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This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying the causes and processes of illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
Dear Boobsta; I don’t think the minds of animal are organised like ours but some animals may think(?) by instinct. I heard some animals heading for slaughterhouse resist to walk in, cow dropping tears, etc.
However, I watched a TV program of some chimpanzee trained by Japanese did thinking! They could follow the long numbers in order, faster than anybody, used coin to release banana from the machine, etc. Those chimpanzees looked like having ability to think to themselves. After all, they do have brains.
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mmmm……I think some animals are highly intelligent and would probably be able to think a little bit like us. Some human like primates are very similar to us and have been shown to solve problems like we would solve problems! It’s just a hard thing to test, isn’t it.
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This is a really tough question to answer for a lot of reasons. One reason is that we’re not even really sure how we think! It may seem obvious, but a really active area of research right now deals with topics like consciousness, and what it means to have consciousness and be conscious. Since we’re not even really sure how that works, it’s difficult to ask if other animals think like we do. It’s also difficult because while we can ask humans questions about how they’re thinking, and compare it to measures like brain scans, it’s a lot more difficult to ask a cat questions as you try to stick it into an MRI machine and get it to think about chocolate! (If you have a cat, you’ll understand the general difficulty in getting a feline to do anything it doesn’t want to, but that’s another story….)
With these things in mind, there’s still some interesting questions to ask and ways to study the problem. One broad area deals with what’s called ‘theory of mind’ and self-awareness. It’s a really technical area, but one of the more interesting tests we can do is about self-awareness and self-recognition. Here’s a question for you: when you look in the mirror, how do you know that the reflection staring back at you is ‘you’? Sounds simple, right? It’s you! But underneath that is a complex bit of thinking that your brain is doing to realise that the image outside of you is actually you, and that anything you do will be done by the reflection because you and it are one and the same thing. Similarly, we can do something called the mirror test on animals to see if they can figure out that their reflection is actually them (and thus that they maybe have an idea of what ‘I’ means). The test typically involves watching animals interacting with a mirror to see what they do – do they threaten their reflection? Do they interact with it? And then we can do a further test which involves manipulating the appearance of the animal and seeing if they react appropriately. For example, we can put a spot of dye on a chimpanzee in front of a mirror (and a control spot that’s invisible and the chimpanzee can’t see, to see if they’re reacting to the dye or to something else). The dye is usually placed so that the chimp can’t look down and see it, but it’s still accessible and visible in the mirror. If the chimp react to the dye appropriately, by angling to see it better, or poking at it on its own body in the right spot as it sees it in the mirror, we conclude that they’ve worked out that the reflection is them.
A number of animals have been seen to pass the mirror test; the great apes (chimps, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos), dolphins, some whales, some of the smarter birds. I was just at a conference where they even showed a smart fish (the cleaner wrasse) solving this test.
Of course, the mirror test is only a part of thinking, but it’s a nice test because it’s simple to do and suggests some plausible things about the way animals think. We can also study other parts of animal thinking (cognition, as we call it). Soon mentioned counting, which is another active area of research; can animals learn to count like we can? A few animals have been shown to be able to count in a linear fashion (1,2,3,etc), but showing the ability to make relative judgements (like 4 apples is less than 7 apples) is more difficult and I only know of a couple of examples of these more difficult math abilities (I believe the gray parrot falls into this category).
I hope this gives you a taste of this big and exciting field. If you study biology in school, this is the sort of question that you could help answer one day!
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