All the Alex Bain you can handle!

Neat 3 year old piece from the Japan Times. I stumbled across it while looking to learn more about my new favorite bit of science, spindle cells. I thought I remembered hearing that elephants also mourned their dead.

As someone with a recently discovered love of pets, I’ve been asking smart people about what makes pets tick, and I’d been told that dogs and cats lack the portion of the brain that enabled “complex emotions”. The fantastic book “It’s a Cat’s World, You Just Live In It” taught me that cats don’t poop on your bed after a prolonged absence because they’re frustrated, mad, or jealous. They do so as a primal response to stress. (Side note: every cat lover should read this book. It’s a hysterical page-turner, and extremely informative)

The better I understand the differences between our brains, the easier my interactions have become with Furio. His behavior is almost entirely determined by 2 factors: instinct and stress. With this knowledge, I don’t waste time interpreting his actions. He likes to smell things, so I open up spice jars for him to experience different sniffs. He likes to hunt, so rather than handing him a treat, I launch it across the room for him to track down. He’s weary of significant changes to his environment, so I’ve tried to ease him into our cross-country move, surrounding him with familiar items and activities.

As interested as I am to learn more about spindle cells, I’m equally interested to improve my understanding of the extent to which stress, and not consciousness, dictates our behavior. For anyone interested in this topic, there’s a terrific lecture from Stanford’s Professor Sapolsky titled “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” available for free on iTunes. It borders on stand up comedy at times, but his message is clear that stress plays a massive role in the human condition, and that evolution has left us ill-equipped to cope properly with persistent stress.