The paramount importance of change coming from a positive vision.
Yesterday’s post, In the name of progress, was primarily a review of the documentary film Surviving Progress. As was made clear in that post, the film was a very tough view. Recall that I wrote:
The blunt truth is that the film is scary beyond belief. Like watching a giant wave about to engulf you, or a snake about to strike; nothing to do but be transfixed; to be mesmerized by these last few moments of your life.
I also mentioned that I had started to read the Transition Primerfrom Transition US. The primer is a guide to becoming a Transition Town. The first page of that document starts:
Something remarkable is happening …
All cross the country and around the world citizens in every locale are banding together to reinvent their communities. They are boldly looking at climate change, resource depletion and the economic crises and purposefully unleashing the collective genius of their communities to address these issues.
They are not waiting for government and they are not acting alone. Instead they are building connections in their community; they are reaching out to others and spurring each other into actions that are bold, poignant and exhilarating. Together they are creating a momentum, a groundswell, an empowered and active community movement. These groups are building their future by vision, by design and by intention.
Official Transition Initiatives (TIs) range in size from the TI in the Los Angeles basin with a population of 13 million to the TI in Micanopy, Florida that boasts a population of 653.
Well that’s all fine and dandy but doesn’t ‘smack me in the face’! But this does from Page 8 of that Primer.
The Guiding Principles of Transition
1. Positive Visioning
We can only create what we can first vision
If we can’t imagine a positive future we won’t be able to create it.
A positive message helps people engage with the challenges of these times.
Change is happening – our choice is between a future we want and one which happens to us.
Transition Initiatives are based on a dedication to the creation of tangible, clearly expressed and practical visions of the community in question beyond its present-day dependence on fossil fuels.
Our primary focus is not campaigning against things, but rather on positive, empowering possibilities and opportunities.
The generation of new stories and a new narrative are central to this visioning work.
“If we can’t imagine a positive future we won’t be able to create it.”
With so much going on that has the potential to upset, to undermine, and to disturb, this guiding principle of transition should be extended to be a guiding principle of life.
The immensity of the universe and what it means for Planet Earth.
Jean and I have been watching the astounding BBC Series Wonders of Life presented by Professor Brian Cox. Here’s the BBC trailer:
and there are more clips from the programmes on the relevant part of the BBC website. There is so much about the series that is breath-taking. So much that reminds one of what a beautiful and fragile planet we live on. Quite rightly, the series received great reviews. Here, for example, is a little of what the UK Daily Telegraph newspaper wrote:
Wonders of Life, BBC Two, review
Sarah Crompton reviews the first episode of Brian Cox’s latest series, Wonders of Life (BBC Two).
When it comes to presenting styles, Professor Brian Cox is hard to keep still. There isn’t a beach he won’t feel compelled to stroll on, a mountain he won’t climb, or a river he won’t jump into. And what does he carry in that bag?
Once you got beyond these irritating stylistic tropes, however, Wonders of Life (BBC Two) was Cox at his absolute best, using his natural enthusiasm to communicate complicated ideas in very simple ways. He decided, for example, to show us his own DNA by spitting in a test tube – and missed.
“A physicist doing an experiment,” he giggled, with unforced charm. But when he actually succeeded, those little strands of white that you suddenly see brought everything he subsequently said to life.
He was brilliant at explaining his thesis, which was actually about the second law of thermodynamics, so not that much of a doddle to grasp. If I’ve got it right, what Cox thinks is that life itself may have been the inevitable consequence of the laws of physics and can be explained in the same terms as we explain “the falling of the rain and the shining of the stars”.
Sarah rounds off her review, thus:
The programme’s sophisticated use of graphics, and Cox’s patient repetition of his conclusions, all added to the sensation that this is a series that is actually going to tell you something. For the BBC to unveil both this and The Story of Music over a single weekend reveals a pretty impressive commitment to public service broadcasting. Long may it last.
One of the clear messages that comes from the program is the fact that our universe and the formation of life are intimately connected. That the ‘big bang’ some 3.2 billion years ago, the huge interstellar gas clouds, the formation of the carbon atom and the subsequent long-chained molecules, the collapse of those gas clouds to form suns and planets, the start of life, evolution through natural selection to ever more complex life forms, and on and on and on were and are inevitable. The science is clear. There is nothing mystical about it.
Yes, of course, anyone with half-an-ounce of sensitivity will be in awe of it all; the power and beauty of nature and of the natural world.
But here’s the rub.
As another BBC television programme explained, the universe is bigger than beyond imagination. That was from the BBC Horizon broadcast of August, 2012: How Big is the Universe? Here’s the trailer for that programme.
Stay with me a little longer! Just look at the following image.
The Andromeda galaxy.
This image of the Andromeda galaxy, taken in infrared and X-ray, consists of over a trillion stars.
The detailed Spitzer Space Telescope view above features infrared light from dust (red) and old stars (blue) in Andromeda, a massive spiral galaxy a mere 2.5 million light-years away. In fact, with over twice the diameter of our own Milky Way, Andromeda is the largest nearby galaxy. Andromeda’s population of bright young stars define its sweeping spiral arms in visible light images, but here the infrared view clearly follows the lumpy dust lanes heated by the young stars as they wind even closer to the galaxy’s core. Constructed to explore Andromeda’s infrared brightness and stellar populations, the full mosaic image is composed of about 3,000 individual frames. Two smaller companion galaxies, NGC 205 (below) and M32 (above) are also included in the combined fields. The data confirm that Andromeda (aka M31) houses around 1 trillion stars, compared to 4 hundred billion for the Milky Way.
Please stay with me for a few more minutes. Keeping the Andromeda galaxy in mind, now read this:
ESA astronomers say that for every ten far galaxies observed, a hundred go undetected.
Astronomers estimate that there are between 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies in the known universe. A single galaxy such as the Milky Way contain upwards of 200 billion normal stars. About 75 percent of all stars in the Milky Way are less than half as massive as our Sun. In the universe at large, the majority of galaxies are classified as dwarfs, each with less than a few hundred million stars. The image above is a computer simulation of a colliding dwarf galaxy triggering the formation of the Milky Ways spiral arms.
The largest project ever undertaken to map out the Universe in three dimensions using ESO telescopes has reached the halfway stage. An international team of astronomers has used the VIMOS instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope to measure the distances to 55,000 galaxies as part of the VIPERS survey (VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey). This has already allowed them to create a remarkable three-dimensional view of how galaxies were distributed in space in the younger Universe.This reveals the complex web of the large-scale structure of the Universe in great detail. The light of each galaxy is spread out into its component colours within VIMOS. Follow up analysis then allows astronomers to work out how fast the galaxy appears to move away from us — its redshift. This in turn reveals its distance and, when combined with its position on the sky, its location in the Universe.
Wow!
Millions of galaxies, trillions of suns, inconceivable numbers of planets.
Please pause and let the numbers sink in.
Now back to that Wonders of Life BBC series, during which Professor Brian Cox, said, “that it is inconceivable that there isn’t life elsewhere, that life is not present on countless other planets circling countless other suns …“.
In other words, if mankind is so intent on ‘fouling our nest’ on this most beautiful of planets, so what!
In the bigger scheme of things, it matters not. Find that tough? Then go and hug a dog and enjoy the moment. For tomorrow may never come.
Who doesn’t get stressed out! Maybe not such an issue?
I have in my bookshelf a book called The Anxiety Epidemic. On the back cover it explains this:
The Pain & Stress Center was founded in 1979, but the dream started long before that. The goal is to help individuals realize their true potential and to support and conduct research in the areas of man’s greatest needs – natural alternatives.
I had seen the book in a second-hand bookshop and paid $1.99 for it!
Clearly I have some interest in the topic and like many others around me know that certain situations cause me stress.
Thus when recently there was a TED talk on the topic of ‘How to make stress your friend’ it seemed like a worthwhile thing to watch. I was not wrong!
Published on Sep 4, 2013
Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case. Psychologist Kelly McGonigal urges us to see stress as a positive, and introduces us to an unsung mechanism for stress reduction: reaching out to others.
It was an easy matter to find Kelly McGonigal’s website and discover a mine of advice and other good stuff. For example, this:
In this fun course, I invited my favorite psychology and neuroscience researchers at Stanford to talk about their work and what it means for everyday life and real-world problems. Each class starts with a 45-min lecture by the guest speaker, followed by about 30 minutes of Q&A from myself and course participants. I had a great time grilling these amazing scientists about everything from politics to education, parenting, shopping, and the scientific process. You’ll even hear a few personal stories they’ve never shared in public before!
I’m frequently asked questions about how to get started meditating, what is the best meditation for beginners, what is the best meditation for reducing stress (or training willpower, or cultivating self-compassion, or developing focus, etc.). Below is my favorite meditation for all these intentions.
The intention of this practice is to turn your attention to the breath, notice when the mind wanders, and bring your attention back to the breath.
This meditation cultivates self-awareness, mindfulness, and the ability to make conscious choices about what you are doing. It also is good practice in not following every impulse or habit.
There are a few different ways to focus on the breath; choose the one that feels right to you.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett offers a kind of self-help book for deep thinkers.
Those of you that are regular followers of Learning from Dogs know that I tend to offer posts for the week-end that are light-hearted. Certainly that’s easier for me, if you pardon me from saying, and hopefully a change for you, dear reader.
Well today’s offering is not exactly heavy but it is, nonetheless, not a typical Saturday topic.
However, trust you find it engaging.
Of the many blogs and websites that I follow, I enjoy the regular mental stimulation that flows from the blog Big Think. Recently there was a piece from Daniel Dennett that tickled my interest and I wanted to share it here.
While Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley busy themselves making every aspect of our lives more efficient (except, perhaps, for the process of discovering these new technologies, learning them, and integrating them into our lives), Daniel Dennett sits up at Tufts University in Massachusetts, philosophizing. His latest book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking is an attempt to make transparent some of the tricks of the philosopher’s trade. In an accelerating age, it’s a self-help book designed to slow the reader down and improve our ability to think things through.
The kinds of things Mr. Dennett likes to think about include the nature of consciousness, evolution, and religious belief. But the mind-training his new book offers is applicable to any problem you want to consider thoroughly. In an age of quick fixes and corner-cutting, we’re in constant danger of bad decision making – of overreliance on what cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “system 1”, and what most of us call intuition. This rapid decision making channel of the brain is helpful when we are in mortal danger, or pressed for a quick decision within our areas of expertise. But for most decisions, the slower, more deliberate channel (system 2) is much more reliable. What Dennett offers, then, in Intuition Pumps, is a workout for system 2 – a series of thought experiments you can apply to puzzles real and imagined to bulk up the slower, wiser parts of your consciousness.
Some of the tools Dennett offers in the book are more familiar than others. Reductio ad absurdum arguments, for example, in which we test the validity of a claim by taking it to its most outrageous illogical extreme (a: “all living things have a right to liberty.” b: “so let me get this straight – a blade of grass has a right to liberty? What does that even mean?”). But the true delights of the book are the far-out exercises Dennett and his colleagues have dreamed up in the course of their work, such as “Swampman Meets A Cow-Shark”, from Donald Davidson, which begins:
Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman, moves exactly as I did; according to its nature it departs the swamp, encounters and seems to recognize my friends, and appears to return their greetings in English.
Walking us through Davidson’s considerations about whether and to what extent the Swampman is anything like Davidson, and related ones about a cow that gives birth to something that looks exactly like a shark (yet has cow DNA in all of its cells), Dennett teaches us a surprising lesson about the utility of wild philosophical speculation.
Cloaked in the breezy, familiar trappings of a self-help book, Intuition Pumps is in actuality a dark mirror of that genre – a field of rabbit holes designed to leave the reader with more questions than answers, and wiser for the long and indirect journey.
Watch for Daniel Dennett’s Tools For Better Thinking – a Big Think Mentor workshop coming soon.
oooOOOooo
Don’t know about you but Daniel Dennett’s book looks like one that deserves reading. If you feel the same way the book is called Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking and here’s the link to Amazon.
Perhaps the last frontier, the one underneath our feet?
Can’t recall where I came across this BBC program but so what! The fact is that the BBC have had a long and well-deserved reputation for making some fabulous programmes on nature and wildlife. So it was with a recent programme from the BBC Nature stable. The one that caught my eye and the motivation for today’s LfD post was called The Burrowers: Animals Underground.
Here is the trailer.
Published on Aug 9, 2013 Discover with BBC Two the secret life of Rabbits, Badgers and Water Voles.
Offering us this:
The Burrowers: Animals Underground
Chris Packham continues his underground journey investigating the world of some of the UK’s most iconic burrowing animals. Filmmakers and scientists cannot investigate animal behaviour inside wild burrows without disturbing them so The Burrowers’ team found ingenious ways to film this secret world by recreating full-scale replicas. It’s now spring in the burrows and the new babies are having to grow up fast. The seven orphan badgers are learning to communicate with each other, young rabbits must take their first steps outside, and young water voles their first swim. Chris also meets the most elusive burrower of them all – an animal which almost never comes above ground – the mole. He reveals the moles’ survival techniques, its method of burrowing and the food it eats. Finally, the team unveils a science first: the excavation of a massive abandoned wild rabbit warren… Back in winter it was filled with concrete and left to set. Now a small army of volunteers and diggers have excavated it, revealing a three-dimensional model of a complex system of tunnels and chambers.
So despite it being at the other end of the scale compared to the cosmos, we still know so little about what goes on beneath our feet.
Mind you, that doesn’t stop some of us from trying to find out!
Sweeny digging in the ground after yesterday’s heavy rain!
Now don’t misunderstand me. There are huge numbers of people on this planet who have challenges and issues that I can’t even imagine handling. But whatever we are dealing with, it is at a personal ‘size’ proportional to scale of our lives. For example, I have a guest post coming out tomorrow from Tom Engelhardt about the nature of the American Empire. Frankly, it’s more than disturbing. But, or should I write that as BUT, it is about matters that are trivial and inconsequential in the larger scheme of things.
All of which is a little introduction to a YouTube link that Suzann sent me; the video below. It’s just about 2 1/2 minutes long, yet is incredible. Plus it has already been watched over 9 million times!
Warning! Today’s post has almost nothing to do with dogs plus if you are not into computing then you may want to come back tomorrow! 😉
A little over a week ago I ordered an Apple Mac computer.
So what, I hear you say.
Well one way or another, I have been associated with personal computing for too many years and with the Microsoft Windows operating system equally for a long time.
Here’s that history and, be warned, I do go on a tad!
In 1970 I joined the Office Products (OP) Division of IBM in the United Kingdom. I joined as an office products salesman and after my initial training was based at IBM OP’s London North branch in Whetstone in the London Borough of Barnet. I loved both the job (remember the Selectric ‘Golfball’ typewriter?) and the company and conspired to win the prize of top UK salesman for the year 1977. By that time, IBM was selling dedicated word-processing (WP) machines. They offered powerful benefits for companies of many sizes and, as an experienced WP salesman, I was enjoying the fruits of that success. Thus it was that in 1978 I attended IBM’s Golden Circle celebrations for 1977 country winners from all around the world. The Golden Circle celebrations were held in Hawaii!
I returned from Hawaii with the clear idea in my mind that this was the time to move on; my ego didn’t like the idea of not being number one again! So within a couple of days of returning to my sales branch, I announced to my manager, David Halley, that I wished to give three months notice. I can still recall David’s rather shocked response with him saying, “But I always thought Golden Circle was an incentive event!”
In those days New Scientist magazine was a regular read for me. During my time of working out my notice I read in the magazine about this new personal computer from Commodore Business Machines that had been launched in the UK. It was called the Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) and had been unveiled in 1977 at the US West Coast Computer Faire. I was captivated by what I had read.
I had casually mentioned it to Richard Maugham; a good friend and fellow office-products salesman working for Olivetti UK. Richard said that coincidentally a close friend of many years had just been appointed sales manager for CBM UK Ltd. That friend was Keith Hall and on making contact with Keith, I was invited to go and meet him and learn more about this funny device. What I hadn’t bargained for was that Keith was yet another smart salesman; Keith and Richard had met when they were both salesmen working for Olivetti.
When I asked Keith the retail price of the ‘PET”, his immediate reply was, “Well why don’t you become a dealer and I can sell you one for 30% less!” Like most salesmen, I was always a sucker to a good sales pitch! I signed the necessary paperwork. (It is very sad to say that Keith died a few years ago, at far too young an age.)
So it was that towards the end of 1978, I became the sixth Commodore computer dealer in the UK, opening my small store in what had once been a Barber’s shop in Church Street, off Head Street in the centre of Colchester, Essex. I called my business Dataview Limited.
Frankly, I hadn’t a clue as to what I was doing! If it hadn’t been for a gigantic stroke of luck I would not have lasted long!
That piece of luck was meeting someone who was a programmer for a large, traditional computing company, ICL, who had bought himself a Commodore PET and, just out of fun, was writing a word-processing program. Now if I didn’t know about computers, personal or otherwise, I certainly knew about word-processing. When I looked at what Peter D. had written I practically wet myself. Because, I was looking at a program that even incomplete already offered three-quarters, give or take, of the functionality of a £20,000 IBM Word Processor.
I offered to guide Peter in refining and honing his software which he graciously accepted. Then a few weeks later Peter casually asked me if I would like to sell the software. I jumped at the opportunity and in due course Wordcraft was launched under the Dataview umbrella. (And do see my footnote!)
But back to my Windows journey.
In 1981 IBM announced the release of their own personal computer.
IBM PC
With my love affair with IBM not even dimmed, becoming an IBM PC dealer was a must. An IBM PC version of Wordcraft was developed by Peter and now things were really rocking and rolling. Then in 1983 Microsoft announced the development of Windows, a graphical user interface (GUI) for the operating system MS-DOS. MS-DOS was the existing operating system on the IBM PC.
By the time I sold Dataview in 1986, Windows was well on its way to evolving into a full personal computer operating system and ever since that time my own PCs have been Windows based. (Difficult to imagine now how in those early years Windows didn’t achieve any popularity!)
OK, fast forward 27 years to my present machine running Windows 7, Google Chrome web browser and all the fancy ‘cloud’-based applications of today.
Much of my time spent writing and blogging relies on me being online. Like so many others, as soon as I turn on my computer it becomes an online PC. On average, I am working in front of my PC for about 3 to 4 hours per day. However, slowly but surely over the past few months I have become aware of a number of strange occurrences, the most annoying of which is the regular ‘hanging’ of my Chrome browser. This was happening at least on a daily basis and required the complete rebooting of my PC – a right pain in the posterior!
Muttering about this to friends who know a lot more about computing than I, raised my awareness that the privacy and security of one’s computer was no longer to be assumed. Then just recently, I read online,
“A Special Surveillance Chip”
According to leaked internal documents from the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BSI) that Die Zeit obtained, IT experts figured out that Windows 8, the touch-screen enabled, super-duper, but sales-challenged Microsoft operating system is outright dangerous for data security. It allows Microsoft to control the computer remotely through a built-in backdoor. Keys to that backdoor are likely accessible to the NSA – and in an unintended ironic twist, perhaps even to the Chinese.
The backdoor is called “Trusted Computing,” developed and promoted by the Trusted Computing Group, founded a decade ago by the all-American tech companies AMD, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Wave Systems. Its core element is a chip, the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and an operating system designed for it, such as Windows 8. Trusted Computing Group has developed the specifications of how the chip and operating systems work together.
Its purpose is Digital Rights Management and computer security. The system decides what software had been legally obtained and would be allowed to run on the computer, and what software, such as illegal copies or viruses and Trojans, should be disabled. The whole process would be governed by Windows, and through remote access, by Microsoft.
Then a few paragraphs later:
It would be easy for Microsoft or chip manufacturers to pass the backdoor keys to the NSA and allow it to control those computers. NO, Microsoft would never do that, we protest. Alas, Microsoft, as we have learned from the constant flow of revelations, informs the US government of security holes in its products well before it issues fixes so that government agencies can take advantage of the holes and get what they’re looking for.
Now I’m using Windows 7 so imagine my angst when I then read:
Another document claims that Windows 8 with TPM 2.0 is “already” no longer usable. But Windows 7 can “be operated safely until 2020.” After that other solutions would have to be found for the IT systems of the Administration.
That did it for me – time to move on from Windows.
Many Apple-user friends said that I should switch to the Apple Mac; that it was the only logical way to go. I checked that all my important software applications that I used under Windows were compatible with the Apple Mac Operating System and thankfully they were. I was speaking of Open Office, WordPress, Scrivener, Picasa, Skype. Then I started to browse the Apple website. I was clear about wanting a desktop machine, an iMac, and pretty soon realised that my change of personal computing was going to cost me around $1,500, perhaps a little more.
Then Dan Gomez, both long-time friend and Apple user, in browsing the web came across the Mac mini. He called me and I took a look. For well under half the price of an iMac, I could get a great alternative to my Windows PC and use many of my existing peripherals.
A quick conversation with Zachary of the Apple Mac mini sales team and the deed was done! So all that remained was the great transition!
The box arrived last Wednesday.
Surely too small for a full-blooded personal computer?
I resisted opening the box until last Friday when I had some decent spare time.
This is a long, long way from the Commodore PET!
Plugging it all together was easier than I feared.
Just screen and keyboard/mouse and we are good to go!
Then the acid test. Could I even understand how to operate it? I put that off until Saturday!
The new Mac mini system on the right, all ready for me to play with!
I have to say that first impressions, especially of the elegance of the display and the icons, were great.
But this had to be a fully functional machine for me. Where to start? By downloading and installing the most critical of my software needs: Scrivener, my writing software.
Imagine my great pleasure and huge relief when less than a couple of hours later, not only had I downloaded and installed Scrivener for Apple Mac OS but had passed the latest backup file across from my Windows PC and accessed it on the Apple.
My (very) draft book file installed and running on the Mac mini!
So, all in all, despite this being very early days, it’s starting to look like a great change.
However, I mustn’t close without thanking a few people:
Dan Gomez and John Hurlburt, friends and Apple users, and in John’s case experienced on both Windows and Apple systems. Guys, I couldn’t have made the decision to change without your kind, generous and supportive advice.
Zachary Brown of Apple sales, Mac mini team. Zach, I know it’s your job but nonetheless you did and said all the right things. (And the new screen is much better than my existing one!)
Last but not least, my dearest wife Jean, who just let me get on with things and even though I knew she didn’t have a clue as to what I kept muttering on about, never let on.
Footnote:
Earlier on I wrote about launching Wordcraft, the word-processing software for personal computers. That was in early 1979 and later that year I was invited to present Wordcraft at an international gathering of Commodore dealers held in Boston, Mass.
During my presentation, I used the word ‘fortnight’ unaware that Americans don’t know this common English word. Immediately, someone about 10 rows back in the audience called out, “Hey, Handover! What’s a fortnight?”
It released the presenter’s tension in me and I really hammed my response in saying, “Don’t be so silly, everybody knows the word fortnight.” Seem to remember asking the audience at large who else didn’t know the word. Of course, most raised their arms!
Now on a bit of a roll, I deliberately started using as many bizarre and archaic English words that came to me. Afterwards, the owner of the voice came introduced himself. He was Dan Gomez, a Californian based in Costa Mesa near Los Angeles and also involved in developing software for the Commodore.
Dan became my US West Coast distributor for Wordcraft and was very successful. When Dataview was sold, Dan and I continued to see each other regularly and I count him now as one of my dear friends. Through knowing Dan I got to know Dan’s sister Suzann and her husband Don. It was Su that invited me to spend Christmas 2007 with her and Don at their home in San Carlos, Mexico. Jean also lived in San Carlos and was close friends with Su. Together they had spent many years rescuing feral dogs from the streets of San Carlos and finding new homes for them.
Thus it was that I met Jean. Both Jean and I were born 20 miles apart in London!
So from ‘Hey, what’s a fortnight’ to living as happily as I have ever been in the rural countryside of Oregon. Funny old world!
The ‘voice’ Dan Gomez – Best Man at the marriage of Jean and me, November 20th 2010.
I have often noticed how ideas come along and are then reinforced by other materials and comments. This struck me (again) as follows. In my post about the fabulous, loving bond between Jeff Guidry and his eagle Freedom one of the comments was from Patrice Ayme, and I quote:
Birds have completely different brains. Still, the smartest birds are more clever than most primates. And many parrots speak (although we have not learned their language yet).
Then going on to add:
Parrot language studies have progressed enough to tell us that there is something huge going on. They apparently use names, as dolphins do.
Certainly Jean would verify the amount of talking that goes on between our two budgerigars here at home!
Mr. Green and Mr. Blu!
Then in yesterday’s post The knowing of dogs, I referred to research that indicated that empathy between those that we know and trust, (a) can be measured, and (b) that “our minds are partly defined by their intersections with other minds.” I went on in that post to speculate that maybe dogs ‘reading’ the minds of humans that they know and trust wasn’t so far-fetched.
Wolves Howl Because They Care: Social Relationship Can Explain Variation in Vocal Production
Aug. 22, 2013 — When a member of the wolf pack leaves the group, the howling by those left behind isn’t a reflection of stress but of the quality of their relationships. So say researchers based on a study of nine wolves from two packs living at Austria’s Wolf Science Center that appears in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, on August 22.
The findings shed important light on the degree to which animal vocal production can be considered as voluntary, the researchers say.
“Our results suggest the social relationship can explain more of the variation we see in howling behavior than the emotional state of the wolf,” says Friederike Range of the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. “This suggests that wolves, to a certain extent, may be able to use their vocalizations in a flexible way.”
Scientists have known very little about why animals make the sounds that they do. Are they uncontrollable emotional responses? Or do animals have the ability to change those vocalizations based on their own understanding of the social context?
At the Wolf Science Center, human handlers typically take individual wolves out for walks on a leash, one at a time. On those occasions, they knew, the remaining pack mates always howl.
To better understand why, Range and her colleagues measured the wolves’ stress hormone levels. They also collected information on the wolves’ dominance status in the pack and their preferred partners. As they took individual wolves out for long walks, they recorded the reactions of each of their pack mates.
Those observations show that wolves howl more when a wolf they have a better relationship with leaves the group and when that individual is of high social rank. The amount of howling did not correspond to higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
“Our data suggest that howling is not a simple stress response to being separated from close associates but instead may be used more flexibly to maintain contact and perhaps to aid in reuniting with allies,” Range says.
For those that want to read the original research paper then it is available over at Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.
Wolf Howling Is Mediated by Relationship Quality Rather Than Underlying Emotional Stress
We investigated the influence of social and physiological factors on wolf howling
Wolves howl more to keep contact with affiliated partners and with pack leaders
Howling is mediated by the social relationship not cortisol level of the howlers
This pattern indicates that wolves have some voluntary control of their howling
Summary
While considerable research has addressed the function of animal vocalizations, the proximate mechanisms driving call production remain surprisingly unclear. Vocalizations may be driven by emotions and the physiological state evoked by changes in the social-ecological environment [1,2], or animals may have more control over their vocalizations, using them in flexible ways mediated by the animal’s understanding of its surrounding social world [3,4]. While both explanations are plausible and neither excludes the other, to date no study has attempted to experimentally investigate the influence of both emotional and cognitive factors on animal vocal usage. We aimed to disentangle the relative contribution of both mechanisms by examining howling in captive wolves. Using a separation experiment and by measuring cortisol levels, we specifically investigated whether howling is a physiological stress response to group fragmentation [5] and whether it is driven by social factors, particularly relationship quality [6,7]. Results showed that relationship quality between the howler and the leaving individual better predicted howling than did the current physiological state. Our findings shed important light on the degree to which animal vocal production can be considered as voluntary.
So, don’t know about you, but it all seems to be suggesting how little we know about how animals communicate with the world around them.
Learning from Dogs 