There was no movement, just pulsing heat and the high-pitched sing of insects. Wading up to his thighs, he reached down, scooped up cool water and poured some into his mouth. The rest cascaded over his head. Tiny trickles made serpentine paths through red dust covering his skin. A green-leafed branch drifted nearby. Picking it out of the water, he arched the branch over his head to his spine and lazily scratched back and forth. It was a day to tuck away, a pleasurable remembrance to savour when times were more demanding.
We love the poetics of Lawrence, Dickenson, Marquez, and writers such as Dylan Thomas when he describes his imaginary Welsh village:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters-and-rabbits wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles...
Magicians of the word transport the reader to places as readily as any time machine so that we "hear the dew falling" and "see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep". But this "so real I can taste it" feeling is not due to literary accomplishments alone. Neurobiology provides a slightly more complicated explanation.
Writers and readers get help from mirror neurons, tiny brain cells that wire an organism for empathy. While they don't do the reading, mirror neurons are poised and activated when eyes and ears bring in signals that make us feel what someone else experiences as if it were something or someone we encountered ourselves. So when we read about the lucky fellow quenching his thirst with blue-green waters on a hot humid day, we can also partake in the joy.
Mirror neurons do something more. They may be credited with helping break through the perceptual and conceptual membrane that has wrapped modern humanity's mind like so much shrink wrap for centuries: what primatologist Frans deWaal calls anthropodenial, the "blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves." Not only are mirror neurons found elsewhere in the animal kingdom, the brains they connect through empathy are similar.
Subsequently, when it turns out that the person thigh-deep in water taking pleasure on a desultory summer's day is none other than an Asian elephant, we shouldn't be surprised or worried about anthropomorphic trespass. What we experience vicariously with the happy elephant is scientifically acceptable both because of empathetic connection via mirror neurons and because pachyderm and person share common processes and structures in the brain. Each person may have unique feelings under the same conditions, but neuroscience insists that the potential to experience the same thing is there for human and elephant. Human-animal comparability in brain and mind has brought an intersection between science's objectivity and personal subjectivity.
Finding commonalities between species does not dampen the thrill of discovery or the wonder of diversity. It is still exciting to learn that elephants use tools to accomplish things that daunt even the dexterity of a sinuous trunk. However, greater delight awaits. Trans-species science lends a liberating ease to explore the psychology of someone who wears the grey wrinkled suit of an elephant almost as readily as we investigate the inner workings of a human being.
However, discovering continuity in mind is more than just a new theory. We have entered a new paradigm where familiar signposts of questions and assumptions are either no longer of central interest or they may even point us in the wrong direction. Since, as evolutionary neuroscience says, the cogs and wheels of the brain in different species are shared, then the quest shifts from finding who has what and who doesn't, to learning what and how it is that different species use their minds in their own distinct ways. If, for example, humans and elephants are comparable, then what is it about elephant minds and culture that caused the recent emergence of widespread Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)? And what does this tell us about how we think and our own psychological health and culture? These are some of the same types of questions that have motivated trans-cultural psychiatry: the study of how a mind works and heals having developed under a range of socio-ecological conditions and systems of meaning.
Evolutionary neuropsychology brings us handily to attachment theory, John Bowlby's foundational concept that bridges many a disciplinary and perceptual split. Similar to the Euro or a EU passport, attachment theory provides reliable currency for entrée into diverse psychological lands as we journey among our animal kin. Neuropsychological models used to understand how human minds develop and express in different cultures promise similar insights for those in cultures of other animals, and, in parallel, raise comparable questions and criticism concerning the ethics and validity of western science.
Gay Bradshaw, PhD, PhD is Executive Director of The Kerulos Center (www.kerulos.org) and co-founder of the Trans-species Institute (www.trans-species.org), Santa Barbara California. She is the author of Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity, an in-depth psychological portrait of elephants in captivity and in the wild. Her work focuses on human-animal relationships and trauma recovery of species that include elephants, grizzly bears, tortoises, chimpanzees, and parrots.
Photo credit: Layne David Dicker, copyright 2009
