving and being affected by the death of a partner, then birds are a prime example, because many birds have lifelong. bonds between male and female. And so if one of them dies, I used

to have Jackdaws, which is a sort of Corvitt, sort of little crow, actually. And I had two that were very bonded to each other. And when the female disappeared, he escaped from the Voliere, the male kept calling and calling and calling until he died, basically. He didn't eat and he died. Is that right?

Yeah. Yeah. And you also talk about rodent faces were long thought to be unaffected by emotions, but detailed studies show other rodents have no problem. Recognizing. No, the rodent literature will always emphasize that they have no facial expressions. And now recently there was a study, for example, in Switzerland that was done, where they, that was a funny study. They had two classes of rats, one that they tickled and treated

very well, and they sort of made them very happy, and another group that they didn't do much with. And then they asked that an independent judge to judge from the face and the color of the ears, what they saw had happened, and they could tell the happy rodents apart from the unhappy ones. I'm Ariflato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Franz de Wall,

author of Mama's Last Hug Animal Emotions and what they tell us about ourselves. In the last few minutes, tell us what the emotions tell us about ourselves. How would you summarize that? I think we are much more emotional beings than we

often say we are. We think We are rational beings and we take all these rational decisions, but I think emotions figure into everything we do. And we also underestimate the animality of our emotions because I don't think we have emotions that animals don't have. So basically I look at our emotions like organs. I don't have any organ in my body that a frog doesn't have or a rat doesn't have. I have a liver and a kidney and a heart and brain and so on.

And I think the same is true for our emotions. There are no human emotions in my mind. that cannot be traced back to equivalent animal emotions. In fact, you talk about in your book that pigs can have an optimistic or a pessimistic look, depending on how they're raised. Yeah, yeah, they have done experiments on pigs because they do these experiments where they have to react to an ambivalent stimulus and see if they're hoping for food or not hoping for food.

And so you can test the optimism of the pig. And the optimism of the pig depends on how the pig is kept. The pig is kept in a nice space with a lot of straw and enrichment. The pig is more optimistic than the ones who are kept in a barren place. So let's not confuse when we talk about animals. What we think animal intelligence is and emotion is, right? Yeah, I think some animals are maybe not the most intelligent animals, but they are very emotional.

But I think all animals, all the mammals for sure, and also all the birds, they have quite an emotionality. Indeed, do animals have comedy, laughter? Yeah, we actually, I describe some examples of the sense of humor of the great apes. So, for example, one example is this was a fellow researcher of mine who put on a panther mask and hid in the bushes away from the chimpanzees. And then all of a sudden he showed himself. And all the chimps, 25 chimps, they got very angry at him and started throwing stuff at him.

And he did that multiple times. And then at some point he took the mask off, showing his own human face. And there were many chimps who had this laugh expression that chimpanzees have as if they thought this was sort of amusing, that he had been tricking them, you know. Other animals? Do they also have comedy? I'm not sure. People describe always their dogs.

Some dogs seem to have a sense of humor, but I'm not sure about that. What don't you know yet that you want to know? Oh, I want to know more about the feeling side of the emotions, about how they experience them. So we don't know that, really. And for the moment, that's why in my book I'm very shy about the feeling part of the emotions. But I think with neuroscience we may get there, and we can maybe see if the feelings associated with them are similar to ours. When you say neuroscience, you mean probing the brain?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe some non-invasive imaging science that we can do on animals that increasingly is being done on animals. Thank you very much for taking time. Good luck with the book. It's a great read. Franz de Wall is a primatologist and professor. at Emory, and his new book is Mama's Last Hug, Animal Emotions, and What They Tell Us About

Ourselves, and we have an excerpt up on our website, Science Friday.com slash last hug. One last thing before we go. This month marks a big anniversary for chemistry. 150 years since Mendelae have proposed the design for the periodic table. You'll probably be seeing all sorts of chemical celebrations this month and this year, and we didn't want to miss the party. So this week, in our podcast feed, we are opening up the Science Friday Vault to bring you a few tales from the periodic table with voices of the late Oliver Sacks and Nobel laureate Sir Harry Croto. Check it out, along with some other podcast-only specials, by subscribing to Science Friday

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