Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

182 J HOW THE MIND WORKSpasses on the information. If it's cloudy, the other bees estimate thedirection using the polarization of light in the sky. These feats are the tipof an iceberg of honeybee ingenuity, documented by Karl Von Frisch,James Gould, and others. A psychologist colleague of mine once thoughtthat bees offered a good pedagogical opportunity to convey the sophisticationof neural computation to our undergraduates. He devoted the firstweek of his entry-level course in cognitive science to some of the ingeniousexperiments. The next year the lectures spilled over to the secondweek, then the third, and so on, until the students complained that thecourse had become an Introduction to Bee Cognition.There are dozens of comparable examples. Many species computehow much time to forage at each patch so as to optimize their rate ofreturn of calories per energy expended in foraging. Some birds learn theemphemeris function, the path of the sun above the horizon over thecourse of the day and the year, necessary for navigating by the sun. Thebarn owl uses sub-millisecond discrepancies between the arrival times ofa sound at its two ears to swoop down on a rustling mouse in pitch blackness.Cacheing species place nuts and seeds in unpredictable hidingplaces to foil thieves, but months later must recall them all. I mentionedin the preceding chapter that the Clark's Nutcracker can remember tenthousand hiding places. Even Pavlovian and operant conditioning, thetextbook cases of learning by association, turn out to be not a generalstickiness of coinciding stimuli and responses in the brain, but complexalgorithms for multivariate, nonstationary time series analysis (predictingwhen events will occur, based on their history of occurrences).The moral of this animal show is that animals' brains are just as specializedand well engineered as their bodies. A brain is a precisioninstrument that allows a creature to use information to solve the problemspresented by its lifestyle. Since organisms' lifestyles differ, andsince they are related to one another in a great bush, not a great chain,species cannot be ranked in IQ or by the percentage of human intelligencethey have achieved. Whatever is special about the humsln mindcannot be just more, or better, or more flexible animal intelligence,because there is no such thing as generic animal intelligence. Each animalhas evolved information-processing machinery to solve its problems,and we evolved machinery to solve ours. The sophisticatedalgorithms found in even the tiniest dabs of nervous tissue serve as yetanother eye-opener—joining the difficulty of building a robot, the circumscribedeffects of brain damage, and the similarities betweein twins