From the Vault: Invertebrate Emotions, Part 1

Humans are feeling creatures, constantly awash in a sea of emotion. We struggle to understand the waters that suffuse us, but what about other denizens of the animal kingdom? What about the octopods? In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe explore the question of invertebrate emotions. (Originally published 3/12/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for a classic episode
of the show. This one originally aired March twelve, and
this one was the first in a two part series
we did about whether or not invertebrates like insects and
worms and creatures like that, can feel emotions. I thought

(00:27):
this was a cool question. Yeah, this one will really
change the way you think about all the creepy crawleys
in the world around you. All right, let's go ahead
and dive into part one, Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to

(00:49):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick. And today is going to be
the first and a couple of episodes that we wanted
to do on the subject of invertebrate emotions. And strangely enough,
I got interested in this subject the other day after
I was reading a poem, not a scientific paper. I
was reading a poem by the American modernist poet Marianne Moore,

(01:10):
who I like a lot. 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, entrapped

(01:33):
by tea time fame, and by commuters comforts. 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

(01:54):
until her eggs are hatched, buried eight fold in her
eight arms, for she is in a sense that 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

(02:17):
wasp nest flaws of white on white and close laid
ionic kite enfolds, like the lines in the mane of
a Parthenon horse, around 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 part especially me too. I mean, I love the

(02:38):
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,

(02:58):
writing about More, said that one of the things he
liked most about our 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

(03:21):
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 wonder of evolution. Yeah, this is
quite a remarkable critter. So the argonaut. Uh, first of

(03:43):
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, right, the myth
of Jason and the Argonauts. Right, Yeah, because they 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

(04:05):
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 their 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

(04:26):
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 and this was also Another contributing
factor to this interpretation is the fact that the the

(04:48):
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

(05:09):
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 flotation device that resembles the shell

(05:29):
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 hectocotalis, 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

(05:51):
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, 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

(06:13):
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 protective for
the young that reside within it, because it is a
very slim barrier between them and the open ocean, and

(06:35):
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

(06:58):
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

(07:21):
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,
will 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

(07:42):
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 at the
two thousand two Mathonian book Ammonites. They have suggested that

(08:02):
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,

(08:23):
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 Regis 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

(08:43):
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 they went extinct in the Cretaceous
Paleogene extinction event. And so what do you do if
you depend upon that shell. So the idea here is
that the ancient paper nautilus is we then had to
use their mending skills to just create a shell of

(09:07):
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

(09:28):
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 marine mollusk that
has a shell that sort of resembles an ammonite shell. Also, yeah,
absolutely still a fascinating creature and also definitely a creature
worthy of poetic consideration. Speaking and speaking of poetry, they

(09:51):
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 set action in it where they are, uh,
they're they're aboard the nautilus, the submarine, and they are
they've come up to the surface and they observe these creatures.
They observed the paper nautilus, the argonaut in action. So

(10:13):
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 argonaut, covered with protuberances and
exclusive to the seas near India. These graceful mollusks were
swimming backwards by means of their locomotive tubes, sucking water

(10:33):
into these tubes and then expelling it. Six of their
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

(10:56):
to it. The argonaut is free to leave its shell,
I told seal, 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

(11:18):
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

(11:39):
actually grow that the shell. It kind of makes it.
But if if you were to remove the species from
its shell, 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 that'd take

(12:00):
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

(12:22):
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 impact 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

(12:45):
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 live closely with that we
anthropomorphizes 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

(13:07):
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,

(13:31):
familiar emotions that we name in poems. You know, does
a does a crab feel feared? 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

(13:52):
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

(14:16):
our emotions off of that golden pedestal and and look
at what they really are from uh, 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

(14:37):
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

(14:59):
we should take a break and then when we come
back we can try to address the thorny, difficult question
of what our emotions. Alright, 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

(15:22):
subsection of one episode, but we'll do our best to
try to hint at the broad picture of what this
question entails. Yeah, it can be so tricky to even
contemplate this because because one of the big things is
that emotions are the tumultuous see that we're constantly immersed
in and where we feel cast about in, you know.
And this is again this gets into poetry as well, Right,

(15:44):
how many poems are about you know, the mailstorm 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

(16:05):
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 enemies of passion

(16:26):
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 cantalope. When you cut, you don't
know what it's gonna be. You cut into it, though,

(16:47):
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 candleop I feel
this way about tomatoes. Yeah, tom tomato. My favorite food
in the world is a really good ripe summer tomato.
And there's nothing worse than a meli offseason tomato. Yes,
the tomato is also a great example of human emotion.

(17:09):
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,

(17:31):
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, artists, scientist sages, uh, you know,
religious leaders throughout history have contemplated their nature and formulated

(17:53):
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

(18:16):
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? 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

(18:37):
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,

(18:59):
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

(19:21):
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, you go through a haunted
attraction around Halloween and you you feel something like fear

(19:41):
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

(20:02):
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

(20:23):
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

(20:45):
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 aavioral change. However, as we'll
discussing these episodes, throwing consciousness into it rather complicates things

(21:05):
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 is 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 so you don't know if

(21:28):
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 presumably 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

(21:48):
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 s marine 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, so a relaxed date comes into place. There

(22:12):
is 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 Baccia 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

(22:32):
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

(22:54):
you're trying to study emotions in a scientific way. On
the other hand, that just sounds hilarious. I think that's
that's 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,

(23:15):
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 that builds a fortress of love. I
think the octopus world is a great place to start

(23:35):
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
it'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

(23:56):
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,

(24:20):
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

(24:44):
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

(25:05):
think my dog is happy right now, or my dog
is angry or something right. I mean, with all the
complexities to come with with with making those kind of
statements about an animal, 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

(25:26):
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

(25:47):
that I recommended in our summer reading episode was a
book by an author named Si 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

(26:09):
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,

(26:32):
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

(26:53):
look to because it checks off so many opposite boxes.
You know, it is it is a It is a solid,
very creature that that lives in in a different environment
than we do, that has 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

(27:15):
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 Doud.

(27:36):
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 Doubt 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

(27:57):
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

(28:18):
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
flora pots in the ocean as traps, and the octopuses
would squeeze themselves into these pots, which seemed like perfect

(28:40):
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.
So the octopus is obviously being you know, evolved for
saltwater environment. They don't like this at all, and they

(29:02):
would immediately slither out of the pot and be captured.
All right, That that makes sense. So of course Dowd
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

(29:23):
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

(29:44):
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 pus 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

(30:07):
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,

(30:29):
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

(30:49):
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

(31:10):
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

(31:31):
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 animals that have
been made human. Okay, I guess you're right about that.
But coming back to the story about about Scott doubt

(31:53):
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

(32:15):
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, etcetera,
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.

(32:38):
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

(32:59):
if he'd been 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
them 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

(33:21):
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.

(33:42):
Uh where she says quote and then there was Windy.
Alexe 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. Alexas convinced the whole debacle

(34:04):
occurred because the octopus realized in advance what was going
to happen and resolve to prevent it. It's 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

(34:25):
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
Baz is being mischievous. He's chasing me around the house,
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. But I mean,

(34:48):
to whatever extent it would be useful in dealing with
robot or or more realistically, an animal. Uh, than 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

(35:11):
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.

(35:34):
I should not get close to it right now, but
you know, it's it's one thing for a scientist to,
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

(35:54):
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

(36:14):
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,
uh you know, almost translingual understanding of the basic properties

(36:38):
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

(36:59):
back to now, know, 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 cast between the
fingers of two hands. Ultimately, fewer or more fingers are

(37:23):
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.

(37:47):
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

(38:08):
come back, we can discuss relating the human experience of
emotions to analogous uh behaviors and cognition and animals. 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

(38:31):
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

(38:53):
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

(39:16):
organisms we might even sometimes not not wish to think
about having emotions such as pigs and cows. Um. Uh,
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

(39:37):
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

(39:57):
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

(40:19):
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

(40:41):
necessary to generate complex states like emotions. That 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 as in terms of simple sense

(41:02):
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
persistent emotional state. That that's often the view. But the
authors think this old view is due for revision due

(41:22):
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 cognition, 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

(41:46):
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
physio ugical phenomena that are triggered by appraisal of certain
types of environmental stimuli. So something in the environment causes

(42:07):
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

(42:29):
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 eat.
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

(42:50):
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

(43:14):
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 in its peripheral vision.

(43:35):
In this 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 epinefrin or epernefer and and all that.
You can notice dilated pupils, relaxation of the bladder, etcetera. Yeah,
I mean, we to to go back to episodes that

(43:58):
we've we've done on human fear and like the nature
of fear. Uh, it's uh, it really changed. It kind
of changes who you are. It always makes me think
of the Hunter S. Thompson quote that 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

(44:19):
unless we have sort of you know, performed enough exercises
and fear if you will, and even then there 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 you know, there

(44:41):
are studies that have looked at how fear and uncertainty
affect our politics. You know, something is you know, generally
we think of it's 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

(45:04):
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

(45:26):
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

(45:48):
by a test phrase. Here's a test phrase. The doctor
examined little Emily's growth. Alright, 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,

(46:12):
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

(46:34):
in remission were 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's 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

(46:55):
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 and development, you're not

(47:17):
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

(47:39):
does seem as if the depressional 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, and they pointed out that we
could be talking about more about like a depressional link
response by us reflecting an elevated ten to see for

(48:00):
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,

(48:24):
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're feeling, and it's

(48:44):
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 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

(49:05):
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

(49:27):
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 salient 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

(49:49):
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. Well,
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 it means

(50:10):
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? Right, Yes,
but you know we're humans and we tend to jump
to conclusions and engage in I guess, um, what is

(50:32):
the the X Men personality test that we've a 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 like
the fortune cookie scenario or the um the astrological chart
scenario where the future is read and it's just a
little piece of paper telling you something random, but you

(50:52):
immediately identify things about yourself in that safe release the
horror effects, yes, the Barnum effect also, know, yes, yeah,
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

(51:13):
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

(51:33):
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,

(51:55):
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.

(52:18):
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

(52:38):
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 emotion

(53:00):
tional 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,

(53:25):
I mean it looks like a quote bad mood puts
the animal in a kind of defensive posture where 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

(53:47):
emotions get 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'm 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

(54:09):
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 law 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,

(54:30):
I think, as you and I have discussed before, it's
more difficult to study some emotions 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

(54:51):
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 us 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

(55:13):
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

(55:33):
kind of analogous to the way humans live. Now, 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

(55:57):
personality to or certainly emotional states. But uh, 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 malifera. So bees were trained

(56:19):
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 was sensed, that
was associated with a bitter quinine solution, which the bees

(56:40):
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 B, they're
going to be like, oh, that's the bitter quinine. 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

(57:02):
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 bees subjected to the
shaking were less likely to respond to the ambiguous odor

(57:24):
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 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

(57:46):
any of that. Again, this looks like a pessimistic bias. Yeah, clearly,
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 hemo lymph again is like

(58:09):
insect blood that of blood. They have hemal lymph this
other circulatory fluid, and so it increased this uh, this
thing called octopamine, which is similar I believe to nora
adrenaline 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

(58:32):
sensing that closeness to the bad outcome because 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 sixteen also studied the same thing, but in the
opposite direction, optimistic bias created by pleasure or happiness, or

(58:53):
at least what you might call an analog of pleasure
or happiness in bumble bees. So again there was a
similar are 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 queue.
And then a blue card on the right that has

(59:14):
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

(59:37):
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,

(59:59):
suggest thing 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

(01:00:21):
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 world, and we
are not the only organism that has to navigate a
world of of changing circumstances and and because clearly the

(01:00:44):
bee has to do that as well, and it has
similar abilities that result or our and ore 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 and the knee time. If you want
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
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