Invertebrate Emotions, Part 1

She She writes a lot about like fish and you know, marine organisms. She lived from eight seven to nineteen seventy two. And uh, if it's okay with you, Robert, I wanted to start off this episode just by reading this poem that I encountered the other day. Okay. It is called the paper Nautilus for authorities whose hopes are shaped by mercenaries, writers, and trapped by tea time, fame and by commuters comfort.

It's not for these. The paper Nautilus constructs her thin glass shell, giving her perishable souvenir of hope, a dull white outside and smooth edged inner surface. Glossy is the sea, the watchful maker of it, guards it day and night. She scarcely eats until her eggs are hatched, buried eight fold in her eight arms, for she is in a sense of devil fish. Her glass ram's horn, cradled freight, is hid but not crushed, as hercules bitten by a

crab loyal to the hydra, was hindered to succeed. The intensively watched eggs coming from the shell free it when they are freed, leaving its wasp nest flaws of white on white and close laid ionic kite enfolds, like the lines in the mane of a parthenon horse, round which the arms had wound themselves, as if they knew. Love is the only fortress strong enough to trust to. Oh that's nice. I like that last art, especially me too.

I mean, I love the way it moves from um this, uh this direct, almost clinical description of the actual biology of the paper nautilus and how it builds its shell and all that, and goes from that to these classical illusions, and then ultimately ends on this powerfully emotional note that

kind of gives me a shiver. Uh So, the late American poet Anthony Hate, writing about More, said that one of the things he liked most about her poems was that they had quote a capacity for pure praise that has absolutely biblical awe in it, and I think you kind of see that here. I like that quality a lot too. It captures in language some of the overwhelming, almost religious kind of power I feel when looking at

some animals, especially animals that live in the ocean. But also the poem really just has a very worthy subject. The paper nautilus, also known as the argonaut, is a remarkable species, and the shell that has talked about in the poem, the egg case, is a genuinely gorgeous under of evolution. Yeah, this is quite a remarkable critter. So the Argonaut, Uh, first, let's just talk about the name.

This is of course a reference to Greek mythology, and we we recently talked about this on our other show Invention, the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, Right, Yeah, because the argonaut just means sailors of the Argo, the Argo being the ship built by Argus and the ship upon which Jason sails in his quest to find the Golden Fleece, which itself was a sacred pelt of a winged ram. But the argonaut we're talking about here is again the

paper nautilus, a member of the genus Argonata. So they're octopods cephalopods, and there as many as fifty three species that have been described. They have this delicate calcite shell, hence the nickname, and these shells were once thought to be pilfered like the shells of a hermit crab. There was a question of where did they acquire these things? Well,

they must have they must have stolen them. Uh, they must be using them, right, And they wouldn't be the only octopus that finds a shell or some kind of you know, a coconut or something and picks it up and uses it, right, Uh and uh. And this was also another contributing factor to this interpretation is the fact that the the argonaut is not physically attached to the shell, like when a specimen is examined. The creature can be removed from the shell with ease, though it typically expires

if that is done to it. So, um, we've known about them for these creatures for thousands of years. They pop up an art from three thousand b C. According to Mark Carnal writing for The Guardian. But we did not know how they made their egg shells until the nineteenth century. So this is what happens. The female and only the female secretes the shells via specialized arms and the resulting shell it's essentially a floatation device that resembles

the shell of extinct ammonites. They lay their eggs inside of these shells. They retreat inside. Sometimes you'll you'll you'll find the detached reproductive arm of a male a hectocotalist, and then she'll use she'll use the shell though, to control her buoyancy in the water. There's so many interesting things going on here. I mean, number one is just the implied history of mating that at some point a male octopus came along and made it by what tearing

off one of its own arms and giving it to her. Yeah. Yeah, basically it is like a detachable sexual organ, uh, that then she keeps. But yeah, the other thing about this shell that's so fascinating is when we think of shells, we think of just pure defense. We think of the hard shelter that has grown out of the animal that the animal may retreat into. Right, But they're in the common name the paper nautilus. It implies that the shell

is very delicate. Yeah, it is not a defensive structure, at least not in the same way that a true shell is. I mean it is you can't argue that it is protected for the young that reside within it, because it is a very slim barrier between them in the open ocean, and you know, keeps them close to the female. But mainly it is the means by which this particular type of octopod returned to the open sea as its skin had largely evolved for sea floor life,

and left the open waters to the squid. Okay, so the octopus is generally going to be found, uh, I don't know, along the bottom or maybe hiding along along a reef or something like that. But this one just takes out to the open waters with a flotation device of its own, making like one way. And this is you know, an elaborate and probably a little poetiquet to

think of it. But you can think of the squid as the angel, and the octopus is the fallen angels has lost its wings, but this particular octopod has I guess Miltonian aspirations and or or is or is you know, lined up with the thinking of data lists and icarus, and it is building its own shell that will that in this case, we'll will allow it to ascend up

in the water towards the surface. Now there's another thing I want to throw in as a when you get into the sexual dimorphism here, the females are up to six hundred times the weight of the males. Uh. And again the males do not engage in this kind of shell construction and growth. But a great deal of mystery remains about how the argonaut lives its life and and indeed how they even evolved. Uh Neil Monks and Sea Phil Palmer, authors of the two thousand two Smithsonian book Ammonites.

They have suggested that these ancient octopuses might have depended on the discarded shells of ammonites in prehistoric times and use their abilities to mend the shells. So the idea might be that originally they stole shells from a now extinct animal and then use these uh uh, these abilities to to patch them up and make them fit, to customize them a little bit, but still largely depend on the stolen shell. Interesting, I mean, there is a physical similarity.

If you haven't seen ammonite shells that they tend to be spiral shaped there at some point in the past. I talked about our recent trip to Lime Region us in uh in the UK, where on the beach you can find fossils of ammonites from you know, hundreds of millions of years ago, and there are these colossal serial killer spirals etched into the rocks. It's very very cool. But yeah, at some point the ammonites disappeared, So they

went extinct in the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction event. And so what what do you do if you depend upon that shell? So the idea here is that the the ancient paper nautilus is then had to use their mending skills to just create a shell of their own in order to do the same sort of things that they did previously. So what they what they once used to repair, they had to create from scratch. Yes, that's that's at least

one one theory that's out there. It's also highly possible that we're just talking about covergent evolution here and the paper nautilus is eggshell just happens to resemble that of an ammonite. Sure, but it really does look similar, but then again you can see other signs of similar types of possible convergent evolution. I mean the nautilus, not the paper nautilus, but the animal just normally called the nautilus is like the a marine mollusk has a shell that

sort of resembles an m nite shell. Also, yeah, absolutely still a fascinating creature and also definitely a creature worthy of poetic consideration. Speaking and speaking of poetry. They also show up in in other works of literature, including twenty thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. Uh, there's a there's a section in it where they are, uh there they are aboard the nautilus, the submarine, and uh they are They've come up to the surface and they

observe these creatures. They observed the paper nautilus, the argonaute in action. So here's a quote from the book. Quote. Now, it was a school of argonauts then voyaging on the surface of the ocean. We could count several hundred of them. They belong to that species of argonauts, covered with protuberances and exclusive to the seas near India. These graceful mollusks were swimming backwards by means of their locomotive tubes, sucking

water into these tubes and then expelling it. Six They're eight tentacles were long, thin and floated on the water, while the other two were rounded into palms and spread to the wind like light sails. I could see perfectly. They're undulating spiral shaped shells, which Cuvier aptly compared to an elegant cockle boat. It's an actual boat. Indeed, it transports the animal that secretes it without the animal sticking

to it. The Argonaut is free to leave its shell, I told Consil, but it never does not, unlike Captain Nemo. Conseil replied sage Lee, which is why he should have christened it his ship, the Argonaut. Oh that's good, it's

a shell of his own design. Yeah. So now they're also referring in this passage to this um, this myth or this outdated idea that they could use their arms as sails and sail across the top of the water, and that the shell is like actually a boat, and it really in some sense as it is, because it aids the creature in it's in its buoyancy. But anyway, that's just a fun little literary usage of the argonaut, and it also alludes to that fact that yes, it can.

It can technically leave the shell, because it doesn't actually grow that the shell. It kind of makes it. But if if you were to remove the species from it, shall it typically dies. This is such a cool animal, And I like the idea that Jules Verne was like halfway through writing twenty Leagues and he discovered this animal and He's like, oh, I should have gone back and named it the argonaut from the beginning, but I'd take

too much revision. I'll just plow ahead and I'll have a character acknowledge, like it really would have been better if it was called this other thing. But anyway, I wanted to come back to the ending of the poem by Marianne Moore. This powerful ending is what got me really thinking about the subject for today's episode and the next one. This idea of this eight armed cephalopod clutching at its egg case, as if each of its arms knew that love is the only fortress strong enough to

trust too. Does the paper nautilus feel love? Do the coiled arms of the argonauts simply clutch or do they embrace? Do they hug? With all the emotional and you know, the baggage that comes with that. I think most everyone would probably I think the gut response that people are generally gonna have is no, You're gonna think, no, a a paper nautilus is not going to be capable of

of love. Love is what humans do. And you know, maybe specific animals that we uh live closely with that we anthropomorphize enough into, but not the not the octopi, not the not the the world of invertebrates. Well, I don't know, it's I mean, people would I think you'd encounter a lot of divergent opinion about that. On one hand, you can say, yeah, I mean, of course you're gonna have a problem of if you believe that an octopus can love? I mean, how could you prove that? Uh?

And so? And we'll address questions like that as we move on. But more broadly, I guess, can you can you imagine invertebrates in general feeling anything analogous to the kind of plain, familiar emotions that we name in poems. You know, does a does a crab feel fear? Does a bumblebee feel hate? Uh? Does a snail feel discussed or jealousy? Or joy or you know, is it as you're sort of suggesting folly to meaningfully apply these words

outside of humans, and maybe they're more closely related vertebrate relatives. Well, but then the other side to look at it, and this is something we'll continue to discuss as well, is that you bring up poetry, and poetry is very much a part of the and I love poetry, but it is part of the cult of human emotion indefinitely places things like love on a golden pedestal. And and so there's kind of a push and pull here when we

look to the world of animals. We have to be willing to throw our emotions off of that golden pedestal and and look at what they really are from you know, psychological and even biological standpoint. And at the same time we have to be able to look to the animal world and be willing to attribute these uh, these knockdown emotions to them as well. Well, yeah, I mean that that's the other side of it. I mean, some people, I think would say you're being stingy if you say

that that an argonaut can't love. But then I think there are also people who would say, like, you're really you know, degrading my feeling of my relationships and and my love. If you say that, an octopus can do the same thing, right, So it gets it gets complicated, and there's plenty of room to be piste off on both sides. So hopefully we'll piss everyone off as we proceed here. Well, maybe we should take a break, and then when we come back we can try to address

the thorny difficult question of what our emotions than. All right, we're back, So to proceed here, we're going to have to take a quick stab an exceedingly huge and complicated question, which is what our emotions. Obviously this is something we can't answer adequately in a subsection of one episode, but we'll do our best to try to to hint at

the broad picture of what this question entails. Yeah, it can be so tricky to even contemplate this because because and one of the big things is that emotions are the tumultuous, see that we're constantly immersed in that where we feel cast about in you know. And this is again this gets into poetry as well, Right, how many poems are about you know, the mail storm of emotion, you know, and and and how we just feel like

we're just a victim to them. Well, yeah, I mean we we often think of emotions as being something that's inside us, but it's almost more apt to think of us as being inside them. Like we can't see the whole thing, We don't have perspective. We're it's more like a c on which we are floating. I think that's

a great metaphor. And yet at the same time we are the sea, you know, Like we often fall into this, uh, into this model that I think is largely what you see in the work of some of the you know, the classic philosophers of logic and emotion, and then like logic is the domain of you know, logic and reason on one hand, and then they're the the enemies of passion that uh that that tear us apart, the Apollo and Dionysus model exactly. Yeah, and so it's easy to

fall back on that. It's just baked into so much of our culture. Yeah, And and just in general, emotion is just something we're too close to. I sometimes feel, I feel that emotion is like a cantalope, you know, like when you buy a cantaloupe, when you cut, you don't know what it's gonna be you cut into it, though, and when it's great, there's nothing else like it. It's amazing, And when it's bad, it's just the worst. I don't know if I feel this way about candle up, I

feel this way about tomatoes. Yeah, tomato. My favorite food in the world is a really good ripe summer tomato.

And there's nothing worse than a meli off season tomato. Yes, the tomato is also a great example of human emotion, and I think a lot of our meditative and monastic traditions are ultimately aimed at fostering as much as possible a dependable honeydew melon mental state, something where you know, you cut into it and it's not gonna be just it's not gonna knock your socks off, but it's also

not going to discuss you. It's going to be a nice, pleasant, dependable experience right there in the middle, calming the seas, eliminating the highs and lows, creating equanimity. So this is this is where we are. You know, we're feeling creatures, for better or worse. But we've always tried to figure out emotions. We've tried to figure it out for for ages,

the greatest thinkers, philosophers, artist, scientist sages. Uh, you know, religious leaders throughout history have contemplated their nature and formulated various theories. And we could easily do a multi part series on the question of human emotions. But the short view is that we have basically three ways of considering them. First of all, there's the idea of emotions as feelings. The way they feel is what they are, so it's

a subjective state. And in that sense, the only emotion you can ever really know is your own, Like you cannot share in anybody else's. You can think you do, but you can't know for sure. I mean, does somebody else's sadness feel like yours? Does to somebody else's happiness

feel like yours? Does you know it's it's you? You are trapped with your subjectivity here, right, And then when you get into theory of mind, I mean, I mean, that's a whole issue there and itself, like, to what what degree do we attribute the same level of emotional investment to others? And in what cases are we attributing too much emotion to this individual and less emotion to this individual based on a whole host of reasons. Well so, But if emotion is just subjectivity, it seems hopeless that

you could ever try to study it in animals. Right, If it's just a subjective experience, we have no access to it whatsoever, right, and and and that would be the danger, right if it was just perpetually tied up in the other human concepts of say like consciousness and u uh in theory of mind, etcetera. But then we have these other two categories. First of all, emotions as evaluations.

Emotions are evaluations of the primary circumstances that we're dealing with. So, you know, a huge tie to the environmental stimuli, situational stimuli all around us. So emotions are ways of reacting to the world that their internal states that signal a certain response to what you're seeing or dealing with. Right, go through a haunted attraction around Halloween, and you you feel something like fear or that sort of related safe

feeling of fear, whatever however you want to categorize it. Uh, That is a product of the environment you thrust yourself into, all right, And if these are internal states that are products of evaluating an environment, you could then start to look at patterns about what the what the features of those internal states are, what do they do to the brain? What do they cause? How do they cause you to react?

And I guess that would bring us to the next way of looking at it, right, Yes, emotions as motivations. Emotions as primarily motivating states. So basically this would be a situation of where I am angry and therefore I strike out at somebody. It causes you to act in a certain way. So there's a lot more to it than this, but these are those sort of the three

basic pillars that are often discussed. So seemingly, you know, we can strike because we are angry, we're angry because we strike, and then we also just feel angry, and it all becomes this kind of cat's cradle of um of physiology, behavior, and situational context. Another way to think

of emotions is this UH. This is a definition that is often used conscious mental reactions that we subjectively experience, and these strong feelings are typically directed towards a specific object or person, resulting in or caused by UH or

certainly accompanied by physiological and behavioral change. However, as we'll discussing these episodes, throwing consciousness into it rather complicates things when we look to other animals, because while emotions are certainly tied up in the human conscious experience, is consciousness really required to have emotion? I think there's an extremely

strong argument that it is not. Well, you can certainly imagine, say, a robot that models emotional states without being conscious, right right, and and so you don't know if that's the case for any other animals. You don't know to what extent they're subjectively feeling emotions like you and I do, or like you resumably do. The robot could still act angry, and it would still do all the things that an

angry person would do. Or a robot could act sad and still have all the reactions a sad person would have. Like if again, if you're coming back to emotions as evaluations, you could consider a screensaver on a This is a very simple model of it, but a screensaver on a computer screen is a response to um to what's going on in the world. Like nobody's using the keyboard right now, somebody's away from the machine. Uh so a relaxed date comes into place. There's a paper we're gonna look at

later in the episode. Well, we'll come back to it in a bit, But it's by a Clint J. Perry and Luigi Battia Donna that tried to put together all all of these disparate ways of looking at emotion into a single definition that could be used for objective research purposes, and it comes out with something that will really make your heart burn. Is just you know, full of feeling. Quote.

Emotions are transient central states comprising subjective, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological phenomena that are triggered by appraisal of certain types of environmental stimuli. On one hand, I think that's great because it really does capture all the things you'd be looking for if you're trying to study emotions in a scientific way. On the other hand, that just sounds hilarious.

I think that's that sentence is a great It is a great example of why you need those three categories, because if you run it all together there it just sounds it's a little overwhelming. But if you break it down into three definite, definite categories of consideration, I feel like it it makes a lot more sense, at least to me. Yeah, well, we'll come back to another pretty similar way of breaking it down. When we actually look

at the study. But first I wanted to come back to the eight armed world where we started, So we started off talking about the paper Nautilus, the also known as the argonaut, this great octopus that the builds a fortress of love. I think the octopus world is a great place to start if we're looking for what would be the clearest, easiest examples to find of something that really, at least intuitively looks like emotions in the invertebrate world.

Because of course that's it's long been a debate about whether thoughts and emotions can be said to exist in animals other than humans. You know, a lot of scientists would take issue with saying that there are emotions in any non human animals because they would say, well, if we use human terms like happy and sad, that's just anthropomorphic projection, there's no way to prove it, and so forth.

But I really think intuitively, most people are comfortable with the idea that some analogs to human emotions exist in other animals with complex brains, like mammals and birds. Yeah. I mean again, I think part of the whole exercise is is casting emotions down from that golden pedestal, casting away the poetry and and thinking again about what they

actually are. And certainly it's I imagine that a duck is not it never finds itself feeling sad about being sad or something, so you know, conscious as the human model, but something like sadness that we feel, you you can certainly imagine it in a duck or a cat or or any of these. Certainly, these these higher organisms that come to mind. I mean, it's really easy to see things that at least really intuitively look like emotions, whether

we're interpreting them right or not. In social animals like dogs, it's really hard for me not to look at my dog and think, my dog is happy right now, or my dog is angry or something right. I mean, with all the complexities that come with with with making those kind of statements about an animal, of course, because again we can know we can never deny the power of

anthropomorphism exactly. But one of the first places I wanted to go here with invertebrates is that I think what I just said about my dog, this powerful intuitive sense of my you know, day to day experience with a canine, that this animal does feel emotions that are in some way similar to the emotions. I feel if you wanted to look for this pattern of intuition outside of our relationships with mammals, I think the octopus is a great

place to start. So a couple of years ago, one of the books that I recommended in our summer reading episode was a book by an author named Psi Montgomery called The Soul of an Octopus, which is sort of a cross between a zoology book about the octopus and a memoir about the author's personal experiences with octopus minds

and the people who study and care for octopuses. And that book, really it still sticks with me today, and one of the main reasons is that she presents in it all of these anecdotes that look like genuinely powerful

emotional connections and interactions between humans and cephalopods. It reflects this steady, unshakable sensation that many people who work with octopuses get, which is, on one hand, they see this strange, alien kind of intelligence, but on the other hand, they see a very familiar human kind of intelligence and even emotion at work. Of course, again with all the caveats that these impressions, you know, they could be anthropomorphic projection.

I think it's at least worth looking at the types of encounters that lead to this sort of thinking, whether the thinking is correct or not. Yeah, yeah, I agree that the octopus is a great example to look to because it checks off so many opposite boxes. You know. It is uh, it is a it is a solitary creature that that lives in in a different environment than we do, that has as a totally different structure to its body. It's it's like an alien compared to us.

Distributed intelligence. Also, I mean, the intelligence of an octopus is not just central in its head. It's it's it appears to be able to think with its arms in ways that you know, if we can do something like that, it's in a much more limited sense. So to cite a couple of the many anecdotes and examples that appear in the book, the first one is that at one point she's sharing a story from a biologist named Scott Dowd.

So Doubt is working in an aquarium where one of his jobs is taking care of a dwarf Caribbean octopus who lives in one of the small display tanks, and one morning Dowd comes in to find this octopuss tank overflowing onto the floor, and the octopus itself seems to have vanished. It's not anywhere to be seen, and eventually he finds it. He finds that it has managed to squeeze itself into the tiny pipe that recirculates water in the tank. This pipe is only about half an inch wide.

So obviously there's a problem because the water can't recirculate because the octopus is clogging the pipe, and you need to get the octopus out of the pipe. So what do you do? I have no idea what you'd even begin to do to get something out of an aperture

that's small without harming it. But Dowd in this moment he remembers having seen a National geographic special about fisherman in Greece who were catching octopuses by setting out in four a pots in the ocean is traps, and the octopuses would squeeze themselves into these pots, which seemed like perfect dens for them, only to then get hauled up to the surface by the fisherman. But how do you get the octopus out of the pot without breaking the pot? Well,

there was a very simple solution. These octopuses were saltwater creatures and the fishermen would pour fresh water into the pots. H So the octopus is obviously being, you know, evolved for a saltwater environment. They don't like this at all, and they would immediately slither out of the pot and be captured. All right, That that makes sense. So of course dow didn't want to kill and eat the dwarf octopus in the tank, but he figured that the same process might work to get it out of the pipe,

and it did. Uh. He flushed it with fresh water and the octopus came out. Now years later, he tried the same trick to subdue a misbehaving female giant Pacific octopus that he's working with. And a lot of the emotional connections that people have with octopuses in this book are with these giant Pacific octopuses. They've they've got a lot of personality. But the story goes that dowd would

you know, he was dealing with this octopus. He would lift the top of the tank up to feed it, and and she would put her arms out and attach herself to his hands, and he would be unable to get her to let go. And if he managed to peel one of the creature's arms off, of him. She would just instantly wrapped two or more, you know, around the same hand. Again, So like, how do you get

this octopus off of you? Well, he remembered his earlier experience with the tiny octopus in the fresh water, so he got the idea to repel the larger octopus the same way. He filled up a picture in the sink and he poured it over the octopus clinging to his hand, and again, at first it worked. The octopus let go of him and recoiled sharply, and Dowd said, for a moment he was proud of himself for having rediscovered this

useful trick and outsmarted this crafty creature. But then to read the next section from Montgomery's book, But the octopus was incensed. Quote she got scarlet red and really thorny. It was a heated moment. What I didn't notice, he said, was she was blowing herself up. She siphoned up a massive load of water and gushed a major surge of salt water onto my face. As he stood there dripping, Scott noticed the octopus had the same look on her face as I must have had on mine when I

thought I had outwitted her. Now, which part of the octopus is the face? Now here? Here you may be onto something. I don't know. How do you find the octopus is face? I mean, it's got eyes, but they're not really front facing, are they. I mean we can easily. I mean again, our anthropomorphic powers are such that we can easily devise one. I believe there was a wasn't

there recently an issue with the masters of emoticons. They made an octopus emoticon that rearranged the anatomy to make it look more face like, and I believe a biologist corrected them on this. Oh wait a minute, though, I know that you find an octopus face sometimes when you look into your environment, because when you see the forked coat hook on the door, you see the boxer octopus. Yes, but I see a cartoon octopus, and cartoons are human

and have faces. Cartoon animals are generally of animals that have been made human. Okay, I guess you're right about that. But coming back to the story about about Scott doubt in the octopus, that there is something about this kind of apparent anger and reciprocal vengeance that feels very much

like an analog of complex human emotion. Again, maybe you know, we're maybe we're just overreading into a single anecdote, but the book is full of anecdotes like this where people really feel like they're having these emotionally charged interactions with

these eight armed critters. Yeah, Like a defensive display is essentially what we're talking about here, um and and like that does have an emotional resonance, Like if you see a cat with a defensive display, a horse, a dog, et cetera, Like you know what they're about, that there's a message they are sending. Then there is a presumed emotional state behind it. And you know, we we we get it. We don't even have to be able to

put it into words to to know what that state is. Yeah, and the really interesting part is not that it was a defensive display when something was about to happen that the octopus didn't like. It happened after like he poured the fresh water on it, then it went back in its tank. Then it puffed up and got red and shot him back. Like isn't that much more interesting than if he had been like coming at it with something it didn't want. But there's another part of the book

I wanted to talk about real quick. That speaks of how persuasive the octopus's behavior was in convincing the people who worked with him that they had character, personality, and something like an inner life quote. The students were supposed to refer to their animals by numbers in their research papers, but they ended up calling them by name jet Stream, Martha, Gertrude, Henry, Bob.

Some were so friendly. A researcher named Alexa said they would lift their arms out of the water like a dog jumps up to greet you, or like a child who wants to be lifted up and hugged. And then there's a there's one more story from Alexa in there, uh where she says quote. And then there was Windy. Alexa used her as part of her thesis presentation. It was a formal event that was videotaped, for which Alexa wore a nice suit. As soon as the camera started rolling,

Wendy drenched the student with salt water. The octopus scurried to the bottom of the tank, hid in the sand, and refused to come out. Alexa is convinced the whole debacle occurred because the octopus realized in advance what was going to happen and resolved to prevent its crafty. Now, on the other hand, I think we need to recognize that the subjective impressions of people who work directly with animals are probably going to be prone to all kinds

of biases. I mean, even people who work with robots tend to attribute lots of essentially human qualities of mind to those robots. They name the robots. They think of the robots as having personalities and intentions apart from their explicit programming. You know, I often think Johnny the room bas is being jive us. He's chasing me around the house or around the kitchen right now. Uh, And yeah, we're not tempted to actually think those impressions are telling

it telling us anything real about the emotions of robots. No, but I mean to whatever extent it would be useful in dealing with robot or or more you know, realistically

an animal. Uh. Then we see the usefulness of that anthropomorphism. Um, like the you know, the classic example being like, if you're dealing with an animal that could be dangerous when it's uh, when it's in a defensive mood, you know, uh, like it's it's it's not so much about like the detail of the emotion that you were you were imagining in its head. But but it's more about the degree to which it matches up with how it may act and then allowing you to respond appropriately or or to

not respond at all. Like this, this animal is mad, this animal is aggressive. I should not get close to it right now. But you know, it's it's one thing for a scientist, Tom, you know, to have to avoid intentionally inserting their anthropomorphic feelings into a study. Uh, you know, but our but again, our theory of mind powers are useful in our relationships with animals. And I think you can, you can, you can, you can state that they would be useful in interactions with animals even in a study,

provided that you could still separate those feelings from the data. Sure, I mean I would say that they would be useful insofar as they accurately predict outcomes, right, which sometimes they can. So again, I think it's it's important for us to be able to to take human emotions off of the pedestal, uh and and think more about what they are and and and stating that okay, um, you know the mind of an animal, the mind of an octopus or whatever. You know, their mind is a vessel that cannot hold

the shape of our own emotional states. But our experience plus theory of mind allows us to have this instantaneous, you know, almost translate equal understanding of the basic properties

of the other's emotional state. Yeah, I mean, I guess anytime we're trying to study emotional states, whether that's in animals or really even in other people, I mean, you have to accept the subjective disconnect, that you're not necessarily talking about the same things in terms of subjective feelings, but that once you get into these subjective criteria that we alluded to earlier, and I guess what we're coming back to now, um, you can start to look for

behavioral and cognitive analogies. Another way of thinking about it, to go back to my earlier metaphor of the cat's cradle of you know, of getting some yarn and weaving it between your your fingers and creating a pattern. Right, uh, you know, criss crossing array of string casts between the fingers of two hands. Ultimately, fewer or more fingers are not going to make it any less a cat's cradle. Right, So if if you know, if five fingers are the

shape of human cognitive complexity. There's a certain emotional um web that we can weave and that we're trapped in most of the time. But you know, animals say they just have the have three fingers to cast that web with. I mean, they're still casting the web, and then we might easily conceive what would it be like to to cast a cat's cradle if you had seven fingers on

each hand. Uh, it would it would be more complex, It might be difficult for us to imagine what that would be like cognitively, emotionally, or what have you, but it would still be something that is relatable to that experience. Well, maybe we should take another break and then when we come back we can discuss relating the human experience of emotions to analogous uh, behaviors and cognition and animals. Than alright,

we're back. We've been talking about emotion. We've been talking about emotion in animals and what exactly we would be looking for in trying to find that emotion, especially emotion

in invertebrates. Because people are generally, I think more comfortable with the idea that we see something strongly analogous to human emotions and other animals like say, you know, mammals with complex brains, social mammals and stuff, right like not not only is everyone, I think pretty on board with the idea to say dogs have emotions or even cats have emotions, it would be it would almost be socially dangerous to suggest otherwise. Are you saying you want to

suggest otherwise? No, you're afraid No, no, I think, especially again going back to the idea of taking the human poetic idea of emotion and bringing it down to a more realistic level, stripping the poetry away from it. I think without a doubt dogs and cats and and other organisms we might even sometimes not not wish to think about having emotions, such as pigs and cows, um, you know,

they definitely have emotional states. Uh so yeah, I would not be the one to suggest that dogs don't have emotions, And I pity the person who does make that suggestion because they will be attacked on the street. Well, let's see if we can start some street fights about crowd ads. Okay, so for the next for the rest of this episode and then for most of the next episode. Also, I think we're going to be looking mainly at this one paper.

It was A good paper I found published in seventeen in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Clint J. Perry and Luigi Battia Donna, called studying emotion in invertebrates what has been done, what can be measured, and what they can provide uh. And so these two researchers I believe are both at Queen Mary University of London, and this is not a single study but large review of existing research on invertebrate emotions. There actually aren't that many studies

on invertebrate emotions. It's a fairly recent field, but what is out there is, at least in my mind, very interesting. Now. The authors point out that invertebrates have long played a role in the history of neuroscience. It was researching invertebrates in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that taught us what neurons were and how they were structured. UH. Insects are often believed to lack the structural neural complexity necessary

to generate complex states like emotions. The people think their brains are just too simple. You know, when you've got a brain that structurally simple, with you know, such a few number of neurons, they just couldn't have a complex state like a persistent emotional state. Uh, And their behavior is often characterized in terms of simple sense or emotor response.

So a snail or a spider might have an automatic response that causes it to retreat from a hot match, but the animal isn't feeling anything that could reasonably be called called, you know, anger or fear a persistent emotional state.

That that's often the view. But the authors think this old view is due for revision due to this growing body of research showing various invertebrates, not just octopuses like we were just talking about, being capable of mental phenomena previously considered unthinkable, including all kinds of stuff concept learning,

numerical cause mission, cultural transmission, and so forth. So in order to study emotion and animals, we need to land on a definition that that makes emotions susceptible to external detection. And that's where that definition that I mentioned earlier in the episode comes in again. It is quote, emotions are transient central states comprising subjective, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological phenomena that are triggered by appraisal of certain types of environmental stimuli.

So something in the environment causes it. The animals appraisal of that thing in the environment triggers an internal state. And these internal states have subjective, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological effects. And when you break it down like that, uh, I feel like you have a model then that you can. You can you can certainly, you know, informally attribute to a wide variety of organisms. But more to the point,

you can you can potentially test for it exactly. And well, you can definitely test for like three of the four effects. You can't test for subjective states. We don't get. That goes back to the three examples we had are earlier that feeling is what it feels like. Yeah, you can't do that, but the other three you can. So emotions are thought to have cognitive effects. Emotions affect how you

think and how you perceive. They have behavioral effects. Emotions affect what you do with your body, and they have physiological effects. Emotions affect unconscious or involuntary reactions within the body. So just for example, to use fear, there is of course the subjective experience of fear, and we can only know this in the first person. You just assume by analogy that everybody else feels a similar subjective experience when

they're afraid. But external observers, you know, could document cognitive changes during fear, such as increased awareness of sensory stimulized signaling danger. Maybe for example, when an animal is feeling fear, it is more likely to notice movement and its peripheral vision in the state. You could notice behavioral changes such

as threat displays or retreat behaviors. You could notice physiological changes such as increased heart rate or the release of fight or flight hormones like epinefn or epernefer and and all that. You can notice dilated pupils, relaxation of the bladder, etcetera. Yeah, I mean we've to to go back to episodes that we've we've done on human fear and like the nature of fear. Uh, it's uh, it really change. It kind of changes who you are. It always makes me think

of the hunter S. Thompson quote. You're a whole different person when you're scared. Uh. You know, we think we know how we're going to behave in in a situation of real fear, but we can't always be sure unless we have sort of you know, performed enough exercises and fear if you will and even then there may be unknowns well. Of course, so fear, like other emotions, has cognitive and behavioral effects, in some cases very strong ones. What is who you are, It is your how you

think and how you act. Yeah, I mean there are studying again, these are human studies, but there, you know, there are studies that have looked at how fear and uncertainty affect our politics, you know something, as you know, generally we think of as very very complex and nuanced and based in ideas and very stable. Yeah, it's just based on what we believe in a kind of permanent

or semi permanent way. But no, I mean people's political opinions appear to fluctuate based on their their emotional states day to day, moment to moment. Yeah, which of course should not come as a surprise if you're you know, aware of the degree to which emotions are manipulated by politicians. But but but yeah, like you you add, you change the emotional state, you change how the animal behaves and

perceives the world. Right, So I think in the time we have left to in today's episode, we've got time to look at the first one of these, the cognitive tests for invertebrate emotions. And we'll have to save the other types of tests for the next episode. But to look at the cognitive tests, one of the things that you can do to study emotions in UH, in humans, of course, but also in other animals is something known as a judgment bias test. So imagine what is meant

by a test phrase. Here's a test phrase, the doctor examined little Emily's growth. Al Right, Well, that that just brings to mind that the clear image of little Emily, and like a Norman Norman Rockwell painting, be exam being examined by the doctor, and the doctor finding this grotesque mass on the back of her neck. Well, it turns out,

so this is an ambiguous phrase. People interpret it different ways, and at least in some studies, people with some conditions negative emotional conditions like depression or generalized anxiety were more likely on average to read this ambiguous statement as being like, what you're talking about about some kind of disease growth, People with without anxiety or depression, or people who had formerly had these conditions and are now considered cured or

in remission, UH, we're more likely to interpret it as measuring normal growth in childhood. He as in he measured her height. Yeah. So um So, first of all, I have to say, so, so the way that I answered it in the show here is also the way I responded to the text when I read it for me to so, and it is it is is entirely possible that that it comes from me having just a generally

anxious a depressed state. However, I do have questions about to what degree this test phrase is weighted, because if you simply add and development to the end of this test phrase, granted, it makes it more specific and it's less ambiguous, but then but there also means there's no question if you say the doctor examined a little Emily's growth in development, you're not going to say, oh, he he was the doctor was looking at not only the weird thing on her neck, but also how she's developing.

I don't know. Oh, I feel like that would just make it not ambiguous anymore. Yeah, it's true, but I also just it just feels it feels manipulative that that phrase to me. So I was looking around a little bit about this to see if anybody else had any problems with this. Uh, And it does seem as if the depression link negative interpretation bias findings are not without

at least some criticism. Uh. Claire Lawson and Colin McLeod bring it up in Depression in the Interpretation of Ambiguity in and they pointed out that we could be talking about more about like a depression link response bias, reflecting an elevated tendency for depressives to admit or endorse negatively toned response options. So so under this model, it's possible that depression maybe just is affecting more like what you're likely to say to other people rather than what you're

actually likely to represent internally. Yeah, and I guess in this we're getting into the complexity of of language and social interaction on it, you know. Um. Also, others have argued that interpretation biases and depression might be limited to interpretations for the self. So unless you are little Emily, uh, there perhaps wouldn't be that much of an impact here. Um.

You know. So it's in a way, it's kind of like self deprecating humor, you know, like it's it's it's more about how you were feeling, and it's about the the stuff in the world that's directly affecting you. Which makes sense because these emotional states are largely going to be connected to you or things of value to you, not some random little girl in a you know an example phrase. Well, I wouldn't want to put too much on that one example phrase. Maybe that's not a great example.

Well it's it's probably the better. I found a couple of phrases as well that we're used in other studies, but that one was still the best and one that's frequently cited um elsewhere. I found a two thousand seven study published in Cognition and Emotion from Bison and Sears, and they found no negative interpretive bias in their studies. But that's not to say that an emotional state won't

just generally influence how information or stimuli is received. A loving touch may startle you and spin you around in a defensive stance, if you are primed for a hostile physical encounter. Well yeah, I mean there there could be very sale criticisms that I'm not aware of. I thought I understood like that, it's pretty well documented within humans and animals that yeah, that like negative mood does tend

to bias perception. So when you encounter something ambiguous, if you're feeling angry or sad, you're more likely to interpret the ambiguous thing in a pessimistic way. Yeah, and I think that that is definitely the case. I guess the main thing I wanted to drive home is I didn't want anybody to engage in this sort of exercise with us here and have the same knee jerk reaction that we did and then immediately assume that that means that

they have an anxiety problem or or in a depressive state. Well, I mean, even if you did react that way, and even if the test is generally valid, it would just be like one answer, you'd have to like do an average of a bunch of different things to figure out

what's you know, more likely the case. Yes, but you know, we're humans and we tend to jump to conclusions and engage in I guess, um, what is the the X Men personality test that we've factor that we've discussed in the show before X Man, I don't remember this, well, the name is eluding me at the moment, but you know, when you you engage it, like the fortune cookie scenario or the uh the astrological charts scenario where the future is read and it's just a little piece of paper

telling you something random, but you immediately identify things about yourself in that safe release the horror effects, yes, the Barnum effect also, yes, yes, a little something for everybody. Well, I think we we can certainly log possible criticisms of the judgment bias effect and keep them as an asterisk over what we're about to read, which you know it may in some ways be undercut by any weakness in

the inherent paradigm. But in some existing research on animals, we people have tried to use judgment bias tests to see if there is cognitive evidence of emotions and animals. And you can do this in some animals, like if you take rats and you train them to distinguish between two different tones, say a high pitch tone and a low pitch tone, And then in the enclosure with the

rats is a lever that they can press. So if they press the lever when they hear the high pitch tone, they get a food pellet reward, but if they press the lever when they hear the low pitch tone, they get an unpleasant blast of white noise. So they learn and they get good at telling the difference when the high pitch tone plays, they are quick to press the lever and get the food reward. When the low pitch

tone plays, they hang back. They either take a long time to press the lever or they don't press it at all. And it turns out you can manipulate something like the rats mood or emotional state you know, asterisk with all the caveats that are implied there to bias their judgments about new ambiguous stimuli. So what happens when you play a tone in between the two tones that

the rats have been trained on? The studies show that, say, if you tilt the rats housing up at an angle, or if you wet the rats betting or introduce an unfamiliar rat to the group, when the ambiguous tone plays, the rats will be much more avoidant of the lever in response to this this ambiguous stimuli than rats in a control condition with normal stable housing conditions, which are more likely to interpret the ambiguous tone optimistically and run

and press the lever. So what this looks like again, And of course you know we could be overreading into it, but it looks like if you put rats in something like a bad emotional state by making them uncomfortable and uneasy, they're going to interpret unfamiliar information in a pessimistic way, whereas quote, happy rats are more likely to interpret unfamiliar information in an optimistic way. So it's an emotional state based on experience that is preparing the rat to deal

with um, with with incoming stimuli or or incoming environmental situations. Yeah, I mean it looks like a quote bad mood puts the animal in a kind of defensive posture, or it's less likely to explore an experiment and it's less likely to to take a risk. It's more just kind of hunkered down, right, Yeah, So it's you know, it's like um.

And again, I think this helps to demystify the human experience of some of these emotions, even though these emotions could arguably more complex when you bring in human language and so forth. But if every time in the past that I've gone to a specific fast food restaurant I have I've gotten ill, then in the future when I go back, I am going to be on guard against incoming illness of course. Yeah, I mean that's like classical conditioning one totally. So I mean, really that's that's what

we're talking about here. Um, you know, and I do think it does serve to demystify something like fear, but really any of the emotions, even the you know, the loftier emotions like uh, like you know, like love, uh, that you know, we need to to to take bring them to bring them down a few steps anyway, so that we can attribute these things to animals as well. Yeah. Now, obviously, I think, as you and I have discussed before, it's more difficult to study some emotion than others. So you'll

find more studies on on invertebrates. We're about to get into an invertebrate example on things like aversion and anxiety and fear than you will in invertebrate love. Though there are some with invertebrate positive emotions that I think are very interesting. We'll get to one and just it's generally easier to take an animal out of its natural habitat and study it by making it feel anxious and afraid

as opposed to making it feel at home. I mean, really, that's one of one of the problems and some of these studies that have been conducted with um specifically, I guess I'm thinking of rats and addiction, right, like are you are you testing for the response to these substances under you know, ideal sort of ambiguous circumstances, or is it within the world of a rat prison that you've created in a room somewhere, yeah, or is it unnatural

within the rat prison. But the results are useful to us anyway, because the rats and the rat prison are kind of analogous to the way humans live. Now yeah, yeah, it's like I said, it's it gets complicated. But anyway, to to move to invertebrates with the idea of the judgment bias test, At least three studies so far have shown possible evidence of the judgment bias effect in bees. Bees. You know, this is there's another example of an animal that we generally don't we don't attribute a lot of

personality to or certainly emotional states. But they are they're complicated organisms. They're they're they're fascinating creatures. Yes, well, let's take a look and see what we think. So the authors here site two studies Bates and at All in two thousand eleven and Schloons at All in two thousand seventeen that studied this effect the judgment bias effect in

honey bees or APIs mallifera. So bees were trained on two different kinds of chemical odors that they sensed with their antennae, which were associated with two different sugar solutions that they could extend their probosis to taste. So when odor A was sensed, that was associated with a sweet sugar solution, and when odor B you was since, that was associated with a bitter quinine solution, which the bees

did not like tasting. So if you train them on this, right, once they smell odor A, they're going to be like, oh, boy, sugars coming and that you know, that's the condition response. When they smell odor bee, they're going to be like, oh, that's the bitter quinine and I don't want any of it. They get conditioned like this. And then the manipulation came when the researchers would go and shake the bees housing

vigorously for sixty seconds. And this was supposed to simulate a natural attack on the colony by a predator such as a honey badger and to quote here. After the shaking manipulation, bees were tested with ambiguous odor mixtures intermediate between the two mixtures used for training in both studies.

Honey bee subjected to the shaking were less likely to respond to the ambiguous odor mixture closest in ratio to the oder mixture associated with quinine during training, suggesting that shaking induces a negative cognitive bias to ambiguous odor cues. So when the the odor was somewhere between the other two odors chemically, especially when it was closer to the bad odor, the bees that had been shaken were more likely to say I don't want any of that. Again,

this looks like a pessimistic bias. Yeah, clearly, and it seems like a clear case. Uh. Now, the authors do offer an important caveat here. They say quote however, it has been argued that shaking may cause bees to become better discriminators. Shaking increased hemolymph concentrations of octopamine, which can modulate sensory function. And hemolymph again is like insect blood

than of blood. They have hemio lymph, this other circulatory fluid, and so it increased this uh, this thing called octopamine, which is similar I believe to nora adrenaline and in mammals and humans. Uh So, remember that the shaking really seemed to make a difference when the odor was ambiguous but closer to the odor associated with the bitter food. So maybe shaken bees are just better at sensing that closeness to the bad outcome because is of non emotional

physiological reasons. That's also possible. But this isn't the only test of judgment bias effect in bees period. All In also studied the same thing, but in the opposite direction, optimistic bias created by pleasure or happiness, or at least what you might call an analog of pleasure or happiness in bumble bees. So again there was a similar type of setup. They would train bumble bees to respond to two possible visual cues. There would be a green card on the left that has a cup of sugar water

solution underneath it. This is the reward cue, and then a blue card on the right that has a cup of regular water underneath it, and this is the control que. Trained bumble bees would learn to go straight to the green card on the left when it was present to get the sugar they you know, they don't bother with

the blue card on the right. Now, what happens when you put a bluish greenish card in the middle of the two positions, Well, the study showed that if you give the bees a little bit of sugar reward before the test, they approached the ambiguous new stimulus the blue green card in the middle position faster than if you don't give them any sugar. And so the authors hearsay quote.

Control experiments showed that after consumption of the small unexpected reward, bees did not increase their flight speed and we're not more likely to explore novel stimuli, suggesting that the small reward did not simply increase the bees general activity or exploration, but was indeed due to changes in their decision making

processes under ambiguity, thus resembling optimism in humans. Uh So, again, there could be something wrong here that we're that we're missing, but at least it on the surface, it looks like the bees are just expecting better outcomes with ambiguous possibilities

when they've had a little bit of sugary treats. Right. So, I think one of the big takeoffs from this is that it is going you have to think of emotion is being tied to how we navigate the war world, and we are not the only organism that has to navigate a world of changing circumstances. And and because clearly the bee has to do that as well, and it has similar abilities that result or our and our and

or are caused by emotional states. Yeah, but I think we've got to call it for this first episode, and we can come back and explore some more research along these lines next time. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us anywhere you get a podcast. These days, we don't even know all the places you get podcasts. Uh, we know a few of them. One of them is I heart and if you go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that will shoot you over to

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