Animals in Translation

by Temple Grandin

  HOW DO ANIMALS KNOW WHAT’S SCARY?

  There’s a fair amount of research showing that certain basic fears are built into animals and people. The visual cliff experiments I described in Chapter 2, showing very young children and animals refusing to crawl or walk over what looks to them like a cliff, are an example of an innate, inborn fear. No one has to teach young humans or animals to fear heights. They already know.

  More recently, Jaak Panksepp found that laboratory-reared rats who’ve never seen or smelled a cat stop playing the instant you put a tuft of cat hair in their play space. Since frightened animals don’t play, that’s a good indication that those rats are afraid. “The animals moved furtively,” Dr. Panksepp says in Affective Neuroscience, “cautiously sniffing the fur and other parts of their environment. They seemed to sense that something was seriously amiss.”17

  This experience got Dr. Panksepp to thinking about how many research laboratories might be messing up their results due to researchers’ coming to work smelling like their pet cats. The Pet Food Institute says there were 75 million pet cats living in the United States in 2002. That’s a lot of cats. Since a huge amount of what we know about the psychology of learning and behavior comes from lab rats, you have to wonder how much of that knowledge came from terrified rats. This is an extremely important question, because learning done in a state of fear is different from learning done in a state of calm. I’ll get to how it’s different shortly.

  Dr. Panksepp didn’t have a pet cat, but he did have a dog, a Norwegian elkhound named Ginny. He realized he had to find out whether his own research was being affected by the fact that he was coming to work every day smelling like elkhound. So he covered his rats’ play space with a massive amount of Ginny’s hair, and—nothing happened. The rats kept right on frolicking and playing. Dr. Panksepp thinks this is evidence that ancient rats weren’t hunted too much by ancient dogs.18

  UNIVERSAL FEARS

  We know what most of the almost certainly innate fears are. All children under the age of two are afraid of sudden sounds, pain, strange new objects, and losing physical support.19 After age two, children lose these fears. That’s decent evidence that these fears are innate. Every child has them at the same age, then every child loses them at the same age.

  Older children and adults also have a set of universal fears that may or may not be innate: sudden sounds, a stranger walking toward you with an angry look on his face, snakes, spiders, dark places, and high places. Animals have whole sets of similar fears. Most mammals don’t like snakes, and all animals are frightened by sudden sounds. Animals don’t like anything sudden at all.

  Other animal fears are more specific to each species. Mice and rats, for instance, don’t like well-lit open spaces. If you plop a lab rat down in the middle of an open room in broad daylight he’ll freeze and defecate. That makes sense for a small prey animal like a rat whose best bet for not getting killed is to stay out of reach and out of sight. All those old Tom and Jerry cartoons are ethologically correct: mice like mice holes. Small prey animals are happiest in small, dark places where larger predators can’t get to them.

  Big prey animals like cows and horses, on the other hand, are fine with wide-open spaces. They’d have to be or they couldn’t get enough food to eat. If you’re a thousand-pound animal trying to live on grass, you need a lot of grazing space. To stay safe, herd animals like horses and cows create their own “small space” by clustering together in groups. You’ll always find the dominant animals standing in the middle of the herd where it’s safest, too. That way they’ve got a lot of animal shields standing between them and whatever predator comes along.

  Predator animals like wolves seem to be perfectly happy out in the open, but even they like to nap and sleep together inside a small den, where other predators can’t get at them. In short, all animals, predator or prey, have natural-seeming fears of the natural dangers their worlds present.

  IT’S EASIER TO LEARN SOME FEARS THAN OTHERS

  But the story doesn’t end there, because animals (and people) also have a number of fears that fall somewhere between innate and learned. These are fears that are extremely easy to pick up, like snake phobias in people. Snake phobias are common, and no snake has ever bitten most of the people who have them. Some people with snake phobias may never even have seen a snake outside a photograph. And yet they’re terrified by the very thought of a snake.

  That wouldn’t necessarily seem like evidence that snake phobias are semi-innate if it weren’t for the fact that people don’t easily develop phobias to all kinds of things that are much more dangerous nowadays, like automobiles or electrical outlets. I’m not even sure a person can develop a car phobia per se. People who’ve been in bad accidents can and do develop post-traumatic stress syndrome, but they don’t feel fear just looking at a photograph of a car, as people with snake phobias do looking at a picture of a snake. They’re terrified of riding in a car, but the fear doesn’t spread any further.

  Animals show the same bias toward certain fears and against others. Psychologist Susan Mineka’s experiments with monkeys and snakes at Northwestern University are probably the most important evidence we have of this. She started with the fact that monkeys living in the wild are terrified of snakes, while monkeys raised in labs are not.20 Show a live snake to a bunch of wild-reared monkeys and they explode. They make faces, flap their ears, grip the bars of their cages, and their hair stands on end (piloerection). Wild-reared monkeys refuse to even look at the snakes; that’s how aversive the presence of a snake is to a wild-reared monkey.

  But show the same snake to a monkey who grew up in the lab and nothing happens. He’s not worried. So obviously monkeys don’t come into the world already knowing snakes are bad. Somebody has to teach them.

  What Dr. Mineka showed is that it’s super-easy to teach a lab monkey to be just as terrified of snakes as any monkey living out in the wild. When Dr. Mineka exposed her fearless monkeys to wild-reared monkeys acting afraid of snakes, the lab monkeys instantly got scared themselves, and they stayed scared. All they had to do was watch one snake-scared monkey, and they were snake-scared for life themselves. It took only a few minutes. Moreover, the lab-reared monkeys learned the same level of fear the demonstrator monkeys showed. If the demonstrator monkey was scared but not panicked, the observer monkey learned to be scared but not panicked, too. If the demonstrator monkey was terrified, the observer monkey learned to be terrified.

  And, after learning snake fear through observation, the lab-reared monkey was just as good a fear model for other lab-reared monkeys as the wild-reared monkey had been for him.

  Dr. Mineka also showed that it’s impossible to teach a monkey to be afraid of a flower using the same technique. She showed her lab monkeys videotapes of a flower followed by a shot of a monkey acting terrified, making it look like the monkey on the tape was terrified of the flower. That tape had no effect. Watching a video of a monkey acting afraid of a snake scared the lab monkeys to death; watching a video of a monkey acting afraid of a flower didn’t faze them.

  Most researchers have concluded that the fear of snakes is semi-innate. Monkeys aren’t born fearing snakes, but they are born ready to fear snakes at the first hint of trouble. Animal behaviorists call snakes a prepared stimulus, meaning that monkeys have been prepared by evolution easily to acquire a fear of snakes.

  Dr. Mineka also found she could protect an animal from developing a fear the same way. If she first exposed a lab-reared monkey to another lab-reared monkey not acting afraid of a snake, that gave him “immunity.” After that, if he saw a wild-reared monkey acting scared of the snake, he did not develop snake fear himself. He held on to his first lesson.

  LEARNING BY WATCHING

  This is called observational learning. When it comes to evolutionary fears, as well as to many other areas of learning, animals and people learn by watching what other animals or people do, not by doing something themselves and learning from the consequences. I have the im
pression this lesson hasn’t quite been absorbed by most educators. You read that hands-on learning is best, but that may not always be so. Obviously evolution has selected for strong observational learning in animals and in humans. One of the most amazing examples of this is in Frans de Waal’s book The Ape and the Sushi Master. Dr. de Waal says that in Japan, apprentice sushi cooks spend three years just watching the sushi master prepare sushi. When the apprentice finally prepares his first sushi, he does a good job of it.21

  Dr. Mineka’s research shows how people and animals can develop phobias without ever having had a bad experience with the thing they’re afraid of. Classical learning theory always assumed people learn phobias through direct experience. That’s logical, but it doesn’t correspond to reality, because lots of phobic people can’t remember any initial bad experience. Probably most people with fear of flying, just to give a common example, have never come close to crashing.

  So a lot of therapists had suspected that phobias are contagious, that people can “catch” a phobia by hanging around people who already have it. Dr. Mineka’s research showed that not only is it possible to learn a phobia by being exposed to someone else who has that phobia, it’s incredibly natural and easy to acquire a phobia this way. Fear is contagious.

  The fact that animals learn what to be afraid of from watching other animals is another example of evolution giving animals and people an ability to ward off trouble before it happens. If you’re Mother Nature and you decide to set things up so everybody learns what to be afraid of through direct, hands-on personal experience, you’re going to lose a lot of animals. The only monkeys you’d have around to propagate the species would be monkeys who’d had the good luck never to meet up with a snake in the first place, or monkeys who did meet up with a snake and lived to tell the tale. The odds of keeping monkeys on the planet are going to be a lot higher if you set things up so monkeys learn about snakes from other monkeys.

  AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS

  Of course, it’s not going to be much use learning about snakes in the safety of your monkey community if you don’t remember what you know the next time you run into one. What happens if your monkey elders tell you snakes are bad news, and it slips your mind?

  When you think about how much stuff you’ve forgotten in your life (quick! what’s the quadratic equation?) it’s kind of horrifying to think that our survival depends on remembering all the bad stuff we’re supposed to be afraid of.

  Evolution solved that problem by making fear learning permanent. All intensely emotional learning is permanent. That’s why you can forget everything you ever learned in trigonometry, but no one born before 1958 is ever going to forget where they were when Kennedy was shot, and no one born before 1996 is ever going to forget where they were on September 11. You couldn’t forget where you were even if you wanted to, and even if you tried to.

  The story is a little different with lesser traumas and fears. Animals and people certainly act as if they can forget a milder fear, and in the past behaviorists did quite a bit of research on this. Typically researchers would teach an animal to be afraid of something neutral, such as a light or a tone; then teach the animals to stop being afraid of the light or tone. They did this by pairing the conditioned stimulus, which was the light or the tone, with something aversive, like a shock to the foot or a puff of air to the eye.

  Under those conditions, pretty quickly an animal would start reacting fearfully to the light or the tone, at which point the experimenters stopped pairing the light or tone with anything bad. Sure enough, after a while the animals stopped reacting badly to the light or the tone. Behaviorists called this phenomenon extinction, because they had extinguished the response. The animals seemed to have forgotten that lights or tones were scary. Researchers found the same thing in humans.

  However, it turns out that extinction doesn’t actually wipe out the fear from your brain. It’s still there. If you teach an animal to fear a tone that precedes an air puff to the eye, and then teach him not to fear the tone because there’s no more air puff, he hasn’t forgotten. He stops blinking reflexively every time he hears the tone, but all you have to do to get him blinking again is to pair the tone with the air puff again just once and the animal is right back where he started. He knows that tone means air puff. He hasn’t forgotten.

  Both animals and people can “get over” a learned fear. But today we understand that getting over a fear isn’t the same thing as forgetting a fear. Extinction isn’t forgetting; it’s new learning that contradicts old learning. Both lessons—tone is neutral and tone is bad—stay in emotional memory.

  FAST FEAR, SLOW FEAR

  When you spend a lot of time with animals it’s easy to see that animal fears are worse than human fears a lot of the time. It’s also easy to see that you, as a human, share certain core fears with animals.

  Cows don’t like snakes, and neither do you. You and any cow you meet see eye-to-eye on that one.

  But beyond that, it’s hard for people to empathize with an animal’s fears. A lot of times it’s hard even to know what an animal’s fears are. I get a lot of calls from people who can’t figure out what’s getting their animals so upset. I’ll go out to a plant that’s having problems and find the manager standing there in the middle of what looks like a perfectly normal, perfectly safe feedlot to him, and he’s got a couple hundred head of cattle having conniptions. He has no idea why.

  To understand animal fears it pays to know something about the brain. One of the most important researchers in the neurology of fear is Joseph LeDoux of New York University. In his book The Emotional Brain, Dr. LeDoux explains that fear happens in the amygdala.22 What’s really interesting for nonscientists is that he’s found there are two kinds of fear in the brain: fast fear and slow fear, which he calls the low road and the high road.

  The high road gives you slow fear for a simple reason: its physical path through the brain is longer than the low road. On the high road, a scary stimulus, such as the sight of a snake in your path, comes in through the senses and goes to the thalamus, located deep inside the brain. The thalamus directs it up to the cortex, at the top of the brain, for analysis. That’s why Dr. LeDoux calls slow fear the high road. The information has to travel all the way up to the top of the brain. When it gets there the cortex decides that what you’re looking at is a snake, then sends this information—it’s a snake!—back down to the amygdala, and you feel afraid. The whole process takes twenty-four milliseconds.

  The low road takes half the time. Using the fast fear system, you see a snake in your path, the sensory data goes to your thalamus, and from there it goes directly over to your amygdala, which is also located deep inside the brain, in the temporal lobes at the side of your head. The whole process takes twelve milliseconds. Dr. LeDoux calls fast fear the low road because the sensory information doesn’t have to travel up to the top of the brain. The cortex is out of the loop.

  Both systems operate at the same time, with the same sensory inputs. This means that the thalamus receives potentially frightening sensory data and sends it two places: both to the cortex and to the amygdala. If you’re looking at a snake, the fast fear system has you jumping out of the way in twelve milliseconds; then, twelve milliseconds later, you get a second jolt of fear from the exact same information finally arriving at the amygdala after having been routed through the cortex for closer analysis.

  Dr. LeDoux thinks the reason our brains are set up to work this way is that evolution couldn’t put both speed and accuracy into the same system. The fast road, he says, is quick and dirty. You’re walking down a path, you see something long, thin, and dark in the path, and your amygdala screams, “It’s a snake!” Twelve milliseconds later your cortex has the second opinion: either, “It’s definitely a snake!” or, “It’s just a stick.” That doesn’t sound like very much time, but it makes all the difference in the world to whether you get bitten by that snake or not, assuming it is a snake and not a stick. The reason fast fear can be
so fast is that accuracy is sacrificed for speed. Fast fear gives you a rough draft of reality.

  It’s the cortex that does the precision rendering of the world, so it’s the cortex that can tell a snake from a stick. But that takes time, and time is exactly what you don’t have when you’re looking at a snake. Dr. LeDoux thinks nature evolved this system because it’s better to be safe than sorry: it’s better to mistake a stick for a snake than to keep walking toward a snake bite while your cortex is still forming an opinion.

  The other thing to know is that high road fear is conscious, while low road fear is not. High road fear is conscious because it’s been through the cortex, which makes you consciously aware of what’s scaring you. I’m scared of that snake sitting there in the middle of the road. That’s conscious, high road fear. With low road fear you react unconsciously, or mindlessly. You’re running away before you know what you’re running away from.

  WEIRD FEAR

  One of the really interesting things about memory is that conscious memory is much more fragile than unconscious memory. The terminology for different kinds of memory gets confusing, partly because different fields use totally different terms for conscious and unconscious memory. Some fields talk about declarative versus procedural; other fields talk about explicit memory versus implicit memory. I’ll mostly stick to conscious and unconscious, but when it makes sense to use other terms, I will.

  Conscious memory handles the kinds of things we call “school learning,” facts, figures, dates, names, and so on. If you think about how much of what you learned in school you’ve forgotten you’ll get a good idea of how fragile it is. Unconscious learning is much more stable and long-lasting. The old saying about how you never forget how to ride a bicycle is a perfect example. It’s true: you don’t ever forget how to ride a bicycle once you’ve learned.23 You can have significant brain damage from a stroke, and you’re still likely to remember how to ride a bicycle. It’s very tough to wipe out unconscious memory.