The dinnertime wag-and-smile come from one of the most basic emotions we have, an emotion that doesn’t have a stand-alone name. You need at least two words to capture it, and even then you haven’t completely got it. Dr. Panksepp says the best language he can come up with is intense interest, engaged curiosity, and eager anticipation.
When this brain circuit is activated, a person or animal probably feels some mixture of all three—curiosity, interest, and anticipation—depending on the situation. Humans have trouble describing what it’s like to have this part of the brain electrically stimulated but usually “report a feeling that something very interesting and exciting is going on.”14 Animals who are having their curiosity-interest circuit stimulated act as if that’s the way they feel, too. They get very animated and excited-acting and immediately start to run around like crazy, sniffing, exploring, and foraging.
Dr. Panksepp calls this part of the brain the SEEKING circuit.15 Animals and humans share a powerful and primal urge to seek out what they need in life. We depend on this emotion to stay alive, because curiosity and active interest in the environment help animals and people find good things, like food, shelter, and a mate, and it helps us stay away from bad things, like predators.
We know that curiosity/interest/anticipation, or SEEKING, is a positive emotion from a field of research called electrical stimulation of the brain, or ESB. In ESB studies surgeons implant electrodes in an animal’s brain and then watch the animal’s behavior when different parts of the brain are stimulated. The SEEKING part of the brain is located mostly in the hypothalamus, which is in the mammalian brain, and the most important chemical involved is dopamine, which goes up when the hypothalamus is stimulated. The hypothalamus regulates sex hormones and appetite, so it makes sense that the SEEKING emotions would originate from there, since all animals spend a great deal of their time seeking food and mates.
We know animals like being in the SEEKING state because of self-stimulation studies where the researcher gives his animals control over the electrodes, so the animal can choose to turn the electrodes on or off himself. When electrodes are implanted into the curiosity/interest/anticipation system, animals turn them on and keep them on until they’re totally exhausted from all their frenzied racing around and sniffing.
Since a lot of people read about these experiments in college I want to point out that the interpretation of these studies has changed completely in recent years. Researchers used to think that this circuit was the brain’s pleasure center. Sometimes they called it the reward center. The main neurotransmitter associated with the SEEKING circuit is dopamine, so they thought dopamine was the “pleasure” chemical. That’s what I was taught in college. When I learned about these experiments, I thought the ESB animals must be experiencing something like a permanent orgasm.
The pleasure center idea fit in with the fact that dopamine is involved in a lot of drug addictions. Cocaine, nicotine, and all the stimulants raise dopamine levels in the brain. Researchers assumed people develop addictions to drugs because drugs make you feel good, so dopamine must be the feel-good chemical in the brain.
But now researchers see things differently. We have a lot of evidence that the reason a drug like cocaine feels good is that it’s intensely stimulating to the SEEKING system in the brain, not to any pleasure center. What the self-stimulating rats were stimulating was their curiosity/interest/anticipation circuits. That’s what feels good: being excited about things and intensely interested in what’s going on—being what people used to call “high on life”!
There are at least three different lines of evidence for this new interpretation. One is the fact that animals who are having this part of the brain stimulated act intensely curious. The second is the fact that human beings who are having this part of the brain stimulated say they feel excited and interested.
The third is the clincher. This part of the brain starts firing when the animal sees a sign that food might be nearby but stops firing when the animal sees the actual food itself. The SEEKING circuit fires during the search for food, not during the final locating or eating of the food. It’s the search that feels so good.
That’s not as surprising as it sounds when you think about it. At the most basic level, animals and humans are wired to enjoy hunting for food. That’s why hunters like to hunt even if they’re not going to eat what they kill: they like the hunting part in and of itself. Depending on their personalities and interests, humans enjoy any kind of hunt: they like hunting through flea markets for hidden finds; they like hunting for answers to medical problems on the Internet; they like hunting for the ultimate meaning of life in church or in a philosophy seminar. All of those activities come out of the same system in the brain.
ANIMALS LIKE NEW TOYS, TOO
In a natural setting, different animals have different levels of curiosity.
Rats, for instance, are super-explorers. They’re very active and will explore every little nook and cranny of any environment you put them into.
Cattle are a lot less curious by nature, possibly because they’re big enough, and have been domesticated for long enough, that they don’t have quite so many dangers that need looking into.
Some cows are more curious than others. Holstein cows are very curious and do a lot of exploring with their tongues. If I lie down in the middle of a pasture filled with Holsteins they’ll come up and start licking my boots. They’ll go up to a horse, too, and lick him on his backside.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out wild animals are more curious than domestic animals overall. My assistant, Mark Deesing, has a wild-type Carolina dog named Red Dog who is genetically closer to her wild ancestors than the AKC purebreds. Red Dog is very curious. If you take her to a new place she sniffs like crazy; she has to explore everything. One time we took her to a dog washing business that was next door to a McDonald’s and she just went crazy sniffing and exploring. She wouldn’t interact with us at all.
Mark’s old dog, Annie, who was a little Australian blue heeler, was much more sociable. She was curious, too, but if we took her someplace like the dog washing business she would still interact with us. If domestic animals are less curious, it’s probably the result of another difference in the selection pressures acting on domestic animals versus animals who fend for themselves in the wild. Domestic animals are taken care of by humans; they don’t have to look for food or shelter. They don’t have as much need for the emotion of curiosity as a wild animal does.
What I call novelty seeking—an animal’s desire to touch and explore and interact with new things—is probably the same thing as curiosity. All animals like new things the same way people do. If you give an animal a bunch of nice toys to play with, and then a couple of weeks later you give him a brand-new, not-very-nice toy, he’ll always prefer the new toy even if it’s not as good as the old ones. That was true with my pigs at the University of Illinois. I gave them lots of good things to play with, like straw to root around in and telephone books for them to tear up. But if I brought in anything new they dropped everything and went for the new toy. All the pigs preferred a new, crummy toy, like a metal chain that you can’t chew up, to an old, fun toy, like the straw and the telephone books.
That’s why children always want new toys no matter how many toys they have already, and grown-ups always want new clothes and cars. It’s the newness itself that’s pleasurable.
So a liking for novelty probably comes out of the SEEKING system. It’s curiosity for curiosity’s sake, rather than curiosity for the sake of finding food or shelter. People and animals need to use their faculties, and curiosity is an important faculty. So people and animals need new things to stimulate their brains with. Parrots, for instance, need a huge amount of novelty to keep them from going stir-crazy. In one study of a single parrot, the more novel items the researchers put in the parrot’s cage, the less likely the parrot was to develop feather-picking behavior, which is stress-related.16 (Parrots also have to have lots of human companions
hip. They are highly social birds.)
For the time being, that’s the best explanation I can come up with as to why novelty is both scary and fun. We need to know more about the SEEKING system in the brain. I do have one good story about this from a friend of mine, though. Her son is one of those children who hates change and transitions, so she’s always working with him, trying to teach him to be more flexible. He loves new toys, but that’s about it.
One day she was explaining to him that it was a little contradictory to be against new experiences while constantly bugging her to buy him new toys and he said, “I don’t like new things, but I like new stuff.” That’s exactly the way animals act.
ANIMAL SUPERSTITIONS
Curiosity doesn’t just help animals find the things they need; it also helps them learn. That sounds obvious, I know, but the details of how curiosity helps an animal learn aren’t.
It turns out that all animals and humans have what researchers call a built-in confirmation bias. Animals and humans are wired to believe that when two things happen closely together in time it’s not an accident; instead the first event caused the second thing to happen.
For instance, if you put a pigeon in a cage with a key that lights up right before a piece of food appears, pretty soon the pigeon will start pecking the lighted key to get food.17 He does that because his confirmation bias leads him to believe that the first event (the key lighting up) causes the second event (the food appearing). The pigeon happens to peck the lighted key a couple of times, the food appears (because food always appears when the key is lit), and now he concludes that pecking the key when it’s lit causes food to appear.
The pigeon is acting like a person who thinks his team will win the baseball game if he’s got his lucky rabbit’s foot with him, which is why B. F. Skinner called this kind of behavior animal superstition. The pitcher has pitched a couple of good games while carrying his rabbit foot the same way the pigeon has gotten food a couple of times after pecking the lit-up key. In both cases, they’ve concluded that a correlation is a cause.
Confirmation bias is built in to animal and human brains, and it helps us learn. We learn because our default assumption is that if Event 1 is followed closely by Event 2, then Event 1 caused Event 2. Our default assumption isn’t that Events 1 and 2 happened at the same time by coincidence. Coincidence is actually a fairly advanced concept both for animals and for people. That’s why in statistics courses you have to formally teach students that a correlation isn’t automatically a cause. Our brains are wired to see correlations as causes, period. Since in real life a lot of times Event 1 does cause Event 2, confirmation bias helps us make the connection.
The downside to having a built-in confirmation bias is that you also make a lot of unfounded causal connections. That’s what a superstition is. Most superstitions probably start out as an accidental association between two things that aren’t actually related to each other. You just so happened to wear your blue shirt the day you passed your math test; then maybe you just so happened to wear your blue shirt the day you won a prize at the fair; and after that you think your blue shirt is your lucky shirt.
Animals develop superstitions all the time thanks to confirmation bias. I’ve seen superstitious pigs. On farms, pigs get fed one at a time inside small electronically controlled feeding pens. Pigs can get into really nasty fights over food, so farmers use the pens to keep the peace. All the pigs wear electronic tags on their collars that work something like an electronic pass at a tollbooth. When a pig walks over to the feed pen a scanner reads the tag and opens the gate, then shuts the gate behind the pig so none of the other pigs can get in. The sides of the pen are solid, so the other pigs can’t reach their snouts inside and bite the tail or rear end of the pig who’s eating.
Once a pig is inside the pen she has to put her head up close to the feeding trough where another electronic scanner reads the ID, then measures out the exact amount of food that pig is supposed to eat.
Some of the pigs figure out that it’s the collar that lets them into the feeding pen, and if they see a loose collar lying on the ground they’ll pick it up and carry it over to the pen and use it to get inside. In that case confirmation bias has led them to the correct conclusion about the nature of reality.
But other pigs develop superstitions, also based in confirmation bias, about the feeding trough inside the pen. I saw several who would walk over to the feeder and go inside when the door opened, then approach the feed trough and start doing some purposeful behavior like repeatedly stomping their feet on the ground. They kept doing this until their heads happened to move close enough to the pen scanner to read their tags and deliver their food. Obviously they had had food delivered a couple of times when they happened to be stomping their feet, and they’d concluded it was the foot stomping that got them food. People and animals develop superstitions the exact same way. Our brains are wired to see connections and correlations, not coincidences and happenstance. Moreover, our brains are wired to believe that a correlation is also a cause. The same part of the brain that lets us learn what we need to know and find the things we need to stay alive is also the part of the brain that produces delusional thinking and conspiracy theories.
ANIMAL FRIENDS AND FAMILIES
On top of the four primal emotions, all animals and birds have four basic social emotions: sexual attraction and lust, separation distress, social attachment, and the happy emotions of play and roughhousing.
Sexual Attraction and Lust
Sex is another area where you see funky evolution thanks to human interventions. One example: American breeders have started selecting for much leaner pigs, because Americans want to eat leaner cuts of meat. So far the leaner pigs are healthy, but their personalities are completely different. They’re super-nervous and high-strung. No one knows why this happens, although it might have to do with myelin, which is the fatty sheath surrounding the nerve cell axons that helps signals pass from one brain cell to another. Myelin is made of pure fat, so it’s possible that when you breed a pig to have less fat you interfere with myelin production in some way. Lower myelin levels could produce jumpy animals because inhibitory signals—the chemical signals that tell other neurons not to fire—don’t get through from one neuron to another. The animal can’t calm itself down. That’s one theory, anyway.
Lean pigs are also a lot less sexual. In China the pigs are all fat, and the mama pig makes way more piglets. A fat Chinese mother pig will have a litter of twenty-one piglets compared to just ten or twelve piglets in a lean American sow’s litter. And the fat Chinese boars are super-sexy. When they brought them to the University of Illinois the boars would magically slip out of their pens and breed the sows whenever the staff wasn’t around, something no American pig would do. They had nonstop sex on their minds and they turned into Houdini to have sex. All the fat Chinese pigs were super-calm and super-sexy. The females were really good mamas, too.
Sex is a very strong drive in any animal, so humans who take care of animals always have to be dealing with their sexuality one way or another. Either you want to prevent your animals from breeding, or you’re trying to get them to breed successfully, and both goals have their challenges.
You can prevent unwanted breeding easily enough by neutering an animal, but you can’t necessarily prevent all the behaviors that go along with breeding, especially not if you neuter an animal relatively late in its life after all its mature sexual behaviors have come in. That happened with our Siamese cat BeeLee when I was little. We neutered him pretty late, after his spraying behaviors were well established. One time we moved to a new house where we stacked all our pictures in the hall, waiting to be hung on the walls. BeeLee saw his reflection in the glass of the pictures, and he sprayed every single one. There were about thirty-five pictures altogether, and he completely ruined twenty of them. We had to throw them out. The rest were stinky, but we put them up anyway.
HOW TO MAKE A PIG FALL IN LOVE
Like all complex beh
avior, sexual attraction and mate selection depend on learning. The sex act itself is a hardwired fixed action pattern, like the rooster’s courtship dance. It’s hardwired into the brain, and an animal is born knowing how to do it. He doesn’t have to be taught. But an animal does have to learn from other animals who he’s supposed to mate with and who he’s not supposed to mate with.
We know this partly because there’ve been so many stories over the years of animals who got mixed up in this area. There’s a book called The Parrot Who Owns Me, written by an ornithologist at Rutgers University who adopted a thirty-year-old parrot after his owners died. The parrot got so attached to his new owner that he decided she was his mate. Every spring he would court her. He would shred newspaper to make a nest, he would kiss her, he would hoard food to share with her, and he would attack her husband if he saw him getting too affectionate with his wife. Then later on he’d act sorry for being mean to the husband.18 There’s also the famous story of A Moose for Jessica, about the moose in Vermont who fell in love with a Hereford cow named Jessica and courted her in her pasture for seventy-six days.19
Breeding domestic animals can be easy or hard, depending on the animal.
Cows and sheep are the easiest. Some cow and sheep breeding is done au naturel; they just send the males out in the pasture with the females, and they breed. The one thing you do have to be careful about with cattle is dominance hierarchies with the bulls. The most dominant bull doesn’t necessarily have the best semen or the best genes. So if the top bull is shooting blanks and chasing off all your good bulls, that’s bad. You have to try to put enough bulls out with the cows that one dominant bull won’t breed them all.
Most of the dairy cattle breeding is done by artificial insemination, which is easy with cattle. You don’t have to do anything special with the females. You just thread a catheter into their wombs and inject the semen and that’s it.
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