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Science News | December 19, 2009 Feature | Humans Wonder, Anybody Home? FEATURE | HUMANS WONDER, ANYBODY HOME? To prevent Shania the octopus from becom- Humans wonder, ing bored, keepers at the National Aquarium in Washington, D.C., gave her a Mr. Potato Head filled with fish to snuggle. Researchers anybody are now looking beyond behavior into the brain for signs of awareness in birds and invertebrates. home? Brain structure and circuitry offer clues to consciousness in nonmammals By Susan Gaidos ne afternoon while participat­ except for the fact that Betty was a New ing in studies in a University Caledonian crow. of Oxford lab, Abel snatched Betty isn’t the only crow with such a hook away from Betty, leav­ conceptual ingenuity. Nor are crows the Oing her without a tool to complete a task. only members of the animal kingdom to Spying a piece of straight wire nearby, exhibit similar mental powers. Animals POST WASHINGTON THE she picked it up, bent one end into a can do all sorts of clever things: Studies EARY/ L ’ hook and used it to finish the job. Noth­ of chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins and O ILL ing about this story was remarkable, birds have found that some can add, B 22 | SCIENCE NEWS | December 19, 2009 www.sciencenews.org FEATURE | HUMANS WONDER, ANYBODY HOME? subtract, create sentences, plan ahead objects in their visual field. “This raises or deceive others. the intriguing question whether con­ Brain-on-brain comparisons To carry out such tasks, these animals scious experience requires the specific In an effort to find signs of conscious- ness, scientists are identifying analo- must be drawing on past experiences and structure of human or primate brains,” gous structures (same coloring) among then using them along with immediate biologist Donald Griffin wrote inAnimal the brains of humans, birds, octopuses perceptions to make sense of it all. In Minds: Beyond Cognition to Conscious- and other animals. The cortex, hippocam- pus and thalamus are believed to be other words, some scientists would say, ness in 2001. involved in generating awareness. Once these animals are thinking consciously. But today, Edelman says, most neuro­ such structures are identified, research- Many people (some scientists among scientists agree that consciousness ers can look for similarities in neural circuitry (yellow arrows represent a vocal them) would like to believe that con­ probably correlates with the degree of learning pathway in the zebra finch). sciousness sets the human mind apart complexity of the nervous system, not just from the rest of the animal kingdom. But a specific brain architecture. And studies Human whether in humans or other creatures, are exploring self­awareness beyond mon­ behavioral signs of cognizance all arise keys and apes, even beyond mammals. from the tangled interactions of neu­ Recent studies of bird brains reveal rons in the brain. So a growing number that avian gray matter is more similar to of scientists contend that animals with mammalian brains than not — a fact that brain structures and neural circuitry might explain why many kinds of birds are Eye similar to humans’ might experience able to manufacture tools (SN: 8/29/09, something like human awareness, even p. 5), solve mathematical problems (SN: 10mm if a bit less sophisticated. 4/25/09, p. 15) and communicate in ways Still, everyone agrees that conscious­ that even some primates can’t. And new ness is one of science’s great unsolved work suggests that some invertebrates Zebra finch mysteries. Something goes on in the heads with wildly different brain structures, of people when they are seeing, think­ such as octopuses, have elaborate ner­ ing or feeling that does not occur during vous systems and show high intelligence. dreamless sleep. For two decades or so, They use tools, exhibit play behavior and researchers have been conducting studies have distinct personalities. to see what kinds of brain activity match Studies designed to probe the con­ Eye up with those specific experiences. scious states of animals with various Drawing on this information, sci­ brain architectures may help scientists 10mm entists are now poised to explore the better understand the mechanisms possible presence of consciousness in underlying consciousnesses and how animals. Neurobiological information such levels of awareness evolved. John Octopus gleaned from studies of brain activity, David Smith, a psychologist at the Uni­ together with studies of animal behav­ versity at Buffalo of the State University ior, may help scientists identify various of New York, says it’s important to keep types of conscious states in animals, says in mind that consciousness is not an all­ neurobiologist David Edelman of the or­nothing event. “It didn’t just wink on Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. like a fuse box in a house getting switched He and collaborator Anil K. Seth out­ on,” he says. “There are levels and grada­ lined a framework for probing animal tions of the capacity, and I think we have consciousness in the September Trends to bear that in mind.” in Neurosciences. 10mm “In many cases, we still know nothing A consciousness loop Cerebral cortex (human), pallium (bird) about the brain areas that would control Everyone has an idea of what being Thalamus consciousness in a particular animal,” conscious means, but nobody seems to Hippocampus Vertical & median superior frontal lobes Edelman says. “But we now have data in be able to define it. In the 17th century, Striatum the human domain that suggests where French philosopher and mathematician Midbrain and hindbrain to look and what to look for.” René Descartes declared that mind and Cerebellum (human, bird), Past studies have shown that specific body are separate, leaving the debate peduncle (octopus) Retina and retina-like optic lobe monkey brain structures do what they over the nature of consciousness to Lateral ventricle ELMAN do in humans when the animals engage philosophers and theologians. Today Pallidum ED D. D. in certain activities, such as tracking scientists reject that notion, viewing www.sciencenews.org December 19, 2009 | SCIENCE NEWS | 23 FEATURE | HUMANS WONDER, ANYBODY HOME? consciousness as arising from the activ­ or minutes — that allows one to interact in ness, rather than a direct measure, ity of neurons in the brain. a meaningful way,” Edelman says. because “it’s hard to know the exact The late Francis Crick, who shared a Scientists are working to identify the instant a person is being conscious,” Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA’s neurological mechanisms that knit sen­ Edelman says. “Still, 99 percent of the structure, helped pioneer studies on the sory input and memory into a unified time if you’re scanning a person and neural basis of consciousness. Working perception. One possible mechanism is they’re responding to something and with his longtime collaborator, neuro­ a curious electrical rhythm in the brains they’re aware of something, that signa­ scientist Christof Koch of Caltech, of animals exposed to sensory stimuli. ture appears reliably.” Crick argued that consciousness is syn­ Known as gamma oscillations, the waves Such EEG patterns and cortical­thal­ onymous with awareness — all forms of reflect the synchronous activity of large amic interactions serve as a convenient awareness — and that only by examining interconnected networks of neurons fir­ reference point to probe for potential neurons and their interactions could sci­ ing together roughly 40 times per sec­ conscious states in other animals, he entists accumulate the kind of empirical ond. This beat spreads across the brain says. Birds, for example, don’t have a cor­ knowledge needed to create a scientific and seems to be especially strong when tex, but recent findings on the structure model of it. animals are concentrating on a single of avian brains do reveal a robust higher­ Edelman likens conscious experiences object — such as they might when track­ processing center intricately wired to to “scenes” in which sensations, percep­ ing the scent of their favorite prey. deal with information in a similar way. tions, thoughts and feelings are unified More recent studies of human brain into a picture of the world. Higher­order activity show that consciousness cre­ Singing in the brain consciousness — the kind that humans ates other frequencies of oscillation Bird brains have long had a bad rep, and have — may include context that helps that can be detected using an electroen­ until recently were considered to consist shape the experience, such as inner dia­ cephalograph, or EEG. In 2005, Edelman of one large basal ganglia forebrain and log, implicit expectations and voluntary and colleagues published a paper in a few “primitive” structures. In 2005, control of thought and action. Such high­ Consciousness and Cognition outlining a Duke University neuroscientist Erich level cognizance makes people aware series of studies showing that recordings Jarvis showed this isn’t the case at all. that they are aware. Primary conscious­ taken during tasks such as memorization In reviewing the neuroanatomy of birds, ness, on the other hand, requires no self­ or problem solving reveal a circuit of neu­ he noted that there is a higher­process­ reflection but does require a neuronal ral activity running in loops between the ing center — similar to humans’ cortical circuit capable of combining attention thalamus, known to help control alert­ area — in the brains of all vertebrates, and short­term memory, Edelman says. ness, and the cerebral cortex, the brain’s including birds, fish, reptiles and mam­ “It’s the ability to take in sensory infor­ outer layer where sensory stimuli enter. mals. This area, critical for reasoning and mation and form memories — whether The presence of such activity is con­ remembering, is organized differently those memories persist for tens of seconds sidered a correlate of human conscious­ in birds and in mammals. In mammals, it appears as layered cells in the cortex, Big brains and small brains Some scientists look to brain-to-body mass ratio as a sign while in birds it is organized as clustered of intelligence.
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