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! BEYOND THE BRAIN This page intentionally left blank ! B E YO N D T H E B R A I N How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds Louise Barrett PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barrett, Louise. Beyond the brain : how body and environment shape animal and human minds / Louise Barrett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-12644-9 (hardback) 1. Brain—Evolution. 2. Evolution (Biology) 3. Ecology. I. Title. QL933.B27 2011 591.5—dc22 2010048477 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Perpetua Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ! For Gary This page intentionally left blank ! C O N T E N T S Acknowledgments ix C hapter 1 Removing Ourselves from the Picture 1 C hapter 2 The Anthropomorphic Animal 20 C hapter 3 Small Brains, Smart Behavior 39 C hapter 4 The Implausible Nature of Portia 57 C hapter 5 When Do You Need a Big Brain? 71 C hapter 6 The Ecology of Psychology 94 C hapter 7 Metaphorical Mind Fields 112 C hapter 8 There Is No Such Thing as a Naked Brain 135 C hapter 9 World in Action 152 viii CONTENTS C hapter 10 Babies and Bodies 175 C hapter 11 Wider than the Sky 197 Epilogue 223 Notes 225 References 251 Index 269 ! AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S he nice thing about writing a book, if you’re a fan of distributed cog- T nition, is that it lets you practice what you preach. This book could never have been written if I hadn’t borrowed all the brains that I could, to echo Woodrow Wilson. Some of the brains I borrowed were distributed in other books and articles, but there is also a more embodied means of exploiting other people’s brains as a resource, and I have been very lucky to f nd myself in an environment full of smart, enthusiastic people who were more than happy to share their expertise and knowledge with me face-to-face. First, thanks to my editors at Princeton, Alison Kalett, who saw the project through to completion, and also Robert Kirk and Sam Elworthy, who got it all going in the f rst place. The book took much longer to write than it should have—which is why I managed to get through three editors—and their patience, good advice, and immense tolerance is very much appreciated. Thanks must also go to all the students who have taken my class on embodied cognition at the University of Lethbridge; their thoughts, ideas, comments, and suggestions have, I hope, helped make this a more accessible and interesting read than if I’d been left to my own devices. In particular, thanks to Kerri Norman, Michael Amirault, Stacey Vine, Stefanie Duguay, Clarissa Foss, Eric Stock, Kevin Mikulak, Beverley John- son, Andy Billey, Danielle Marsh, Alena Greene, Nicole Whale-Kienzle, Joseph Vanderf uit, Amanda Smith, Brad Duce, Brett Case, Joseph Mac- Donald, Kevin Schenk, Mecole Maddeaux-Young, Jordon Giroux, Shand Watson, Joel Woodruf , and Ben Lowry. I’m also very grateful to the following friends, students, and col- leagues for reading and commenting on various chapters and drafts: April Takahashi, Tom Rutherford, Carling Nugent, Natalie Freeman, Graham Pasternak, Doug Vanderlaan, Shannon Digweed, Craig Roberts, and John x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Lycett. I am grateful as well to the two anonymous readers who read the draft for Princeton. And I’d like to thank John Vokey and Drew Rendall for many and varied conversations on these and other topics. Robert Barton, John Granzow, and Sergio Pellis deserve very special thanks for reading the f nal draft in its entirety (in John’s case, more than once) and providing extensive comments. Rob and Serge played devil’s advocate in the most generous way possible and helped curb my ex- cesses, while John’s enthusiasm for all things embodied and distributed ensured I didn’t concede too much to the other side. All three passed on some excellent ideas, and their thoughtful, constructive criticism helped increase the clarity and precision of the arguments presented here, for which I am immensely grateful. Of course, as they say, any remaining errors are my own. Shellie Kienzle did a superb job of proofreading the f nal draft for me, including pointing out those places where English idiom might raise a few North American eyebrows. At Princeton, Lauren Lepow’s brilliant copyediting helped improve the text considerably, Stefani Wexler kept me on track during the f nal stages of manuscript preparation, and Dimi- tri Karetnikov drew the illustrations, based on some very poor examples and some highly convoluted explanations of what I was after. Last but certainly not least, Deanna Forrester proved herself a true friend and very generously gave up part of her Christmas holiday to construct the index. It was a genuine pleasure to work with them all. Peter Henzi did not read a single word, but, then again, he didn’t need to, as he was forced to endure an unrelenting verbal onslaught, and did so with immense good humor and grace. He also kept me in hot dinners and stif drinks, and insisted that, sometimes, it was not only pleasant but necessary to sit on the porch in the sunshine, and I’m very pleased and grateful that he did. ! BEYOND THE BRAIN This page intentionally left blank ! C hapter 1 Removing Ourselves from the Picture I’m personally convinced that at least chimps do plan for future needs, that they do have this autonoetic consciousness. —Mathias Osvath, BBC News, March 9th 2009 1 I saw only Bush and it was like something black in my eyes. —Muntazer al-Zaidi, Guardian , March 13, 2009 2 n March 2009, a short research report in the journal Current Biology I caught the attention of news outlets around the globe. 3 I n t h e r e p o r t , Mathias Osvath described how, over a period of ten years, Santino, a thirty-one-year-old chimpanzee living in Furuvik Zoo, Northern Swe- den, would collect rocks from the bottom of the moat around his island enclosure in the morning before the zoo opened, pile them up on the side of the island visible to the public, and then spend the morning hurl- ing his rock collection at visitors, in a highly agitated and aggressive fashion. Santino was also observed making his own missiles by dislodg- ing pieces of concrete from the f oor of his enclosure once the supply of naturally occurring rocks began to dwindle. Santino’s calm, deliberate, and methodical “stockpiling” of the rocks ahead of the time they were needed was interpreted by Osvath as unequivocal evidence of planning for the future. Future planning has long been seen as a unique human trait because it is thought to require “autonoetic consciousness.” Autonoetic means “self- knowing,” which Osvath def nes as “a consciousness that is very special, that you can close your eyes [and] you can see this inner world.” 4 M o r e precisely, it is the idea that you can understand yourself as “a self,” and that you can, therefore, think about yourself in a detached fashion, considering how you might act in the future, and ref ecting on what you did in the past. Osvath argued for this interpretation of Santino’s stockpiling behavior on the grounds that it simply wasn’t explicable in terms of Santino’s current 2 CHAPTER ONE drives or motivation, but only on the assumption that he was anticipating visitors arriving later in the day. In addition, over the ten or so years that Santino was observed behaving like this, he stockpiled the stones only dur- ing the summer months when the zoo was open. For Osvath, this spon- taneous planning behavior—so reminiscent of our own—suggested that chimpanzees “probably have an ‘inner world’ like we have when reviewing past episodes of our lives or thinking of days to come.”5 Of course, having a large rock f ung at your paying customers by a hefty male ape is not particularly good for business, and the zoo staf were a little less impressed by Santino’s antics than the scientists were. Given the suggestion that Santino possessed a highly developed form of conscious- ness, and an “inner world” much like our own, one might suppose that the solution to a problem like Santino would capitalize on his advanced cognitive capacities: given the ability to plan ahead and understand the consequences of his own actions—given, in other words, Santino’s ratio- nality—it would seem possible to reason with him by some means, so that he would understand why his behavior was problematic. But no. The zookeepers decided that the best way to reduce Santino’s aggressive ten- dencies, and so his rock-f inging antics, was to castrate him.6 Coincidentally, the consequences of some other unwanted missile throwing were reported in the press that same week. Muntazer al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, was sentenced, by a court in Baghdad, to three years in prison for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press conference held three months previously.7 Despite the fact that al-Zaidi’s actions—unlike those of Santino—were apparently not pre- meditated but, by his own admission, ref ected his inability to control his emotions, no one (thankfully) concluded that castration would be an ap- propriate way to curb al-Zaidi’s missile throwing.

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