The line between humans and animals gets a bit blurrier...

One of the topics that seems to come up a fair amount in class is the difference between human and animal minds. One theory that I held for awhile was that humans have the concept of past, present, and future, we can stop and think about the possibilities instead of just acting upon them. In summary, that we have the ability to think in the abstract, rather than simply cognize what is in the present, in front of us.

This article in The New Yorker, "The Interpreter", called that view into question. It's about this tribe in Brazil that a missionary-turned-anthropologist has been studying for years. These people have a completely different mode of thinking than any other culture discovered. To quote the article:

The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (“the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”).

When I imagine the cognition of intelligent animals (dogs, cats, rodents, etc... I guess basically mammals, although that sounds kind of prejudiced considering the things I've been saying in class, hehe), this is the kind of cognition I imagine. Basic thoughts and evaluations, just no way to think abstractly and fix these observations into some kind of bigger framework. This article questioned whether that was such a given for humans, and the observation I did for my paper on squirrels made me wonder if animals may potentially have the ability to think in the abstract after all.

One thing is for sure, these people have a sense of humor and I'd love to spend time with them if I had a translator... They were doing an experiment to test whether or not the Pirahã could understand basic grammer using an animated monkey going a certain direction for right and another way for wrong. In the first test, all the guy did was watch the monkey, and the following conversation ensued:

“It didn’t look like he was doing premonitory looking,” Fitch said. “Maybe ask him to point to where he thinks the monkey is going to go.”

“They don’t point,” Everett said. Nor, he added, do they have words for right and left. Instead, they give directions in absolute terms, telling others to head “upriver” or “downriver,” or “to the forest” or “away from the forest.” Everett told the man to say whether the monkey was going upriver or downriver. The man said something in reply.

“What did he say?” Fitch asked.

“He said, ‘Monkeys go to the jungle.’ ”

Maybe it's just me, but that made me crack up.