Saturday, July 06, 2019
No, people didn't think that way.
Article in Aeon reports that "scientists" are sloooooooooooooowly catching up with knowledge that humans have possessed for thousands of years.
Now, having come up with some sneaky new ways to investigate animal memory, scientists are closer than ever to answering that question once and for all. In the past decade, researchers studying animals from the far corners of the animal kingdom – western scrub-jays, dolphins, elephants, even dogs – have come to the same conclusion: at least some animals are capable of these human-like memories of past experience. ‘For a long time, people thought that nonhuman animals were not capable of forming episodic memories,’ Jonathon Crystal, a neuroscientist at the Indiana University, told me. ‘That default view is not correct.’No, people didn't think that. Only "scientists" and Catholics believe that non-human animals are inanimate mechanisms. People who WORK with animals have always understood and USED the episodic memory of animals. A milkman's horse or a seeing-eye dog remembers and implements a LONG sequence of actions and places. A more interesting question is the genetically implanted sequence in some fish, who know how to reach their designated spawning location through thousands of miles and hundreds of tributary branchings. (When going downstream you merge automatically. Upstream you have to pick the correct branch.) Later: Note how the milk horse in the cited video negotiates a sharp turn in a narrow space flawlessly. Like a semi driver, he knows where each point of the vehicle is without looking.
Labels: Asked and unanswered, Grand Blueprint
¶ 10:45 PM
