Animals in Translation

by Temple Grandin

  To most people, this doesn’t make sense. We humans tend to think of emotions as dangerous forces that need to be strictly controlled by reason and logic. But that’s not how the brain works. In the brain logic and reason are never separate from emotion. Even nonsense syllables have an emotional charge, either positive or negative. Nothing is neutral. That’s what you have to remember.

  I want to stick with this idea for a little bit longer, because it’s important to understanding what fear means to an animal. The reason most people think logic is more important than feeling is that we aren’t usually aware of the connection between the two. A lot of people’s emotional life is unconscious a lot of the time, especially when you’re calmly thinking something through. You feel like you’re just using logic, but you’re actually using logic guided by emotion. You just aren’t aware of the emotion. Not only that, but sometimes when you are aware of your emotions, because you’re passionate about an issue or a person, you make bad decisions and you blame the emotion. And, of course, most of us definitely think other people’s emotional decisions are dumb!

  We’re half right about all of this. A lot of obviously emotional decisions probably are dumb a lot of the time. But the problem isn’t the fact that emotion was involved. Everyone uses emotion to make decisions. People with brain damage to their emotional systems have a horrible time making any decision at all, and when they do make a decision it’s usually bad. The problem isn’t the emotion; the problem is that the emotions they’re using are dumb.

  I recommend Descartes’ Error to anyone who’s interested in emotions, intuition, and decision making. Dr. Damasio has done a huge amount of work with frontal lobe patients who lost the ability to have what we call a gut feeling. Even though these patients still had completely normal IQs and logical reasoning abilities, they couldn’t function as normal adults. They needed other adults to take care of them, and after Dr. Damasio testified for one of them in court he qualified for permanent disability payments.

  The really interesting thing is why these people can’t function. On paper, it seems like they ought to be able to manage their lives just fine. They pass most or even all of the standard neuropsychological tests. Elliot, Dr. Damasio’s patient, had a high IQ and tested well on “perceptual ability, past memory, short-term memory, new learning, language, and the ability to do arithmetic.”12 His attention was good, and so was his working memory.

  Working memory, by the way, is the part of your memory that performs work. When you hold a phone number in mind while you dial you’re using working memory. Or, if you’re a researcher or a writer, working memory holds two different ideas in mind while you’re trying to figure out how they’re related. Working memory also searches your brain for any other ideas that might be related to the first two. In other words, working memory is in charge both of finding things in long-term memory and of holding those items in conscious memory so you can use them once they’re found. If you’ve got working memory deficits—which I do—it’s a problem.

  Elliot’s working memory was fine. All of his cognitive abilities tested out fine, too; on paper there wasn’t anything wrong with him.

  It took Dr. Damasio a long time to figure out what it was Elliot couldn’t do, and what he found relates directly to animals and their emotions. What Elliot couldn’t do was have a proper emotional response to life. Dr. Damasio writes, “I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, no frustration with my incessant and repetitious questioning…. [In the rest of his life] he tended not to display anger, and on the rare occasions when he did, the outburst was swift; in no time he would be his usual new self, calm and without grudges.”13

  Elliot hadn’t just lost the big emotions like fear and anger, either. He’d lost his visceral emotions, the kind of thing you feel when you look at a photograph of a terrible accident or a wounded animal—or, on the positive side, a happy child or a sunset. He was mostly an emotional blank.

  Why was that such a huge problem? Because people and animals use their emotions to predict the future and make decisions about what to do. That’s what Elliot couldn’t do after his brain damage: he couldn’t predict the future, so he couldn’t decide what to do about the future. He’d get stuck in endless deliberations instead. One time when Dr. Damasio asked him what day he wanted to come to the office next week, Elliot pulled out his date book and spent a full half-hour going through all the pros and cons of each one of the two days Dr. Damasio had suggested. He went on and on and on, spelling out all the possible consequences of either choice and never reaching a conclusion. Finally Dr. Damasio just picked one of the days. Without visceral emotion, Elliot couldn’t automatically predict which day would be better and which day would be worse; he also couldn’t tell whether the two days would be equally good or equally bad. He couldn’t decide about the future.

  If he did manage to take an action, it was almost always the wrong one. His judgment was shot.

  But he sure did great on all those tests. Eventually one of Dr. Damasio’s graduate students developed a test that picked up the difference between Elliot and people whose brains were normal. They called it the Gambling Test. In the test, the subject, who is called the Player, starts out with $2,000 in play money and four decks of cards to draw from. All he knows about the game is that every card he turns over will win him money, but a few of the cards will also require him to pay a “fine” to the experimenters, so he takes a loss on those draws. The goal is to try not to lose any of the loaned money and to win as much extra money as possible.

  What the player doesn’t know is that decks A and B give you really high wins but also really high losses. Decks C and D give you lower wins and lower losses. If you could sit down and do the math you’d find out that in the end you come out ahead drawing from Decks C and D. But that’s not allowed, because the Gambling Test is supposed to be like life: it’s uncertain. You don’t know what’s going to happen, so you don’t know, for sure, what to do. You have to rely on intuition; you have to develop a feeling for which decks are the good ones.

  That’s what emotions do. Emotions let you develop hunches. They give you a feeling—and it really is a feeling—for what’s going to happen in the future so you can make the right decision about what to do.

  Elliot flunked the test. He started out like everyone else, picking cards from Decks A and B because the payoff was so high. But he didn’t change to Decks C and D when he noticed his money dwindling down to nothing. People with normal brains, and even people with other kinds of brain damage (including language disorders!) start to get a bad feeling about Decks A and B pretty quickly. Once they have that bad feeling they switch to Decks C and D. But Elliot never switched. Although he understood perfectly well that he was losing his shirt, he never got a bad feeling about A and B, so he never switched to C and D. He just kept on picking cards from A and B and going deeper into debt.

  USING EMOTIONS TO PREDICT THE FUTURE

  A healthy animal is the exact opposite of an emotional blank, and he makes sound, emotion-based decisions all the time. He has to; otherwise he’d be dead. The single most important thing emotions do for an animal is to allow him to predict the future. We didn’t always know that, but thanks to research we do now.

  Animal behaviorists have learned that emotions work a lot like hunger. It’s easy to see that the whole point of hunger is to keep you alive and functioning. Hunger makes you get up off your comfy seat on the sofa, or up off your comfy seat on a rock inside your cave, and go find something to eat. But what most people don’t know is that hunger isn’t just a motivator of action, it’s also a predictor of the future. Your body doesn’t wait until the last possible moment to get hungry. Instead you get hungry long before you’re in danger of running out of the energy you need to keep on finding and consuming food. Hunger is an early warning system.

  Nature is filled with systems just like the hunger system, and that includes our emotional system. Emotions don’
t just give you motivation; they give you information—information about the future and what you need to do about it.

  The way our bodies work reminds me of a question productivity consultants ask companies about when they deal with problems. Do they deal with a problem when it shows up, or when it blows up?14 The right answer is “when it shows up.” Companies that wait until the last minute to handle a problem end up handling a much bigger problem than they would have if they’d jumped on it as soon as they knew about it.

  It’s the same way with nature, only nature goes management consultants one further: Mother Nature tries to keep us out of trouble in the first place. This isn’t speculation. We know that emotions work by letting animals predict the future thanks to research into fear and the sense of smell in rats.15 All mammals have two systems for smell: a close-up system (called the accessory olfactory system, or AOS) and a distant system (the main olfactory system, or MOS). The close-up system is extremely close-up; an animal almost has to be touching an object to smell it using the AOS.

  Although it’s not a mammal, the snake is a good example of the AOS. Snakes smell the air by flicking their tongues in and out. When they do that they are actually catching air molecules on their tongues and moving them to the roofs of their mouths, where the AOS is located.16

  When it comes to picking up a predator’s scent, the close-up system lets a rat smell a cat that’s sitting no more than a foot or two away. The distant system lets rats smell a cat way off in the distance.

  So naturally everyone assumed that rats—and any animal who’s vulnerable to being attacked and eaten—would use their distant smell system to stay out of danger. It just stood to reason that if you’re a rat and you don’t react to a cat until you’re face-to-face with it, it’s too late. You’re lunch.

  But it turns out that’s not the way things work at all. The distant system isn’t connected to fear centers in the rat’s brain, and the smell of a predator in the distance does not motivate a rat to flee. The distant smell system doesn’t affect a rat emotionally or behaviorally at all.

  It’s the close-up system that’s connected to the fear centers in the rat’s brain, and it’s the close-up system that activates survival behaviors like freezing in place or fleeing. It’s the close-up system that keeps rats alive. We know this from experiments comparing rats whose close-up system has been disconnected from the rest of the brain to rats whose long-distance system has been disconnected. (This is done by snipping the fibers connecting the two inside the brain.) Only rats who have an intact close-up smell system act scared when they smell a predator. The instant they smell cat they freeze and start dropping more pellets of poop, classic signs of fear. The rats whose brains are getting input only from long-distance smell don’t react at all. They feel nothing emotionally.

  Researchers were stunned to get this result. It was completely counterintuitive, because why would nature want a rat to wait to get scared until he’s standing face-to-face with a cat?

  The answer is nature wouldn’t want that, and that’s not what nature did. What nature did by linking close-up smell to fear was to give the rat the ability to predict the future.

  Here’s how it works. In the wild, rats get scared when they wander into a place where a predator has been in the past. There’s no cat there now (or let’s hope not), but there’s plenty of cat smell, and the rat is right on top of it when his close-smell system picks up the scent. Since most predators are territorial, where a cat has been in the past is an excellent indication of where it’s going to be in the future. So the rat’s close-up “scary smell” system lets it predict where any cats in the area are going to be and then get out of the way before they get there. It’s an early warning system. Animal emotions help animals stay out of trouble in the first place, which is a very good idea if you’re a rat. It’s probably a good idea if you’re a dog or a cat, too. Cats might want to stay away from major dog spots, and dogs who’ve lost fights might want to stay away from spots the victor dog is going to be visiting soon.

  It seems like Mother Nature thinks an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And emotions are essential to prevention. A healthy fear system keeps animals, and people, alive by allowing them to predict the future.

  When you think about emotions as a prediction system, it stands to reason that close-up smell would be wired to fear. But it’s still not obvious why nature would wire up a rat’s brain so that it doesn’t feel fear when it smells a real live cat off in the distance. Shouldn’t a rat who knows there’s a cat in the detectable distance be motivated to put even more distance between itself and death-by-cat?

  I don’t think so. Fear is such an overwhelming emotion for an animal that evolution probably selected for brain systems that keep it under control. Propagating a species takes more than just not getting eaten. All creatures need to eat, sleep, mate, have babies, and feed and protect the young until they’re big enough to fend for themselves. To do all that, a rat has to have some time off from fear. If rats froze in place every time they smelled a cat in the distance they could be frozen around the clock, depending on the neighborhood where they live.

  My explanation is ad hoc, of course. You can’t know why one thing evolved and another thing didn’t, and it’s a mistake to assume that everything we see in nature serves a purpose. Evolution can be random, and some things are probably just the side effects of other characteristics that did give animals an edge when it came to survival. But I think wiring close-up smell to fear probably did confer an evolutionary advantage. Until someone else comes up with a better idea, it makes sense to me.

  The same basic principle (close-up = fear; distant = calm) probably applies to other senses as well. Take vision, for instance. People are always struck by how nonchalant prey animals are when they see a predator who can’t get to them—not just nonchalant but sometimes downright provocative. A friend of mine once watched a squirrel in a tree tease a cat way down on the ground for a full half hour. The squirrel would creep down the trunk, getting closer and closer to the cat, looking it straight in the eye, until finally the cat sprang. Then the squirrel would scamper back up to safety and the cat would have to drop back down to the ground, because the trunk was too long for the cat to make it all the way up to where the branches began. There’s no way for me to know what was in that squirrel’s brain, but to my friend it sure looked like the squirrel was deliberately taunting the cat. He definitely wasn’t frightened, because a frightened squirrel, just like a frightened rat, displays very specific behaviors like freezing in place. This was not a frightened squirrel.

  He was definitely using his vision (he was probably smelling the cat, too), because he was staring at the cat intently. So obviously the sight of a predator out of the range of danger does not activate a squirrel’s fear system. I suspect that if you surgically removed his close-up smell system and put him eyeball-to-eyeball with a cat, he’d panic. Distant predators don’t fire up fear; close predators—or close signs of predators, like smell—do.

  You see the same thing with dogs. Dogs know when other dogs are on a leash. Another friend of mine lives with a young male dog named Jazzie who’s part Rottweiler. Jazzie is an extremely dominant dog, so he’s always trying to get in fights. My friend’s husband says Jazzie takes offense at any dog who’s not “minding his own business,” which means a dog foolish enough to look Jazzie in the eye. According to Jazzie, a dog who happens to enter his body space is supposed to bow his head and avert his eyes. Maybe a cat can look at a king, as the saying goes, but a dog definitely cannot look at Jazzie. He’s going to get chomped if he does.

  Jazzie lives next door to an unneutered golden retriever named Max whom he’s tangled with a couple of times. For a while after that everything was fine because Max acknowledged Jazzie as the leader. Whenever Max got within a certain distance of Jazzie he would avert his eyes and then, if the distance between them got even smaller, drop to the ground. Both dogs seemed to know how close it was okay for the two of
them to be without Max having to look away or drop to the ground.

  But if Jazzie happened to be on a leash, forget it. Max would drop all his submissive behaviors and carry on like Jazzie was no more threat than a flea. Max would also act outrageous whenever Jazzie was behind the sliding glass doors looking at him. My friend said it was hilarious watching the two of them. Max would look straight at Jazzie—just like that squirrel—then wander nonchalantly around the deck, peeing all over the place.

  It’s the same story with deer, who are some of the most timid animals on the planet. Jazzie’s house has an invisible fence and the deer know exactly where the electronic perimeter is. They’ll calmly stand outside the boundary munching grass. Every once in a while they’ll give Jazzie a direct stare, a challenging behavior no prey animal would ever do to a dog close enough to strike. Those deer know Jazzie can’t get to them, so they aren’t afraid. Distant-sense sensory systems do not activate fear.

  The total disconnect between distance sensing and fear is really striking in the wild. A herd of antelope won’t show the tiniest concern about a pride of lions sunning themselves not too far away. When you observe these animals you see that prey animals are very aware of whether or not a predator is stalking them. They know what stalking behavior looks like, and if they don’t see stalking behavior they don’t worry.

  So we have a lot of evidence that animals are put together in such a fashion that they have a good chance of not getting frightened any more often than they have to. Nature seems to have tried to wire animals and people to have useful emotions, useful meaning emotions that keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Emotions keep us alive by letting us make good predictions about the future, and good predictions let us make good decisions about what comes next.