Humans are geniuses at pretending. We can imagine that the world is different to how it actually is; a superpower that is at the core of our ability to imagine the future, engage in causal reasoning, and understand what it’s like to think like someone else. In psychology, the ability to create a mental model of a hypothetical situation is called having a secondary representation.

A primary representation is our brain’s ability to use sensory/perceptual information to generate a mental model of the world as it actually is. If you look at a can of coca cola, your brain uses the light bouncing off of the can to generate a visual image of that can. If you reach out to touch it, the tactile information gives you more information to add to your representation of the can. You can taste it, smell it, and even hear the can (if you tap it with your finger), generating even more sensory information that builds up a mental model in your mind of the can.

A secondary representation, on the other hand, does not need any sensory/perceptual information to generate a mental model of the can. If I pretend that I am holding a can of coca cola and say to you “this is a can of coke”, we can both engage in a conversation about the properties of this pretend can of coke, and even mime passing the “can” between us. Most people can even generate a fake mental image of that can, although people with aphantasia cannot (more info on that here). But you don’t need to visualize a can to engage in pretending. Mental representations are something other than visual representations (although nobody really understand what they are). We just know that the fake can is both fake and a can (i.e., a hypothetical situation that clashes with reality).

Scientists have always wondered if animals can pretend. Can they form secondary representations? It’s painfully difficult to design an experiment to show this. For humans, we can use language to explain that we’re pretending. But we don’t have this luxury with animals. It would be a big deal if they could pretend because, as I noted earlier, it would mean they have the cognitive building blocks to engage in those complex abilities needed to generate human intelligence (e.g., causal reasoning, theory of mind, mental time travel, etc.).

Which is why this new scientific article is such a big deal. It is, in my opinion, the best evidence that animals can generate secondary representations. It involved Kanzi the bonobo, a rather famous ape who could use a lexigram board to communicate. His board had words for hug, jello, water, chase, etc. nouns and verbs that research suggested Kanzi understands. Because Kanzi had spend so many years in the company of humans and been trained to use symbols to communicate, he was the ideal candidate to test to see if he could engage in pretending.

The experiment was simple and elegant. The researcher would present Kanzi an empty jug and two empty glasses and then pretend to pour “juice” from the jug into each glass. They would then pour the invisible “juice” from one of the glasses back into the jug, remove the jug from view, and ask Kanzi where the juice was. Kanzi would then point to the other glass that the researcher had not “poured” into the jug.

There were a bunch of controls to make sure that Kanzi was responding to the questions “where’s the juice” and not some other cue, like pointing at the the last thing the researcher had touched. I won’t go into the details (you can read them in the article), but they seemed well designed to suggest that Kanzi really was pointing at fake juice. You can see a video of the experiment below:

This is, in my opinion, remarkable. And it does suggest that Kanzi was pretending that there was juice - forming a secondary representation of juice being in the glass even though he knew that there wasn’t really juice in the glass. Awesome.

But, I wouldn’t be a real scientist if I just accepted this as definitive proof that non-human animals use and understand pretense or pretend at the same level of sophistication as a human. Here are some things to note about the experiment that furrow the brows of skeptical scientists:

• Kanzi only correctly pointed to the pretend juice in 34 out of 50 trials. This is above chance, but nowhere near as good as his performance when asked to point to actual juice in a glass. What does his failure on those 16 other trails mean? You would expect a human to get it right 100% of the time, so failures must mean something about the difference between human and bonobo thinking?

• Kanzi only observed the pretending, but didn’t engage in pretending himself. That is, he didn’t use a jug to pretend pour fake juice in a glass and then fake drink it. While there is some anecdotal evidence of great apes engaging in behavior that could be considered pretend play along these lines, there is not yet experimental evidence of animals doing this. The authors themselves noted this: “We haven’t shown that Kanzi was pretending himself. He is not pouring the liquid and creating these imaginary things, but we have shown that he understood pretense.”

This kind of nitpicking is the heart of good science. And it’s vital to pick those nits so we can figure out exactly what’s going on inside the minds of non-human animals as opposed to just assuming that they must be thinking identically to a human. Both the devil and the beauty is in those details.

Because Kanzi is an enculturated bonobo, meaning that he was raised by humans being taught how to do human things, the question remains as to how much his thinking had been warped by exposure to humans. Is his ability to understanding pretending because humans were able to generate a novel form of thinking in Kanzi that no other non-human ape would be capable of in a natural situation? Or maybe his enculturation exacerbated a latent ability in his mind that was only used sparingly in the wild, but blossomed in a human environment? Or maybe non-human apes have the capacity to pretend that is equal to that of humans, and it was only now that humans were clever enough to uncover it? Any three of these explanations are possible.

I am a big fan of this experiment, despite its shortcomings (which all experiments have), I think it has uncovered solid first evidence of a capacity for pretend in a non-human animal. A form of pretending that is at the very least a building block upon which the kind of intelligence we see in humans can be built. Imagining the world not as it is, but as it could be is at the very heart of what it means to be human. Not just in our social interactions and ability to understand one another, or our ability to reason or uncover causality. It’s at the heart of our storytelling ability, and our capacity for play. It makes me happy to know that apes and other species might have this ability in some form. There is no greater pleasure than imaging (and striving for) a better world, filled with yummy juice.

This is the most charming video I have ever seen published in a peer-reviewed scientific article:

Aside from the zen-like charm of this cow, Veronika, calmly scratching herself with a broom, if you stick around until the end of the vid you will witness the appearance of Witgar Wiegele, which is not to be missed. Witgar is Veronika’s owner. While scratching behind Veronika’s ears, he says:

“Hello guys! This is Witgar and this is my very intelligent cow, Veronika. And we have some message for you. Save the nature then you protect yourself and nature diversity is the key to survive on this planet. Thank you.”

Nailed it, Witgar. I want Witgar to host his own nature documentary. He’s a David Attenborough/Werner Herzog mashup that 100% needs to go viral.

The scientific study in question, however, needs to go viral as well. The core takeaway is that we now have video evidence of a cow using an object as a tool in a very sophisticated manner. Not only does she use it in a deliberate, goal-directed manner to scratch herself, but she appears to understand the physical properties of the broom in a way that allows for what scientists call “flexible tool use.” That is, she can use the tool in different manners to attain different outcomes. She uses the bristle-side to scratch her upper body and back, and the pointy end to scratch around her udder and rump. Here is how it’s described in the article:

She employed the broom end on her upper body in a scrubbing motion with a forward-pulling action, lifting and repositioning, between movements. When targeting delicate areas such as the udder or anal region, she used the stick end for gentle forward pushes, aiming precisely at the target.

Now there is a large body of research on tool use in animals, from primates to insects, stretching back to Darwin’s time. There are literally entire books written on this subject. So there’s no reason to be surprised that an animal like a cow could use a tool, even in this flexible manner.

What IS surprising, as the authors of this article point out, is that nobody has officially documented a cow using a tool like this before. Not in the thousands of years that we’ve been living alongside cows. “The real absurdity lies not in imagining a tool-using cow, but in assuming such a thing could never exist,” Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró (a co-author of the study) told The Guardian.

In the video, the narrator says the following:

The cognitive ability of cows have only recently begun to attract attention. Our long history of exploiting them has lead to their underestimation. Veronika is certainly special but we don’t think she is particularly different to other cows. Her conditions are.

This is a truism in the study of animal cognition. Looking back at the emergence of evidence for sophisticated cognitive abilities in non-human species, the first evidence to arrive was found for those species that most resembled humans. That is, chimpanzees, gorillas, and the other great apes. Dolphins and their large brains and human-like social complexity soon followed. Elephants and crows were in the mix as well. Scientists focused attention on species that had human-like properties when looking for human-like cognition, be it large brains, overtly complex behavior, or sophisticated social systems. There is no shame in that; it’s a fully logical approach to assume that species that act (or look) like humans might also have human-like cognition.

But this obvious jumping-off point for the search for human-like cognitive complexity in the animal kingdom also meant that we were less likely to look for human-like intelligence in those species didn’t look or act like us, or that we’d been using for food or labor; chickens, pigs, cows, and the other domesticated species that we find on farms. This is also logical insofar as finding human-like cognitive complexity in the animals that we kill and eat makes it more difficult for us to justify killing and eating them. But once scientists began expanding their search for cognitively complexity, we started finding it in chickens, insects, and all sorts of species that are very un-human-like in appearance and behavior, or that we otherwise tried not to think about since they were on our dinner plates.

So it’s baffling but also understandable that we somehow might have missed that cows are a complex, tool-using animal. As the researchers for this study pointed out, we simply don’t give cows the opportunity to show us their tool-using skills most of the time. Veronika is smart, but not special, as they point out. Probably most cows would love to have access to a butt-scratching broom, and would likely figure out how to use it to maximize its scratching properties. If given the chance.

And that’s the beautiful takeaway form this study. If you give species the chance and observe them carefully, you are likely to find that they do engage in behaviors that we humans would label cognitively complex or intelligent. Of course, the idea that thinking in a human-like way is what deserves the moniker “intelligence” while also assuming that this is inherently a good thing is a matter of debate. I wrote a whole darn book on this subject, if you’re curious.

But for now, let’s bask in the charm of Verokina and her broom, while also insisting that Witgar Wiegele be given a Netflix special.

In other, fundamentally unrelated news, The World Economic Forum is giving us some rather distressing headlines regarding a “rupture in the world order” (as Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney put it). A lot of Canadians are feeling more unease than ever before about events south of the border. Just after the last US election, I had many conversations with uneasy Canadians nervous about all this 51st state talk. As a way of working through my feelings on this subject, I conceived of a television show about a silent/secret occupation of Canada by the US government (not dissimilar to the Norwegian TV show Okkupert). I even wrote a pilot episode. It was dark and sad, but a cathartic way for me to process events at the time. I sent out the pilot to see if anyone was interested in the idea, but it was deemed too dark - people want escapism, not something that hits too close to home in a distressing way. Logical, of course. But now all this “rupture in the world order” talk has got me thinking about dark things again. So I thought I would share with you the script for the pilot episode in case you want to commiserate with me in the darkness. I find this kind of creative writing a helpful way to process things, and maybe reading it will feel helpful for you too? It’s certainly not lighthearted, and nowhere near as fun as a cow scratching her butt with a broom. But here’s a link to read/download the pilot if you’re curious. And here’s an image and show description:

In the aftermath of a devastating U.S. economic embargo, the small town of Tidehaven, Nova Scotia struggles to survive. Food is scarce, power outages threaten lives as winter approaches, and Canada stands isolated from the world. When the charming Taylor family moves in across from Zya, a local schoolteacher, they claim to be American political refugees. But Zya and her tight-knit group of friends—two professors, an actor, and a software engineer—grow suspicious as the Taylors hold secret meetings with town officials, associate with far-right groups, and somehow access embargoed goods while proudly flying the American flag alongside Canada’s.

A study was published yesterday showing that horses are more skittish when exposed to odors emitted by scared humans. In the experiment, humans shoved cotton pads under their arms and then watched a 20-minute clip from the horror film Sinister. The sweat-soaked pads were then placed directly over the horses’ nostrils. They were then tested to see their reaction in situations that could make a horse nervous; being groomed, being exposed to a novel object, or having an umbrella suddenly opened. When compared to the controlled conditions (more on that in a sec), the horses were significantly more fearful after having breathed in the smell of sweat from a scared human.

These findings are not novel; there are other experiments showing that horses and dogs exhibit fear after being exposed to scared-human sweat (a good review at this link). The idea is that many animals produce chemicals when they are scared (through sweat or even tears) that transmit information about their emotional state. And other animals - either of the same or different species - have the ability to sense the presence of these chemicals, which induces a similar feeling in them via the process of emotional contagion. It’s not just fear that can be transmitted; sadness, sexual arousal, anxiety and also happiness/joy can be transmitted via chemical communication.

It’s the happiness thing I want to talk about. In the recent horse study, some participants were not shown the scary movie, but a fun video clip montage meant to induce feelings of “joy”. This included clips from “Les inventions by Florence Foresti, Singing in the rain’s dance scene, Have you ever seen a giraffe with a necklace , The Willy Waller 2006 , Birds (Pixar), and We go together from Grease.” Now I leave it up to you if that Grease song produces joy or, as it does in me, despair.

Regardless, when the horses smelled the cotton pads with “joy sweat”, their behavior did not differ from the control condition involving a cotton pad without any sweat. So “joy” was not transmitted via sweat from humans to horses in this study. From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense; it’s far more useful for an animal to detect the presence of fear (and thus the potential presence of danger) in either conspecifics (members of the same species) or other species. Danger is universal, whereas happiness is not. What makes a marmot or a sea otter or a parrot happy is surely quite different (they have completely different diets and habitats and social needs). But all of those animals are equally at risk of being killed by, for example, an eagle. So if an otter can detect a parrot’s fear when seeing an eagle on the wing, being infected with that fear via emotional contagion will very likely make them safer from a potential eagle attack. On the other hand, if an otter can detect a parrot’s joy at finding a ripe peach it won’t matter to the otter since otters are carnivores and don’t care about peaches.

It’s not to say that happiness doesn’t always transmit via olfaction because it certainly does. There is experiential evidence that dogs display positive behavior when exposed to happy-human sweat, and a previous study with horses showed that they can at least detect happy-human sweat, even if it doesn’t make them happy too.

So inter-species happiness detection via olfaction is likely a thing. But what about between humans? Is there evidence that joy and happiness can be transmitted through olfaction in humans? After a dive into the literature, I was surprised to learn that there is not very much research on this topic. But the research that does exists suggests that yes indeed, you can increase your happiness levels by being exposed to the sweat of happy people.

This study found that people can, more often than chance, correctly choose a bottle filled with cotton sweat pads that came from “happy” people. This study found that exposure to happy-people sweat was more likely to make people smile. In a slightly-related but intriguing study, people exposed to the smell of lavender show increased synchronized brain activity when watching the same happy (or sad) film clips together. I am not sure what to do with this information other than to suggest that if you want a closer connection to your spouse while watching Netflix together, put some lavender-scented potpourri on the coffee table?'

Although the studies are sparse and the evidence is not robust, there is enough of a suggestion of an effect here to lead me to this conclusion: things are going to be more fun (and funnier) if you are doing them together with people in the same room. This harkens back to my recent post on the power of meatspace; my argument that the human communication system was designed to work best in the real world involving all sensory modailites. And I hinted that olfaction (that is, smelling other people) was necessary to get the full human experience. And now I can say with more certainty that smelling people is indeed super necessary when it comes to maximizing your pleasure.

The reality is that if you can detect that I am happy (via a subconscious transmission of olfactory chemicals travelling from my sweat to your nostrils), you will increase your own experience of pleasure and happiness. This means that if, for example, I am performing in an improv show at a theatre and am really enjoying myself during the show, your experience of the improv show will be increased if I were to install an industrial-sized fan on stage that wafted the sweaty-stank of the improv performers out into the audience. And if you are also sitting in the audience in a cloud of sweat-scent produced by your fellow audience members who are all laughing and having a good time, you will literally have more fun.

This is yet another argument for going to see live performances. If you just watch a comedy show (or whatever the hell Grease should be categorized as) on TV, you will not be getting the full human experience. Go watch Grease or an improv show at your local theatre and bask in the joy emanating form the happy sweat-cloud of your fellow patrons. Or, if you’re feeling extra motivated by all this science, bring along some lavender-potpourri. Imagine how much funnier my improv show will be if you bring potpourri!

I can’t wait for my next improv show filled with a bunch of sweaty lavender-scented audience members! Thanks, science!

I gave a talk a few weeks ago about why improv was such a powerful force for personal transformation, and one of the reasons I gave was the value of meatspace. The term meatspace has been around since the 90s and means the opposite of cyberspace. It’s the physical, non-digital world that our meaty bodies occupy, as opposed to the virtual world that appears on our screens (televisions, smartphones, computers, etc.). Much of our communication today happens in the non-meatspace environment like email, texting, or video conferencing. But it’s face-to-face interaction that is the core of meatspace and, as I hope to show, the environment our minds need in order to feel fully human.

Although improv can be performed over Zoom or watched on YouTube, it is, like all types of theatrical performance, intended to be experienced in the flesh. It’s when the meaty bodies of improvisers smash into each other on a stage while the audience feels the vibration of laughter rumbling through their seats that improv comes to life. Being in the same room with other humans that you can see, hear, touch, smell, and even taste is what the human brains craves, and why live performance just can’t be beat.

I was chatting with the singer/songwriter Jenn Grant about this on a podcast recently. She was explaining how important the connection with her audience is for her when both performing and planning her live shows. As much as we all love recorded music, there is something special about being in the same room as your favorite performer while they belt out a song, and experiencing the joy of their performance alongside others. But why is this, exactly?

Humans, like all other animals, did not evolve in a virtual, digital environment. We are products of the meatspace world, where our sensory/perceptual system was honed by millions of years of evolution to function across multiple modalities simultaneously. It’s this multi-modal system that is missing from virtual environments.

Consider a typical human conversation happening in the meatspace. Obviously a large amount of information is transmitted via the actual words used in a conversation, which is why written text works just fine. But there is a vast amount of info beyond the words that can both reinforce the intended message or add nuance and complexity, even altering the meaning of the words themselves. This paralinguistic information takes the form of changes in pitch, volume, rhythm, stress, intonation, rate/speed of speech, and even vocal quality like breathiness. All of these changes to the structure of speech can convey emotions or intentions that words alone cannot express. This is why reading text alone is not as powerful as hearing it spoken.

Consider the simple demonstration in the below video. The words in the sentence do not change, nor do most paralinguistic features. The only thig changing is the stress placed on the words, and yet this simple variation can completely change the meaning of the sentence – 6 totally different meanings!

Then there are the visual cues that accompany speech; facial expressions including subtle shifts in the musculature around the eyes, gestures, postures, etc., all adding additional communicative information about the speaker’s state of mind, emotions, or intentions. These augment and often change the meaning of the words being spoken. Here’s a handy overview of the importance of body language from speaking guru Vinh Giang:

And, then there are the often forgotten cues like proxemics (the distance between speakers), haptics (touch or physical contact), and even olfaction and gustation (scent, for example, plays a vital role in mate attraction for humans).

Obviously the vast majority of paralinguistic information is lost over email. But it’s also lost or muddied over video conferencing, where the subtle facial expressions are unreadable or the full suite of gestures cannot be conveyed. Our minds evolved to use ALL of this information while communicating with fellow humans, and any communication medium that falls short of giving us the full human experience leaves us feeling disconnected from our social partner.

Which is why meatspace is so important. Meatspace is where our minds want to be; in the same space with other humans, soaking up the muti-modal communicative signals emanating from the others around us. Jenn Grant’s performances, like any live improv or theatre performance, expose us to the full spectrum of human communication, giving us the deepest possible connection to others, and leaving us feeling our most alive. There is simply no replacement for interacting with other humans in the meatspace; it’s what our minds crave more than anything else. If you have the opportunity to see a live show, whether that’s music, theatre, comedy, or improv, make the effort to get out into the non-virtual world to do it. Your brain will thank you by flooding your system with the kind of endorphins that only a meatspace environment can provide.

Here’s Jenn performing - catch one of her live shows if you can! Trust me, your brain will thank you.

One night as our family was getting ready for bed, we heard loud banging coming from behind the door that leads out to our deck. We live in rural Nova Scotia with plenty of wildlife, so there was a non-zero chance that it was a bear. Because I have no fear and/or sense when it comes to this type of situation, I slowly opened the door and peeked through the crack to see what it was. Not a bear, but a raccoon. I could see his tail sticking out of my now tipped over compost bin.

“Hey,” I said to the raccoon, who shimmied out of the bin and turned to look at me. “Get out of here please,” I asked. The raccoon said nothing, did nothing, and simply stared at me with his adorable little eyes. He didn’t look frightened or angry or in any way disturbed by my presence. I spent a few minutes explaining to the raccoon that he was making a mess and should clear off. Toward the end of the “conversation” the raccoon turned and dove back into the compost bin to continue his meal.

It surprised me that he was so unfazed by my presence. But new research suggests that raccoons that live near humans (like my new friend) might be evolving to be both less aggressive and more cute; a process labeled domestication. There are a couple of important points I want to make about this new study, including the fact that “domestication” is a word that can be confusing in this context, and the raccoon domestication process is a lot less innocent than it sounds.

The study itself looked at the head morphology of raccoons that lived in urban vs rural locations, sifting through over 20,000 photographs submitted by members of the public through the researchers’ website. The results showed that urban raccoons have snouts that are 3.5% shorter than rural raccoons. The explanation is that a shortened snout is an indication of a process called domestication syndrome, whereby animals that live near humans evolve “curly tails, floppy ears, depigmentation, smaller brains and reduced facial skeletons.” It can also involve behavioral changes like being less aggressive and less fearful of humans (although this study did not investigate behavior).

These changes are common across many wild species that spend time with or near humans (like mice and foxes) and are possibly generated by changes to the neural crest cells, which contribute during embryonic development to the morphological characteristics I just listed, but also changes to the adrenal glands which can make animals less aggressive. Domestication syndrome thus creates an animal that is both cuter and friendlier.

The cuteness thing is key to understanding what’s going on here. The domesticated animals that we are most familiar with (like dogs) have facial features that are more baby-like than their wild ancestors. This is likely something humans bred into them through the process of artificial selection (whereby we purposely bred the cutest dogs with each other to make even more, cuter dogs) or self domestication (whereby early wolves chose to mate with other wolves that were friendly to humans). Whatever the mechanism, wolves eventually evolved into the baby-faces pugs and bulldogs that we see today. Having neotenous (baby-like) features that conform to the Kindchenschema plan (that is, a facial plan with large eyes, a small nose/snout, elongated forehead, etc.,) generates a subconscious, care-giving response. The same mechanism that compels us to care for human babies with cute faces also compels us to care for our adorable pets.

Perhaps thanks to the way neural crest cells are involved in generating a suite of cute, neotenous characteristics, when we start breeding for one trait (like friendliness) other traits (like shorter snouts) get dragged along automatically. There’s a famous study from the 1950s where Dmitri Belyaev bred silver foxes, choosing the least aggressive and friendliest foxes to mate. After 20 generations of breeding, the silver foxes he created were not only friendlier, they all had morphological features that made them cuter in ways strikingly similar to domestic dogs (shorter snouts, spotted coats, floppy ears, curly tails); early evidence that friendlies and cuteness go hand in hand, which is what the neural crest hypothesis suggests.

But there’s something important to understand about this raccoon study that most news reports don’t emphasize. These raccoons are not being selectively bred by humans. They are wild animals choosing their own mating partners. So the selection pressure that is possibly making them friendlier and cuter is likely coming from a much more nefarious source. Humans are simply less likely to kill or otherwise chase off a raccoon that is both 1) cute, and 2) friendly. The angry, ugly raccoons are more likely to be shot or trapped, removing them (and their ugly, aggressive genes) from the gene pool. Which means that an adorable raccoon (like the one I saw on my deck) is more likely to have access to human food and thus go on to live a happy life, churning out dozens of cute, friendly raccoon babies. In order for domestication syndrome to work in this case, humans have to be both actively killing aggro raccoons, and let the friendly ones live to feed on our trash.

Perhaps more importantly, we should not be fooled by the word domestication itself. Yes it’s true that domesticated animals are ones that live in our homes (the word domesticated has the word domus in its root, which is Latin for home). But raccoons do not want to live in our homes. All they want is to eat our trash without being shot at. Natural selection might well be giving them the tools of cuteness and friendliness to allow that to happen, but that does not automatically make them interested in getting belly rubs from us. As co-author on the study Raffaela Lesch pointed out, while raccoons might be on a “pathway to domestication” (meaning that they could end up sleeping in our beds one day like dogs), that would take many generations and perhaps “thousands of years.” So it will be a long time before that little trash panda I saw eating from my compost bin on my deck is ready to walk through the front door and sit on my lap.