Neuroscientists have found evidence that when a monkey learns to use a tool, it treats it like another body part. Earlier research has found that brain area F5 controlled the monkey’s ability to hold and use objects. The researchers recorded the activity of 113 neurons in F5 (as well as F1, also involved in manipulation) and discovered that the same ones fired in the same order when the monkeys grasped with their hands as when they used pliers, and even when they used reverse pliers that required they open their hand to grab the food. So, it seems that the monkey brain uses the same neural net for tool use as when using its hands, thereby extending its consciousness beyond its hand.

This serves as scientific support for the theory of extended cognition, as advanced by David Chalmers and Andy Clark. Our minds have a certain plasticity that allows them to go beyond bodily parameters. When writing with a pen, we are not conscious of manipulating an object, but can write without thinking about it, unless the pen breaks, at which point we are confronted with the reality that we are using a faulty tool. This mental plasticity allows people to use robotic prosthetic appendages, as well as let blind people see and deaf hear by means of cybernetic implants. The study reinforces that we do in fact extend our minds into the tools we use, incorporating them into a kind of machinic assemblage where subject and instrument are merged into one.

Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind, ScienceNow.ScienceMag.org
The Extended Mind, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, Consc.net

When dogs like someone, their tails wag more to the right, when they don’t, their wagging is mostly to the left, found neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara (University of Triste, Italy) and others in a recent study called "Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli." Most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, show some variation of emotional asymmetry in the brain. For humans, the left brain is linked to positive feelings, attachment and love, safety and calm, as well as a slow heart rate. While, the right brain is associated with negative feelings, fear and hate, depression, rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system. In broader terms, the left controls behaviors of approach and energy enrichment, the right, withdrawal and energy expenditure. It’s important to note that asymmetries appear on opposite sides of the body, as the left brain controls the right side, the right - the left. So, in reading people’s faces, it is the movements on the right side that reflect happiness, the left - unhappiness. For the tail-wagging experiment, Vallortigara took 30 mixed breed dogs and put them in camera-monitored cages, where they were shown either their owner, an unfamiliar human, a cat, or an unfamiliar, dominant dog. Each instance lasted 90 second, 10 sessions a day for 25 days. As to be expected, the pets’ tails wagged the furthest to the right when they saw their owners, moderately with a human stranger, a little bit with cats, and strongly to the left with aggressive dogs.

This adds to the growing body of evidence that brain asymmetry, once attributed only to humans, is present in most animals. Bees learn better with their right antenna. Chameleons are more likely to change color out of fear when they see someone from their left eye. Chickens look down with their left eye to look for food while keeping the right watching for predators overhead. Chimpanzees, when excited negatively, tend to scratch themselves on the left side. Furthermore, left-handed chimps are more frightened in general by new stimuli than the right-handed, their right brain making them more wary. All this is rather curious, seeing how many languages have some sort of synonimity between right (dexter) and good on the one hand, left (sinister) and bad on the other. It seems on some level, the distinction between the brain hemispheres and their domains has long since been recognized. Sometimes, this manifested in interesting ways, e.g. in the Middle Ages, left-handed people could not become knights, even though, as anyone who has fenced can testify, they would have made exceptional fighters, since not only are most people unaccustomed to fighting the left-handed minority, but the spiral stairs in castle towers are designed to put right-handed attackers at a disadvantage. Also, it would be interesting to look, from a holistic perspective, how physical changes on different sides of the body effect personality and behavior. Because, it seems to me that I’ve been getting more moody and paranoid as vision in my right eye worsened. Could it be the same as with the chameleons? And are pirates portrayed one-eyed for the same reason (it sure isn’t for depth perception)? That would be a whole other study.

If you want to know if Spot loves you so, it’s in his tail, NYTimes.com

A zoo in Adelaide, Australia, has caged a group of humans in an effort to raise awareness about primate conservation. In what has been billed as "Big Brother behind bars", the select volunteers are locked in an orangutan cage, where they wear microphones and are monitored via webcam. Officially, the aim is for psychologists to use the findings to improve living conditions for apes in captivity. However, zoo audiences can also vote for their favorite participant by text message, like American Idol, and at the end of the month a winner will be selected to represent the zoo. Boringly, the human apes are allowed to go home at night and there are rules against nudity, ironic since every other animal in the zoo is naked. Then again, looking at the participants’ profiles on the human zoo homepage, it’s probably for the best. Too bad they don’t use prison populations for such experiments, could get two birds with one stone.

Zoo puts humans on display, Reuters.com
HumanZoo Homepage

Ok, I’ve mentioned before how MIT has this OpenCourseWare program, whose goal it is "to make the courses materials that are used in the teaching of almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT available on the Web, free of charge, to any user, anywhere in the world." Well, now they have video and audio files of lectures for a number of courses, including:

Animal Behavior
Electromagnetics and Applications
Nano-to-Macro Transport Processes

More audio/visual courses at MIT OpenCourseWare

Sexual harassement is a problem females of many species face. A research team from the University of Leeds, led by Darren Croft (U. of Wales), has found that guppies, a popular aquarium fish, sometimes risk their lives to avoid the courtship of males. "Male guppies spend most of their time displaying to females. But if their courtship displays don’t impress the females, males will attempt to sneak mating with them when they aren’t looking," says Croft. Consequently, female guppies sometimes opt to swim in places that contain few males, but many predators. While females are a dull brown color, the males are brightly colored so as to attract attention, making them hesitant to follow the opposite sex into dangerous waters. "Understanding why and how [sexual segregation] occurs is essential if we are going to conserve and protect species and habitats," explains Croft. "In many ecosystems, predators are the first to go extinct, and our work shows that this may have many, perhaps unexpected, effects. In this case, females may suffer more sexual harassment."

Female guppies risk their lives to avoid too much male attention, EurekAlert.org

A new study by Michael A. Cant, University of Cambridge, UK, and others suggests that differences in aggressive behavior in cooperative insect societies are related to "inheritence rank", the chance of successful mating, which increases with higher placement within the social hierarchy. Everyone has to work their way up and can reach the top only when those ahead in rank have died, thereby inheriting from them the right to reproduce. By testing colonies of paper wasps Polistes dominulus, recording aggression and repeatedly removing dominant wasps, they "found that rates of both aggressive ‘displays’ (aimed at individuals of lower rank) and aggressive ‘tests’ (aimed at individuals of higher rank) decreased down the hierarchy." The inheritence rank is the hidden variable that may explain the difference in aggression among seemingly equal individuals. So, even in wasps, the essence of the desire to work up the social ladder is really just a need to get laid. No real surprise there.

The higher the hierarch, the greater the aggression, EurekAlert.org

Ok, so maybe they’re not real, yet, but koalowls would make the coolest marsupials.

Method is more important than strength, when you wish to control your enemies. By dropping golden beads near a snake, a crow once managed to have a passer-by kill the snake for the beads.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The crow has a cunning rep in the avian kingdom. It is the messenger for the Zoroastrian good god Ahura-Mazda, as well as for Hermes (Mercury) and Apollo. Norse god Odin, had two ravens, Huginn and Munnin (Mind and Memory), one on each shoulder. There is a Greek myth that recounts how the crow became black, the love story of Coronis and Ischys. Coronis was pregnant with Apollo’s baby, but before she had the kid, she went and shacked up with Ischys. Apollo found out about this from a crow and in his anger turned the crow black for bringing bad news and then proceeded to kill Ischys and the pregnant Coronis (for what it’s worth, he did feel bad as his lover was lying on the funeral pyre, so he saved the kid by performing the first c-section, the child was Aesclepius, future father of medicine). This identification as a harbinger is possibly why a gathering of crows is a "murder", of ravens an "unkindness."

Crows and other corvidae top the bird IQ scale, followed by falcons, hawks, herons and woodpeckers. They have unusually large brains for their size, about the size of a chimpanzee’s, while rivaling the great apes in intelligence. They use traffic stops to crush nuts, setting and retrieving them during red lights. Like other scavengers they know to follow armies for carrion. They can talk, make tools out of wire, and form complex hierarchical societies. They can even lie.

Dr Bungyar, University of Austria, conducted an experiment to see what ravens learned from each other while foraging. He had two birds, one dominant and one subordinate, named after Odin’s. Their task was to work out which color-coded film containers held cheese, open them and eat. The subordinate was far better at this than the dominant. But as soon as he’d start eating, the dominant one would bully him away to gain access to the food. So then the subordinate headed over to a set of empty containers, opened them enthusiastically, and pretended to eat. The dominant followed, whereupon the subordinate rushed to the loaded containers, having clearly misled the other. But that’s not all, the dominant one soon grew wise and stopped falling for the tactic, at which point the subordinate got angry and started throwing things about. Crows not only lie, but they can tell when others lie, and even get upset when they’re found out.

Quoth the raven, Economist
Crows as clever as great apes, study says, National Geographics
Crows and jays topbird IQ scale, BBC

By training captive chimps to use tools in different ways, a team at the University of St Andrews in the UK and the National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, US, have shown experimentally that primates develop cultural traditions through imitation. They presented two different groups of chimps with a problem: how to retrieve an item of food stuck behind a blockage in a system of tubes. One chimpanzee from each group was secretly taught a novel way to solve the problem. Ericka was taught how to use a stick to lift the blockage up so that the food fell out. Another female chimp, Georgia, was shown how to poke at the blockage so that the ball of food rolled out of the back of the pipes. Each chimp was then reunited with its group, and the scientists watched how they behaved. They found that the chimps gathered around Ericka or Georgia and soon copied their behaviour. By the end of two months, the two different groups were still using their own way of getting at the food and two distinct cultural traditions had been established.

Chimpanzee Culture Confirmed, BBC.co.uk

At Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, researchers headed by John Cass report eliciting complex behavior e.g. hand-to-mouth movements, by stimulating specific areas in the brain of a Galago, a small nocturnal primate. This challanges the theory that there are few hardwired complex behaviors in the primate brain because most of the behavior is learned or volitional. These findings follow in the steps of Michael Graziano of Princeton University, New Jersey, who used long electical pulses in the motor cortex to stimulate complex behaviors in macaques. However, Kaas an co. were able to stimulate a greater number of complex movements, including aggresive facial patterns and defensive forelimb movements, in the simpler brain of the Galago. Further, they found that besides the motor cortex they could cause behavior by stimulating the nearby posterior parietal cortex. And to think only a few months ago I was freaking out that they had remote controlled rats.

Monkey behavior controlled through brain stimulation, Betterhumans.com
Microstimulation reveals specialized subregions for different complex movements in posterior parietal cortex of prosimian galagos, Abstract from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences