GoatMan

by Thomas Thwaites

  In her decision, Justice Jaffe rejected many of the arguments made by the attorney acting on behalf of Stony Brook, but found herself, “for now,” bound by precedent from an earlier case, where it was decided a chimpanzee couldn’t legally be a person because it could not bear the duties and responsibilities of society. The NhRP in their discussion of the ruling point out that “a vast number of humans cannot shoulder duties and responsibilities either.” They also note that Justice Jaffe quoted another judge, who wrote “times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once though necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress.” As of this writing, the NhRP have filed for an appeal.

  It’s not just members of our most closely related living species, the apes, that are now recognised as tool users. There’s that clever dingo with his stepladder, and even octopi, it turns out, are up there with the land-lubbers. They’ve been observed slinking along the seafloor holding up bits of seaweed to use as camouflage or rolling along inside an armoured ball made of two coconut shells. Dr. McElligott had referred to cormorants as the “feathered apes”: they are forever making hooks by bending bits of wire to get at little treats cunningly put out of reach by researchers. He hadn’t mentioned any incidence of goats making and using tools; however, he did tell me about his experiment in which goats had to pull a rope, then push a lever to get food out of a box. Most of his subjects worked it out, and he found they remembered how to do it ten months later, too.

  And then there’s language. Sure, other animals make exclamations of alarm or anger, but for it to be language, more complex information needs to be conveyed. Well, vervet monkeys have different warning calls for different predators. If one of them shouts the vervet equivalent of “Snake!” they take to the trees, but if the shout is “Eagle!” they take cover on the ground. Bees famously communicate the direction, distance, and quality of a patch of forage by the angle, length, and vigour of their waggle dance (Karl von Frisch won a Nobel prize for decoding the language of the bees in 1973). And prairie dogs (who aren’t dogs but little rodents that live in burrows in the grasslands of the United States) have recently been discovered to be among the most advanced natural users of language. Not only do they have different calls to distinguish among types of predators, but they also alter these calls to describe features of the individual predator, such as its size, speed, and colour. Professor Con Slobodchikoff, the researcher who worked this out, did so by rigging a pulley system and repeatedly floating big, coloured, abstract shapes over a prairie dog colony. The prairie dogs would make calls specific to the characteristics of the particular thing floating over their home. They were effectively saying the equivalent of “Here comes another of those big blue triangle things.” Brilliant.

  And on to apes. While they can’t talk, because they don’t have the fine vocal and breath control we have and so can’t make speech sounds, they’ve been taught sign language in captivity. For example, there’s Koko and Michael the gorillas and Kanzi and Nim the chimpanzees. Koko reportedly has a vocabulary of a thousand different signs. These range from the basics such as food, drink, nut, and so on to words for pretty complex ideas, such as fake, polite, and obnoxious. Claims for the things that Koko and Michael have signed are pretty extraordinary. In response to a question about his mother, Michael signed, “Squash meat gorilla, mouth tooth, cry sharp-noise loud, bad think-trouble look-face, cut/neck lip/girl, hole.” It’s claimed he’s telling the story of his mother being killed by poachers, though more sober ethologists argue that complex meanings are merely being projected by their human handlers. In a web “live chat” with Koko, and her handler Dr. Patterson, the following exchange is pretty typical:

  Question: What are the names of your kittens?

  Koko: Foot.

  Dr. Patterson: Foot isn’t the name of your kitty!

  Question: Koko, what’s the name of your cat?

  Koko: No.

  Question: Do you like to chat with other people?

  Koko: Fine nipple.

  Dr. Patterson: Nipple rhymes with people. She doesn’t sign people per se, she was trying to do a “sounds like…”

  In spite of some ability by our animal brethren, our achievements in matters of telling each other stuff, combining ideas to generate new ones, and imagining stories of the past, present, and future so far outstrip theirs as to be in a different league. I happen to be writing this on the day that the European Space Agency is live blogging to the world its attempt to land a robotic probe called Philae, which has been travelling around the solar system for ten years on a robotic mothership called Rosetta (named after the engraved stone used to decipher the hieroglyphics of ancient Egyptian cultures), on a comet called 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, in order to find out whether comets likely seeded the amino acid molecules from which life on Earth sprang 3.8 billion years ago. As evidence of humans’ ability to have complex ideas and communicate them, the above sentence will do. Good for us!5 So what is it that makes my mind different from a goat’s mind? Why can’t goats think about fighting wars or going into space? What is the X that separates us from the other animals? Thomas Suddendorf, in his brilliant book The Gap, proposes it’s “nested scenario building” and our “urge to connect.” (OK, that’s two X’s.) In other words, it’s our ability to imagine complex things and our tendency to yap about it.

  To illustrate: imagine a battle of wits where my adversary has put poison in either his goblet of wine or my own, and I have to choose which goblet to drink from. I could reason about my adversary’s actions thusly: “Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me…”

  Clear? What this (snippet of a scene from the film The Princess Bride) demonstrates is how we can run a scenario in our own mind, imagine how our actions might change the scenario, what other actors might think we’ll think, reflect and reason about it, then imagine what we would do differently if that or this were to happen and so on ad infinitum (the scene continues with a lengthy chain of reasoning and culminates in a fatal poisoning). Professor Suddendorf points out that “a basic capacity for simulating scenarios seems to exist in other animals…Human development of mental scenario building explodes after age two, however, while great apes’ capacities do not.”

  A big part of this ability to imagine scenarios is our facility for “mental time travel.” This phrase means being able to delve into the past and recall what did happen, and the related ability of being able to travel into the future and imagine what might happen. All animals can learn from the past, in a way. My cat has learned that when she hears a beeping noise in the morning, if she goes and meows persistently in a big thing’s face it tends to get up and give her food. But ethologists think Janet the cat isn’t remembering yesterday morning specifically or last week or whenever and using it to decide how she’ll behave today, or that she could imagine meowing even more annoyingly tomorrow, reasoning it might cause the big thing to provide breakfast more quickly. Cats or goats won’t recall a specific event and reflect on what they could have done differently. The jury’s still out with regard to chimps, however.

  When I was speaking about goats with Dr. Juliane Kaminski (one of Dr. McElligott’s animal-behaviourist colleagues), she put it like this: “We don’t know, but we think that they might be stuck in time, not able to think about the future or the past much, because they probably don’t have episodic memory. So they probably make their decisions there and then all the time.”

  This gets to the crux of the matter for me.

  It’s this ability to mentally travel in time that makes us humans such good planners and schemers, but which also allows us to worry and regret. Goats feel anxious or stressed about their present, but they don’t get the same feeling about “
what might happen if…” or what could have been. While yes, I do spend a lot of my time bumbling along moment to moment, I also turn my mind to remembering my past and imagining the future—and even sometimes the “if only…” of alternative presents. So to have a holiday from human concerns about jobs, bank accounts, whether I’ve done good things or bad, I just need to escape the tyranny of mental time travel. If you can’t imagine future scenarios, you can’t worry about them, and if you can’t remember the events of your past, you can’t regret them! So I just need to switch off my sense of time.

  Brilliant! And completely terrifying. There are patients who, for reasons of disease or accident, develop lesions in parts of their brain such as the medial temporal lobe. This happened to a musician named Clive Wearing when he was forty-six years old. There is a herpes virus that lies dormant in most people; when it is active, it usually just travels down a nerve to your face and manifests as a gross cold sore on your lip. But it can on rare occasions go the other way—up the nerve to the brain, where it can cause encephalitis, where the brain becomes inflamed and swells up inside the skull. This is what occurred in Wearing in 1985. He thought he had the flu (as did his doctor) and so took to his bed. By the time the doctor recognised what was actually wrong, the infection had damaged parts of his medial temporal lobe and destroyed his hippocampus. One effect of the resulting inflammation was that he became permanently stuck in the present moment, unable to form new memories. He can remember aspects of his life from before he was struck down, but his short-term memory is only ever a moving window of about thirty seconds. So he can ask his wife a question, but he won’t remember the answer, which can lead to endlessly circular repetitions of a conversation. When asked how he is, he reports that he’s just regained consciousness for the first time. He has years’ worth of diaries, pages full of lines where he’s written, crossed out, and rewritten things like “NOW, just, finally fully woken up” again and again. He can still play the piano when he’s put in front of one and can read the music, the continuous moment to moment flow of which carries him through to the end of the piece. Yet he’ll report he’s never seen the piano in his room before.6

  Then, of course, there is the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease, which is often first noticed by its effects on the memory. Along with regret and worry you lose nearly everything else, too, when you lose your ability to project backwards and forwards in time.

  What might it be like to live completely moment to moment? Or to lose the use of language? The tragic effects of lesions in the brains of people like Wearing are studied by psychologists as one way of working out which parts of the brain are involved in the various aspects of ourselves. Another technique that’s used by researchers to try to understand what’s going on in there is to induce temporary “virtual lesions” using a process called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS, for short). When I read about these virtual lesions, I get to wondering: If I could induce virtual lesions in the parts of my brain that differ between me and a goat, the parts that are responsible for imagining scenarios and using language, would I then be able to truly experience what it’s like to be a goat? This is an exciting prospect.

  I email one Dr. Joe Devlin, principal investigator at University College London’s Neuroscience of Language Group, who works with TMS. His reply is that he has “honestly never thought about using TMS to make someone feel more like a goat.” And, while keen to manage my expectations, he’s willing to perform some TMS on me so I can at least experience what it’s like for myself.

  My girlfriend and I arrive at University College London and meet Dr. Devlin in the corridor. He’s given up his lunch hour to talk me out of my notion that I can use TMS to experience the world as a goat. My girlfriend has come along in case I end up needing some help “trotting home.” He shows us into the lab, a windowless room with classic-looking research posters on the walls. I express some disappointment that it’s not at all like a sci-fi Total Recall–esque brain-hacking facility, without any pulsing coloured lighting or anything, and so, accommodatingly, Dr. Devlin pulls up an MRI scan of his brain on a monitor, pulls over a 3-D infrared camera, and straps a tiny tripod to his head so as to set the scene a bit. The tiny tripod lets the 3-D camera work out where his head is positioned and oriented in space and consequently where his brain is positioned and oriented in space. He gives me a special pointing tool, and as I move it over his skull, the view of his brain on the monitor changes to match. As I move the pointer from the crown of his head down around his face and accidentally stick it in his ear, I see corresponding horizontal and vertical slices through his skull and brain and eyes and so on. It’s pretty fun and actually extremely sci-fi when you think about all that’s involved.

  Or as the good doctor puts it: “Very science-y.”

  Neuroscientists use this system to help position the TMS machine’s electromagnets over the head, to make sure the correct part of the cortex is zapped (my word) or stimulated (Dr. Devlin’s word). As any fool knows, at any moment millions of tiny electrical impulses are propagating around the brain and through the nerves of the body, giving rise to all one’s thoughts and actions and somehow the feeling of what it’s like to be those thoughts and actions.

  Now, as any fool also knows, magnetic fields and electric currents interact. So with a strong enough magnetic field aimed at your head, you can induce an electrical impulse in a patch of neurones and thus interfere with the activity in an area of your brain. It’s this methodology of using a whacking-great magnet to stimulate or inhibit a brain area that constitutes TMS. The big blue cables connecting the TMS machine to the electromagnetic coils are rather thick because to generate a strong enough magnetic field to penetrate the skull requires about eight thousand amps. I joke that the lights must flicker, and Devlin says that they did until they got them changed to a different circuit. This power generates a magnetic field that goes through the skull and penetrates effectively about four centimetres into the brain. He tells me it’s important that the field doesn’t go too deep because a lot of the structures that are deep in the brain are doing vital things like keeping your heart beating, keeping you breathing, keeping your blood-oxygen levels regulated…you know, maintaining your vital signs.

  Locating Dr. Devlin’s prefrontal cortex.

  “So you don’t really want to mess them up,” he says.

  I wholeheartedly agree.

  “But we can get away with adding noise to the outer layers of the brain, the neocortex and such, because that’s the bit of your brain that just does thinking and planning and language and all that kind of stuff…you know, not anything important.”

  He uses TMS to try and work out what the specific bits of the brain actually do and which parts they connect to. For example, by giving subjects a task to do, then giving them the same task while zapping/stimulating a brain region he suspects is involved in that task, he can confirm whether that region is actually involved by seeing whether the subjects’ ability to do the task is affected. Dr. Devlin is particularly interested in language, so the tasks he gives people are things like speaking and reading, both things I’ll need to be rid of if I’m to approach the world as a goat.

  However, my idea of simply turning off the language bit, the planning bit, the episodic-memory bit of my brain is way off the mark. For one thing, Dr. Devlin says completely turning off a region of the brain with today’s technology would basically mean killing it—creating an actual brain lesion, like a lobotomy. The virtual lesions that TMS can supply are much more subtle. They just partially suppress activity in a particular spot, the effects of which wouldn’t be like losing a whole region or function of my brain. While the effect is subtle, it does have the advantage over lobotomy of being temporary.

  I bring up the idea that goats might be stuck in time, that they probably don’t have the ability to consciously recall a particular life event or to project themselves forwards into the future, whereas humans are incessantly flicking backwards and forwards: Why didn’t I sa
y that? or What’ll I make for dinner?

  “And the reason why I’m interested in this is because I’m thinking about how humans regret and hope.”

  He responds, “I suppose it could relate to language. The fact that we have the linguistic structure to talk about past events and to make them sort of items, like mental items you can work on, in some ways probably reinforces a lot of the memories. There’s a lot of thinking that you are the stories you tell about yourself. You’re with somebody for a while and their stories start to recur, or you go to a family event and everyone in the family has a slightly different story of a particular event. And the remarkable thing is that you probably remember the stories the way you tell them, not the way they originally happened. And that’s how you get false memories, too. There are certain family events that everyone remembers, whether or not they were even there.”

  My girlfriend chimes in: “I get accused of that a lot. I get accused of remembering things before I was even born.” She’s come along to see me get my brain zapped.