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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind, production of by
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to 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

(00:26):
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, 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

(00:47):
that I encountered the other day. Okay. It is called
the paper Nautilus for authorities whose hopes are shaped by mercenaries, writers,
and trapped by tea time, fame and by commuters comfort.
It's not for these. The paper Nautilus constructs her thin
glass shell, giving her perishable souvenir of hope, a dull

(01:08):
white outside and smooth edged inner surface. Glossy is the sea,
the watchful maker of it, guards it day and night.
She scarcely eats until her eggs are hatched, buried eight
fold in her eight arms, for she is in a
sense of devil fish. Her glass ram's horn, cradled freight,
is hid but not crushed, as hercules bitten by a

(01:31):
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 wasp nest flaws of white
on white and close laid ionic kite enfolds, like the
lines in the mane of a parthenon horse, round which
the arms had wound themselves, as if they knew. Love

(01:54):
is the only fortress strong enough to trust to. Oh
that's nice. I like that last art, especially me too.
I mean, I love the 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,

(02:15):
and then ultimately ends on this powerfully emotional note that
kind of gives me a shiver. Uh So, the late
American poet Anthony Hate, writing about More, said that one
of the things he liked most about her 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

(02:35):
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 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

(02:56):
the poem, the egg case, is a genuinely gorgeous under
of evolution. Yeah, this is quite a remarkable critter. So
the Argonaut, Uh, first, 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,
the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, Right, Yeah, because

(03:18):
the 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 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 they're

(03:38):
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 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

(03:59):
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 uh. And this was
also another contributing factor to this interpretation is the fact
that the the argonaut is not physically attached to the shell,
like when a specimen is examined. The creature can be

(04:19):
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 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

(04:41):
only the female secretes the shells via specialized arms and
the resulting shell it's essentially a floatation device that resembles
the shell 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 hectocotalist,

(05:05):
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 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. Yeah,
basically it is like a detachable sexual organ, uh, that

(05:28):
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 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

(05:49):
shell is. I mean it is you can't argue that
it is protected for the young that reside within it,
because it is a very slim barrier between them in
the open ocean, and 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,

(06:12):
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 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

(06:35):
as the angel, and the octopus is the fallen angels
has lost its wings, but this particular octopod has I
guess Miltonian aspirations and 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, we'll will allow it to ascend up

(06:56):
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 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

(07:17):
indeed how they even evolved. Uh Neil Monks and Sea
Phil Palmer, authors of the two thousand two Smithsonian book Ammonites.
They have suggested that 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

(07:40):
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, 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 Region us
in uh in the UK, where on the beach you

(08:02):
can find fossils of ammonites from you know, hundreds of
millions of years ago, and 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
went extinct in the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction event. And so
what what do you do if you depend upon that shell?
So the idea here is that the the ancient paper

(08:25):
nautilus is then had to use their mending skills to
just create a shell of 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

(08:47):
paper nautilus is eggshell just happens to resemble that of
an ammonite. Sure, but it really 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 a marine mollusk has a shell that
sort of resembles an m nite shell. Also, yeah, absolutely

(09:07):
still a fascinating creature and also definitely a creature worthy
of poetic consideration. Speaking and speaking of poetry. They 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 section in it where they are, uh
there they are aboard the nautilus, the submarine, and uh

(09:29):
they are They've come up to the surface and they
observe these creatures. They observed the paper nautilus, the argonaute
in action. So 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 argonauts, covered with protuberances
and exclusive to the seas near India. These graceful mollusks

(09:53):
were swimming backwards by means of their locomotive tubes, sucking
water into these tubes and then expelling it. Six They're
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

(10:17):
transports the animal that secretes it without the animal sticking
to it. The Argonaut is free to leave its shell,
I told Consil, 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

(10:40):
or this outdated idea that they could use their 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.

(11:00):
It can technically leave the shell, because it doesn't actually
grow that the shell. It kind of makes it. But
if if you were to remove the species from it,
shall 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

(11:21):
named it the argonaut from the beginning, but I'd take
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

(11:44):
at its egg case, as if each of its arms
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 and you know,
the baggage that comes with that. I think most everyone

(12:04):
would probably I think the gut response that people are
generally gonna have is no, You're gonna think, no, a
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 uh live closely with that
we anthropomorphize enough into, but not the not the octopi,

(12:25):
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 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

(12:49):
you imagine invertebrates in general feeling anything analogous to the
kind of plain, familiar emotions that we name in poems.
You know, does a does a crab feel fear? 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

(13:11):
outside of humans, and maybe they're more closely related vertebrate relatives. Well,
but then the 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

(13:33):
there's kind of a push and pull here when we
look to the world of animals. We have to be
willing to throw our emotions off of that golden pedestal
and and look at what they really are from 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

(13:57):
emotions to them as well. Well, yeah, I mean that
that's the other side of it. I mean, some people,
I 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,

(14:17):
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 we should take a break, and
then when we come back we can try to address
the thorny difficult question of what our emotions than. All right,
we're back, So to proceed here, we're going to have
to take a quick stab an exceedingly huge and complicated question,

(14:41):
which is what our emotions. Obviously this is something we
can't answer adequately in a subsection of one episode, but
we'll do our best to try to to hint at
the broad picture of what this question entails. Yeah, it
can be so tricky to even contemplate this because because
and one of the big things is that emotions are
the tumultuous, see that we're constantly immersed in that where

(15:04):
we feel cast about in you know. And this is
again this gets into poetry as well, Right, how many
poems are about you know, the mail storm 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

(15:26):
whole thing, We don't have perspective. We're it's more like
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

(15:48):
on one hand, and then they're the the enemies of
passion 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 cantaloupe, when you cut, you

(16:09):
don't know what it's gonna be you cut into it, though,
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 candle up, I
feel this way about tomatoes. Yeah, tomato. My favorite food
in the world is a really good ripe summer tomato.
And there's nothing worse than a meli off season tomato. Yes,

(16:29):
the tomato is also a great example of human emotion,
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,

(16:51):
dependable experience right there in the middle, calming the seas,
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, artist, scientist sages. Uh, you know,

(17:13):
religious leaders throughout history have contemplated their nature and formulated
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

(17:37):
you can ever really know is your own, Like you
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 you know 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,

(17:57):
that's a whole issue there and itself, like, to what
what degree 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,

(18:17):
If it's just a subjective experience, we have no access
to it whatsoever, right, and 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.

(18:38):
Emotions are evaluations of the primary circumstances that we're dealing with. So,
you know, a huge tie 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,

(19:00):
go through a haunted attraction around Halloween, and you you
feel something like fear 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

(19:20):
look at patterns about what the what the features of
those internal states are, what do they do to the brain?
What 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

(19:41):
strike out at somebody. It causes you to act in
a certain way. So there's a lot more to it
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

(20:02):
of physiology, behavior, and situational context. Another way to think
of emotions is this UH. This is a definition that
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 behavioral change. However, as we'll

(20:25):
discussing these episodes, throwing consciousness into it rather complicates things
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's 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,

(20:50):
and and so you don't know if 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 resumably 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 sad person would have.

(21:14):
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 screen 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. Uh so a relaxed date
comes into place. There's a paper we're gonna look at

(21:37):
later in the episode. Well, we'll come back to it
in a bit, But it's by a Clint J. Perry
and Luigi Battia 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 just you know, full of feeling. Quote.

(21:59):
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 you're trying to study emotions in a
scientific way. On the other hand, that just sounds hilarious.

(22:22):
I think that's that 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, we'll come back to another pretty
similar way of breaking it down. When we actually look

(22:43):
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 the builds a
fortress of love. I think the octopus world is a
great place to start if we're looking for what would
be the clearest, easiest examples to find of something that really,

(23:06):
at least intuitively looks like emotions in the invertebrate world.
Because of course that'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 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

(23:27):
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, I think part of the whole exercise
is is casting emotions down from that golden pedestal, casting

(23:50):
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 like sadness that we feel, you you can
certainly imagine it in a duck or a cat or

(24:13):
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 think, my dog is happy right now, or
my dog is angry or something right. I mean, with

(24:35):
all the complexities that come with with with making those
kind of statements about an animal, of course, 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 my dog, this powerful intuitive sense
of my you know, day to day experience with a canine,

(24:56):
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 that I recommended in our summer reading
episode was a book by an author named Psi Montgomery
called The Soul of an Octopus, which is sort of

(25:19):
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 main reasons is that she presents in
it all of these anecdotes that look like genuinely powerful

(25:40):
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, but on the other hand, they
see a very familiar human kind of intelligence and even

(26:00):
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 look to
because it checks off so many opposite boxes. You know.

(26:21):
It is uh, it is a it is a solitary
creature that that lives in in a different environment than
we do, that has as 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
is not just central in its head. It's it's it

(26:41):
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 Dowd.
So Doubt is working in an aquarium where one of

(27:02):
his jobs is taking care of a dwarf Caribbean octopus
who lives in one of the small display tanks, and
one morning Dowd 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
he finds it. He finds that it has managed to

(27:24):
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
begin to do to get something out of an aperture

(27:44):
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
four a pots in the ocean is traps, and the
octopuses would squeeze themselves into these pots, which seemed like
perfect dens for them, only to then get hauled up

(28:07):
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.
H So the octopus is obviously being, you know, evolved
for a saltwater environment. They don't like this at all,
and they would immediately slither out of the pot and

(28:28):
be captured. All right, That that makes sense. So of
course dow 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 a misbehaving female giant Pacific

(28:50):
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 arms out and attach
herself to his hands, and he would be unable to

(29:13):
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 octopus 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 larger octopus the
same way. He filled up a picture in the sink

(29:34):
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, But the octopus
was incensed. Quote she got scarlet red and really thorny.

(29:58):
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 same look on her
face as I must have had on mine when I
thought I had outwitted her. Now, which part of the

(30:20):
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 such that we
can easily devise one. I believe there was a wasn't
there recently an issue with the masters of emoticons. They

(30:42):
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 you
look into your environment, because when you see the forked
coat hook on the door, you see the boxer octopus. Yes,

(31:02):
but I see a cartoon octopus, and cartoons are human
and have faces. Cartoon animals are generally of animals that
have been made human. Okay, I guess you're right about that.
But coming back to the story about about Scott doubt
in the octopus, that there is something about this kind
of apparent anger and reciprocal vengeance that feels very much

(31:25):
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
these eight armed critters. Yeah, Like a defensive display is
essentially what we're talking about here, um and and like

(31:45):
that does have an emotional resonance, Like if you see
a cat with a defensive display, a horse, a dog,
et cetera, 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. 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

(32:08):
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
if he had been like 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

(32:30):
how persuasive the octopus's behavior was in convincing the people
who worked with him 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 ended up calling them by name jet Stream, Martha, Gertrude, Henry, Bob.

(32:52):
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,
uh where she says quote. And then there was Windy.
Alexa used her as part of her thesis presentation. It

(33:13):
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. Alexa is convinced the whole
debacle occurred because the octopus realized in advance what was
going to happen and resolved to prevent its crafty. Now,

(33:34):
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
to those robots. They name the robots. They think of
the robots as having personalities and intentions apart from their

(33:55):
explicit programming. You know, I often think Johnny the room
bas is being jive us. He's chasing me around the
house or 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. No,
but I mean to whatever extent it would be useful
in dealing with robot or or more you know, realistically

(34:19):
an animal. Uh. Then 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 it's not so much about like the
detail of the emotion that you were you were imagining

(34:43):
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. I should not get close to
it right now. But you know, it's it's one thing
for a scientist, Tom, you know, to have to avoid

(35:04):
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 interactions with animals even in a study,
provided that you could still separate those feelings from the data. Sure,

(35:25):
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 pedestal,
uh and and think more about what they are and
and and stating that okay, um, you know the mind

(35:46):
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,
you know, almost translate equal understanding of the basic properties
of the other's emotional state. Yeah, I mean, I guess
anytime we're trying to study emotional states, whether that's in

(36:08):
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
back to now, um, you can start to look for
behavioral and cognitive analogies. Another way of thinking about it,

(36:30):
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 casts between the
fingers of two hands. Ultimately, fewer or more fingers are
not going to make it any less a cat's cradle. Right,
So if if you know, if five fingers are the

(36:54):
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.
I mean, they're still casting the web, and then we
might easily conceive what would it be like to to

(37:16):
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
come back we can discuss relating the human experience of
emotions to analogous uh, behaviors and cognition and animals. Than alright,

(37:45):
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
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

(38:05):
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
dangerous to suggest otherwise. Are you saying you want to
suggest otherwise? No, you're afraid No, no, I think, especially

(38:27):
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
organisms we might even sometimes not not wish to think
about having emotions, such as pigs and cows, um, you know,

(38:48):
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 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.

(39:10):
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 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

(39:31):
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 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

(39:54):
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 necessary
to generate complex states like emotions. The people think their
brains are just too simple. You know, when you've got
a brain that structurally simple, with you know, such a

(40:15):
few number of neurons, they just couldn't have a complex
state like a persistent emotional state. Uh, And their behavior
is often characterized in terms of simple sense 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

(40:36):
called called, you know, anger or fear a persistent emotional state.
That that's often the view. But the authors think this
old view is due for revision due 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,

(40:59):
numerical cause mission, 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 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 physiological phenomena

(41:25):
that are triggered by appraisal of certain types of environmental stimuli.
So something in the environment causes 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

(41:47):
feel like you have a model then that you can.
You can you can certainly, you know, informally attribute 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 get. That
goes back to the three examples we had are earlier

(42:09):
that feeling is what it feels like. Yeah, you can't
do that, but the other three you can. So emotions
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.

(42:31):
So just for example, to use fear, there is of
course the subjective experience of fear, and we can only
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

(42:52):
signaling danger. Maybe for example, when an animal is feeling fear,
it is more likely to notice movement and its peripheral
vision in the 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 epinefn or epernefer and and

(43:14):
all that. You can notice dilated pupils, relaxation of the bladder, etcetera. Yeah,
I mean we've to to go back to episodes that
we've we've done on human fear and like the nature
of fear. Uh, it's uh, it really change. It kind
of changes who you are. It always makes me think
of the hunter S. Thompson quote. You're a whole different

(43:34):
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 unless
we have sort of you know, performed enough exercises and
fear if you will and even then there may be
unknowns well. Of course, so fear, like other emotions, has
cognitive and behavioral effects, in some cases very strong ones.

(43:58):
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 there, you know,
there are studies that have looked at how fear and
uncertainty affect our politics, you know something, as you know,
generally we think of as 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

(44:20):
or semi permanent way. But no, I mean people's political
opinions appear to fluctuate based on their their emotional states
day 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

(44:44):
perceives the world. Right, So I think in the time
we have left to in today's episode, we've got time
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,

(45:06):
of course, but also in other animals is something known
as a judgment bias test. So imagine what is meant
by a test phrase. Here's a test phrase, the doctor
examined little Emily's growth. Al Right, 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

(45:28):
mass on the back of her neck. Well, it turns out,
so this is an ambiguous phrase. People interpret it different ways,
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,

(45:48):
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
in remission, UH, we're 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

(46:10):
it in the show here is 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 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

(46:32):
less ambiguous, but then but there also means there's no
question if you say the doctor examined a little Emily's
growth in development, you're not 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

(46:53):
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 does seem as if
the depression 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

(47:15):
in and they pointed out that we could be talking
about more about like a depression link response bias, reflecting
an elevated tendency for 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

(47:37):
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, 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.

(48:00):
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 were feeling, and it's 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 you know an

(48:21):
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 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.

(48:43):
But that's not to say that an emotional state won't
just generally influence how information or stimuli is received. A
loving touch 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 sale criticisms that I'm not aware of. I thought
I understood like that, it's pretty well documented within humans

(49:06):
and animals that yeah, that like negative mood does tend
to bias perception. So when you 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 the
main thing I wanted to drive home is I didn't
want anybody to engage in this sort of exercise with

(49:30):
us here and have the same knee jerk reaction that
we did and then immediately assume that that means 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. Yes, but you know,

(49:51):
we're humans and we tend to jump to conclusions and
engage in I guess, um, what is the the X
Men personality test that we've 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 it, like the fortune cookie scenario
or the uh the astrological charts scenario where the future

(50:12):
is read and it's just a little piece of paper
telling you something random, but you immediately identify things about
yourself in that safe release the horror effects, yes, the
Barnum effect also, yes, yes, 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

(50:34):
over what we're about to read, which you know it
may in some ways 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

(50:56):
two different tones, say 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

(51:17):
high pitch tone plays, 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

(51:39):
their judgments about new ambiguous stimuli. 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,

(52:00):
the rats will be much 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

(52:22):
like a bad emotional 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

(52:42):
with um, with with incoming stimuli or or incoming environmental situations. Yeah,
I mean it looks like a quote bad mood puts
the animal in a kind of defensive posture, or 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.

(53:06):
And again, I think this helps to demystify the human
experience of some of these emotions, even though these emotions
could 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 am going to be on guard against

(53:26):
incoming illness of course. Yeah, I mean that's like classical
conditioning one totally. So I mean, really that's that's what
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 you know, the
loftier emotions like uh, like you know, like love, uh,
that you know, we need to to to take bring

(53:47):
them to bring them down a few steps anyway, so
that we can attribute these things to animals as well. Yeah. Now, obviously,
I think, as you and I have discussed before, it's
more difficult to study some emotion 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

(54:09):
and fear than you will in invertebrate love. Though there
are some with invertebrate positive emotions that I think are
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 and afraid
as opposed to making it feel at home. I mean, really,
that's one of one of the problems and some of

(54:30):
these studies that have been conducted with um specifically, I
guess I'm thinking of rats and addiction, right, like are
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

(54:53):
within the rat prison. But the results are useful to
us anyway, because the rats and the rat prison are
kind of analogous to the way humans live. Now yeah, 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.

(55:15):
You know, this is there's another example of an animal
that we generally don't we don't attribute a lot of
personality to or certainly emotional states. But 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

(55:36):
seventeen that studied this effect the judgment bias effect in
honey bees or APIs mallifera. So bees were trained 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

(55:57):
sugar solution, and when odor B you was since, that
was associated with a bitter quinine solution, which the bees
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 bee, they're going to be like, oh,
that's the bitter quinine and I don't want any of it.
They get conditioned like this. And then the manipulation came

(56:20):
when the researchers would go and shake the bees housing
vigorously for sixty seconds. And 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.

(56:43):
Honey bee subjected to the shaking were less likely to
respond to the ambiguous odor 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 the odor was somewhere between the other
two odors chemically, especially when it was closer to the

(57:06):
bad odor, the bees that had been shaken were more
likely to say I don't want any of that. Again,
this looks like a pessimistic bias. Yeah, clearly, and 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

(57:30):
modulate sensory function. And hemolymph again is like insect blood
than of blood. They have hemio lymph, this other circulatory fluid,
and so it increased this uh, this thing called octopamine,
which is similar I believe to nora adrenaline and in
mammals and humans. Uh So, remember that the shaking really
seemed to make a difference when the odor was ambiguous

(57:50):
but closer to the odor associated with the bitter food.
So maybe shaken bees are just better at sensing that
closeness to the bad outcome because is 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
also studied the same thing, but in the opposite direction,

(58:13):
optimistic bias created by pleasure or happiness, or at least
what you might call an analog of pleasure or happiness
in bumble bees. So again there was a similar 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 cue, and then

(58:36):
a blue card on the right that has 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

(58:59):
give the bees a little bit of 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

(59:21):
more likely to explore novel stimuli, suggesting 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,

(59:41):
but at least it on the surface, it looks like
the bees 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 war world,
and we are not the only organism that has to

(01:00:02):
navigate a world of changing circumstances. And and because clearly
the bee has to do that as well, and it
has similar abilities that result or our and our 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. In the meantime, if you want

(01:00:24):
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