2. Ibid.
3. Credit for this goes to John Siegal and his work on cats at the University of Medicine in New Jersey.
4. Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 194.
5. Ibid., p. 198.
6. Debra Niehoff, The Biology of Violence (New York: Free Press, 2002).
7. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, p. 168.
8. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994).
9. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, p. 194.
10. M. J. Raleigh, M. T. McGuire, G. L. Brammer., D. B. Pollack, and A. Yuwiler, “Serotonergic Mechanisms Promote Dominance Acquisition in Adult Male Vervet Monkeys,” Brain Research 559 (1991): 181–90.
11. Nicholas H. Dodman, If Only They Could Speak: Stories about Pets and Their People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), pp. 130–44.
12. The Monks of New Skete, How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend: the Classic Training Manual for Dog Owners (Revised & Updated Edition) (New York: Little, Brown, 2002).
13. Sacks et al., “Special Report.”
14. Rachel Smolker, To Touch a Wild Dolphin (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2001).
15. William J. Broad, “Evidence Puts Dolphins in New Light, as Killers,” New York Times, July 6, 1999, http://www.fishingnj.org/artdolphagress.htm.
16. “Pull Fido pull!” New Scientist 19 (January 2002): 24.
17. Michael D. Lemonick, “Young, Single and Out of Control,” Time (October 20, 1997).
18. John McGlone, Pig Production: Biological Principles and Applications (Clifton Park, NY: Delmar Learning, 2002).
19. Ed Price and S. J. R. Wallach, “Physical Isolation of Herd Reared Hereford Bulls Increases Aggressiveness Towards Humans,” Appl Anim Behav Sci 27 (1990): 263–67.
20. L. S. Shore, “The Question of Dogs, Off-Leash Safety, and Recreation,” A Review of the Literature on Dog Bites (April 12, 2002): 2.
21. Nicholas Dodman, The Dog Who Loved Too Much: Tales, Treatments, and the Psychology of Dogs (New York: Bantam, 1996), p. 75.
22. Ibid., pp. 71–74.
23. Nicholas H. Dodman et al., “Comparison of Personality Inventories of Owners of Dogs With and Without Behavior Problems,” The International Journal of Applied Research 2, no. 1.
24. P. M. Barrett, R. M. Rapee, M. M. Dadds, and S. M. Ryan, “Family Enhancement of Cognitive Style in Anxious and Aggressive Children,” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 24 (1996): 187–99.
25. Z. Viryani, J. Topal, M. Gacsi, A. Miklosi, and V. Csanyi, “Dogs Respond Appropriately to Cues of Humans’ Attemntional Focus,” Behav Process 66, no. 2 (may 31, 2004): 161–72.
Chapter 5: Pain and Suffering
1. F. C. Colpaert et al., “Self-Administration of the Analgesic Suprofen in Arthritic Rats: Evidence of Mycobacterium butyricum-Induced Arthritis as an Experimental Model of Chronic Pain,” Life Sci 27 (1980): 921–28.
2. A. V. Apkarian et al., “Prefrontal Cortical Hyperactivity in Patients with Sympathetically Mediated Chronic Pain,” Journal of Neuroscience Letters 311, no. 3 (October 5, 2001): 193–97.
3. Leucotomies are starting to come back again as a treatment for severe pain.
4. Antoinio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994), p. 266.
5. Apkarian et al., “Prefrontal Cortical Hyperactivity” M. R. Milad, I. Vidal-Gonzalez, and G. J. Quirk, “Electrical Stimulation of Medial Prefrontal Cortex Reduces Conditioned Fear in a Temporally Specific Manner,” Behav Neurosci 118, no. 2 (April 2004): 389–94.
6. N. H. Kalin, S. E. Shelton, R. J. Davidson, and A. E. Kelley, “The Primate Amygdala Mediates Acute Fear but Not the Behavioral and Physiological Components of Anxious Temperament,” Journal of Neuroscience 21, no. 6 (March 15, 2001): 2067–74.
7. Ibid.
8. Ruth A. Lanius et al., “The Nature of Traumatic Memories: A 4-T fMRI Functional Connectivity Analysis,” American Journal of Psychiatry 161, no. 1 (January 2004 ): 36–44.
9. Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (New York: Vintage, 1996).
10. Chong Chen et al., “Abnormal Fear Response and Aggressive Behavior in Mutant Mice Deficient for Calcium-Calmodulin Kinase II,” Science 266 (October 14, 1994): 291–94.
11. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, p. 39.
12. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, p. 41.
13. Ibid., p. 44.
14. David Allen, Stress Free Productivity (New York: Viking, 2001).
15. Jaak Panksepp has a good description of these studies in Affective Neuroscience, pp. 221–22.
16. I’d like to thank Jaak Panksepp for this example.
17. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, p. 221.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 231.
20. S. Mineka, “Evolutionary Memories, Emotional Processing, and the Emotional Disorders,” The Psychology of Learning and Motivation 28 (1992): 161–206; Arne Ohman and Susan Mineka, “The Malicious Serpent: Snakes as a Prototypical Stimulus for an Evolved Module of Fear,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 12 (2003): 5–9.
21. Dr. de Waal writes, “The watching of skilled models firmly plants action sequences in the head that come in handy, sometimes much later, when the same tasks need to be carried out.” Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 24.
22. Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
23. If you’re interested in this subject, I recommend Arthur Reber’s Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge. Dr. Reber is one of the major researchers in the field. Arthur S. Reber, Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious (Oxford Psychology Series, No. 19) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
24. LeDoux, Emotional Brain, pp. 254–55.
25. Invisible fences come in an underground buried wire version, and an aboveground wireless version.
26. I’ve heard only one bad story about an invisible fence, but it’s important so I want to share it. A vet told me he had a lady whose dog was getting more and more neurotic, whimpering and crying, refusing to go outside—the dog was frantic. It turned out either the collar or the main unit had malfunctioned, and the dog was getting shocked every time it went outdoors. I’ve never heard of that happening to any other dog and neither had the vet, so I’m telling you about it only because it’s good to know it’s possible. The vet felt terrible about it, because he didn’t know the lady had an invisible fence, and he put the dog through all kinds of medical tests thinking something was medically wrong before they finally figured out the problem. Now he asks all his dog owners if they’re using an invisible fence just so he can have it in his records.
27. Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend (New York: Ballantine, 2002).
28. Lyudmila N. Trut, “Early Canid Domestication: The Farm Fox Experiment,” American Scientist 87, no. 2 (March-April 1999).
29. Benjamin Kilham and Ed Gray, Among the Bears: Raising Orphaned Cubs in the Wild (New York: Owl Books, 2003).
30. Derek Grzelewski, “Otterly Fascinating,” Smithsonian Magazine (November 2002).
Chapter 6: How Animals Think
1. George Page, Inside the Animal Mind: A Groundbreaking Exploration of Animal Intelligence (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), pp. 77–78.
2. S. Watanabe, J. Sakamoto, and M. Wakita, “Pigeons’ Discrimination of Paintings by Monet and Picasso,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 63 (1995): 165–74.
3. J. M. Pearce, “The Acquisition of Concrete and Abstract Categories in Pigeons,” in Current Topics in Animal Learning, L. Dachowski and C.F. Flaherty, eds. (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991), pp. 141–64.
4. Irene Pepperberg, The Alex Studies: Cognitive
and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
5. Autistic children have both poor expressive language and poor receptive language. It’s not just that they can’t talk, or can’t talk very well; they can’t understand other people when they talk, either.
6. Marian Stamp Dawkins, Through Our Eyes Only? The Search for Animal Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Aubrey Manning and Marian Stamp Dawkins, An Introduction to Animal Behaviour (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
7. Thomas Bugnyar, “Leading a Conspecific Away from Food in Ravens (Corvus corax)?” Animal Cognition Paper 1435–9456, 7, no. 2 (April 2004): 69–76.
8. Alex A. S. Weir, Jackie Chappell, and Alex Kacelnik, “Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows,” Science 297, no. 5583 (August 9, 2002): 981.
9. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden Life of Dogs (New York: Pocket Books, 1996).
10. A controlled experiment means you have two groups of subjects, an experimental group and a control group, who are equivalent in every way except for the variable being tested. A pharmaceutical study that gives the drug being tested to one group of subjects and a placebo to another group of subjects is a controlled experiment. The gold standard in experimental research is the double-blind study, where neither the subjects nor the experimenters know which group got which pill until after the study is over.
11. A. Bandura, “The Role of Imitation,” in Social Learning and Personality Development, A. Bandura and R. H. Walters, eds. (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963); A. Bandura, Social Modeling Theory (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1963).
12. Lynn Koegel and her co-author, Claire Lazebnik, a parent of an autistic child, have written an excellent book called Overcoming Autism that I recommend to all parents. Lynn Kern Koegel and Claire Lazebnik, Overcoming Autism (New York: Viking, 2004).
13. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (October 1974): 435–50.
14. A few books have been written about Genie, but the question of how much language she acquired after her mother brought her to the authorities is in dispute. Up until the early 1990s it was believed that Genie learned words but no grammar or syntax. But a critical analysis of all the literature on Genie, done by Peter E. Jones at Sheffield Hallam University, found that she did learn grammar and syntax, and was still learning at the point when her mother refused to let scientists study her any longer. Peter E. Jones, “Contradictions and Unanswered Questions in the Genie Case,” http://www.feralchildren.com/en/pager.php?df=jones1995.
15. Susan Schaller, A Man Without Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
16. There are at least three different lines of evidence that religion is basic to the human brain: (1) religion is universal to all cultures, (2) identical twins separated at birth have the same degree of religiosity as adults, and (3) there is a “God part” of the brain in the temporal lobes that makes you feel the presence of God when it’s stimulated. I suppose it’s possible that the “God part” gets developed only through religious education, but if we’re born with it, then it should be there for language-less people, too.
17. Jonathan Schooler at the University of Pittsburgh, personal communication.
18. K. Louie and M. A. Wilson, “Temporally Structured Replay of Awake Hippocampal Ensemble Activity During Rapid Eye Movement Sleep,” Neuron 29, no. 1 (January 2001): 145–56.
19. Jeremy Gray, Washington University, quoted in Erica Goode, “Study Links Problem-Solving Skills to Brain ‘g’ Spot,” New York Times, February 27, 2003.
20. Clive Thompson, “There’s a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex,” New York Times late edition, sec. 6, October 26, 2003.
21. George Miller published his famous paper, “The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two,” in 1956. The brain is built to hold on to five to nine separate bits of information at the same time. That’s why phone numbers are seven digits. George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81–97. Available online at: http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html.
22. C. N. Slobodchikoff, “Cognition and Communication in Prairie Dogs,” in The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 257–64.
23. Ibid.
24. Sophie Yin and B. McCowan, “Barking in Domestic Dogs: Noise or Communication?” Animal Behavior Society meeting, July 13–17, 2002, Bloomington, IN.
25. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
26. B. Maess et al., “Musical Syntax Is Processed in Broca’s Area: An MEG Study,” Nature Neuroscience 4 (May 2001): 540.
27. Sandra Trehub, Music and Infants (New York: Psychology Press, 2005).
28. T. L. Gottfried, A. Staby, and D. Riester, “Relation of Pitch Glide Perception and Mandarin Tone Identification,” http://www.lawrence.edu/fac/rewgottt/mandmusic.html.
29. P. M. Gray et al., “The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music” Science 291 (2001): 52–54.
30. Luis Baptista, quoted in S. Milius, “Music without Borders,” Science News 157, no. 16 (April 15, 2000): 252.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” Science 298 (November 22, 2002): 1569–79.
34. Irene Pepperberg, “That Damn Bird: A Talk with Irene Pepperberg,” http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pepperberg03/pepperberg_index.html.
Chapter 7: Animal Genius: Extreme Talents
1. K. Scalise, “Secret of the Squirrel Brain: Memory Tricks Investigated in New UC Berkeley Study.” News release, 10/17/97, http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97legacy/10_17_97a.html.
2. Dana Canedy, “Seizure-Alert Dogs May Get Seeing-Eye Status in Florida,” New York Times, March 29, 2002.
3. C. Boesch and M. Tomasello, “Chimpanzee and Human Cultures,” Current Anthropology 39, no. 5 (December 1998): 591–614, http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Boesch_Tomasello_98.html. Boesch and Tomasello write, “This may be called cumulative cultural evolution or the ratchet effect (by analogy with the device that keeps things in place while the user prepares to advance them further).”
4. Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic (New York: Random House, 1992).
5. Hyper-specificity and general intelligence don’t go together in people or in domestic animals like horses and dogs. My guess is they probably don’t go together in dolphins and birds, either, but I don’t know.
6. A. Shah and U. Frith, “An Islet of Ability in Autistic Children: A search Note,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 24 (1983): 613–20.
7. A. W. Snyder and D. J. Mitchell, “Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental Processing?: The Mind’s Secret Arithmetic,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, B 266 (1999): 587–92.
8. Betty Edwards’s book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain starts students off with upside-down drawings. Douglas S. Fox, a writer who did an article about Dr. Snyder’s work for Discover magazine, tried drawing the negative space around a pair of scissors and said, “I felt I was drawing individual lines, not an object, and my drawing wasn’t half bad, either.” He was drawing the separate parts of what he was looking at, not his unified concept. Betty Edwards, The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (New York: Putnam, 1999). Douglas S. Fox, “The Inner Savant,” Discover, vol. 23, no. 2 (February 2002), available online at http://centreforthemind.com/newsmedia/webarchive/discoverinnersavant.cfm.
9. A. W. Snyder et al., “Savant-like Skills Exposed in Normal People by Suppressing the Left Frontotemporal Lobe,” Journal of Integrative Neuroscience 2, no. 2 (December 2003):149–58; B. L. Miller et al., “Emergence of Artistic Talent in Frontotemporal Dementia
,” Neurology 51, no. 4 (October 1998): 978–82; B. L. Miller and C. E. ou, “Portraits of Artists: Emergence of Visual Creativity in Dementia,” Arch Neurol 61, no. 6 (June 2004): 842–44.
10. You can see the drawings if you do a Web search for “Savant-Like Skills Exposed in Normal People by Suppressing the Left Fronto-Temporal Lobe” and click on the pdf file. http://www.centreforthemind.com/whoweare/SavantSkillsJournal.pdf.
11. R. K. Wayne et al., “Multiple and Ancient Origins of the Domestic Dog,” Science 276, no. 13 (June 1997): 1687–89.
12. Shelly Simonds, “Theory Suggests Greater Role for Man’s Best Friend,” ANU Reporter 29, no. 1. http://info.anu.edu.au/mac/Newsletters_and_Journals/ANU_Reporter/_pdf/vol_29_no_01/dogs.html.
13. Simon Benson, “Man and Canine a Top Team,” Daily Telegraph, March 25, 2002.
14. I’m assuming it’s smell rather than a subtle behavioral cue because I don’t think a person would show tiny behavioral changes indicating that her blood sugar is getting dangerously low when she’s asleep. But of course I don’t know. If diabetics do have tiny behavioral changes when their blood sugar is low, a dog is going to be more likely to spot them than a person.
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 1: My Story
Grandin, T. 1995. Thinking in Pictures. New York: Vintage.
———. 1998. Handling Methods and Facilities to Reduce Stress on Cattle, Veterinary Clinics of North America, 14:325–41.
———. 2000. Livestock Handling and Transport. Wallingford, U.K.: CABI Publishing.
———. 2000. My Mind on a Web Browser: How People with Autism Think. Cerebrum (Winter): 13–22.
———. 2003 Transferring Results of Behavioral Research to Industry to Improve Animal Welfare on the Farm, Ranch, and the Slaughter Plant. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 81:215–28
Hov, C., et al. 2000. Artistic Savants. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, and Behavioral Neurology 13:29–38.
Voisinet, B. D., T. Grandin, J. D. Tatum, S. F. O’Conner, and J. J. Strothers. 1997. Feedlot Cattle with Calm Temperaments Have Higher Average Daily Gains Than Cattle with Excitable Temperaments. Journal of Animal Science 75:892–96.
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