Guests visiting the Brisbane Gallery are not ordinary art lovers; until recently, they had never seen a painting in their lives. With a little practice, they have their own artistic taste. They give preference to Picasso's crystalline designs or Monet's soft focus as they idly wander through the rooms. When it comes to the capabilities of the brain, people think they are second to none. But are we really smarter than other animals?
It is a little surprising that the artists' talents generally attracted guests, given that their brains are smaller than a pinhead: these art critics are represented by bees trained to look for surprises in one or another work of artists.
In fact, the ability to recognize art style was only the latest in a long list of accomplishments. Bees can count to four, read complex signs, learn from observations, and communicate with each other with a secret code (the famous swing dance). In nature, they estimate the distance to different flowers, plan difficult routes in order to collect nectar with the least expenditure of effort. In the hive, their individual duties may include cleaning, removing the bodies of dead bees, and even air conditioning as they collect water to water their combs during hot weather.
There are 100,000 times more neurons in the human brain than in the brain of a bee, but the beginnings of many of our most valuable behaviors can be seen in a hive teeming with activity. What is the meaning, then, of this gray matter, which is found in our skulls? What does it give us in comparison with other animals?
Big brain: a waste of space?
About one-fifth of the food you eat is used to power electrical communications between 100 billion little gray cells. If a big brain doesn't give us any advantage, it can seem like a huge loss.
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And there are some obvious benefits. Bigger brains make us more efficient at what we do. If bees are looking for a specific scene, for example, they will look at each object one by one, while larger animals can process everything at once. In other words, we are multitasking.
A large brain also increases the amount of what we can remember: bees can only hold a few associations associated with signals of the presence of food, and then they get confused, although even a pigeon can learn to recognize over 1,800 photographs, and this is nothing compared to human knowledge. For comparison, some people remember the sequence of thousands of digits after the decimal point in pi.
We remember a lot. What else?
Darwin described these kinds of differences as “differences in degree, not type,” a conclusion that may be disappointing to many. If we look at human civilization and all that we have achieved, surely we must have special capabilities and skills that other animals lack?
Culture, technology, altruism and other traits are touted as a sign of human greatness - but the longer you watch, the shorter the list gets.
Macaques, for example, have long been known for their ability to break nuts with stones, and New Caledonian crows can even make hooks from sticks that help them lift food - such are the rudimentary forms of tools. Even invertebrates try to do something like this. Some octopuses, for example, collect coconut shells and drag them across the seabed to use as shelter later.
A chimpanzee in Zambia, meanwhile, was caught carrying a tuft of grass in her ear - apparently she thought it was beautiful. Very soon, many of the other chimpanzees in her group began chanting after her. Scholars interpret this as a form of cultural expression.
Many creatures also seem to have an innate sense of justice and may even empathize with others. It reveals a wide range of emotions that were once thought to be unique to humans. Take, for example, the humpback whale that recently saved a seal's life by protecting it from killer whale attacks - obviously we are not the only animals capable of selfless behavior.
And what about conscious thought?
Perhaps the answer lies in "self-awareness", the ability of a being to recognize itself as a person. Of all our diverse qualities that make us unique, self-awareness is the hardest to measure. To check its presence, at least in a rudimentary form, in one of the experiments, the animal was coated with a spot of paint and placed in front of a mirror. If the animal noticed the mark and tried to remove it, we can assume that it understands its reflection, and therefore has a certain idea of itself.
Humans do not develop this ability until they are 18 months old, but some animals seem to possess this type of consciousness. Among them are bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, magpies, dolphins and killer whales.
So there’s nothing special about us?
Do not hurry. Some mental faculties may be our own. They are best understood through the example of family conversation at the dinner table.
First, it's amazing that we can speak. Regardless of what you were thinking and what you were worried about during the day, you can always find words and express your experience, tell others about it.
No other creature can communicate with this degree of freedom. The dance of the bees, for example, can convey the location of the flower garden to other bees and even warn of the presence of a dangerous insect, but it cannot express everything that the bees experience, just a few facts about the immediate circumstances. The language of people, on the other hand, is very open. We have an infinite number of word combinations with which we can convey anything, from the laws of physics to the most intimate feelings. And if words are not enough, we just invent them.
Even more remarkable, most of our conversation is not only in the present, but involves the past and the future, and this is another sign that we can consider unique to humans. We have already found that we can recall more facts than most animals. This is "semantic" memory. But Thomas Saddendorf of the University of Queensland notes that we also have "episodic" memories - we can mentally recreate events of the past and show them in numerous details. You can remember that Paris is the capital of France, or you can recreate the pictures and sounds of your first visit to the Louvre.
Importantly, the ability to recall the past also allows us to imagine the future, as we use this experience to predict. You can imagine the next weekend, remembering all the past trips out of town, plan places to visit and put together a food menu.
No other animal has such complex memories and can plan long chains of actions in the future. Even bees, with their complex life in the hive, seem to only react to existing circumstances; they do not plan more than a flight from flower to flower. And they don't remember what it's like to be a maggot.
Together with language, mental time travel allows us to share our experiences and hopes with others, build networks of shared knowledge and grow with each generation. Science, architecture, technology, literature would be impossible without this.
ILYA KHEL