The Age of Empathy (22 page)

After her climbing effort, Maxine adopted a most ridiculous posture, getting completely down on her “elbows” with her large behind and back legs swinging up in the air as she tried to literally stick her entire trunk underneath the mirror. This just goes to show her extreme desire to understand the mirror. On the other hand, at no moment did the elephants treat their reflection as if it were another member of their species. This is remarkable, because even apes and children do so at first sight. Is it possible that smell plays a greater role for elephants, so that it makes no sense for them seeing “another” without accompanying odor cues?

Like the apes, they used the mirror to inspect parts of their bodies that they normally never see. They opened their mouths wide in front of the mirror, feeling into them with their trunks. One elephant pushed her ear forward with her trunk while facing the mirror. They also made strange swinging motions, or walked repeatedly in and out of view of the mirror, as if to make sure that their reflection behaved the same way as they did themselves. This is known as “self-contingency testing,” which is typical of apes as well. It was what we were waiting for, as it suggested that the animals had an inkling of what they saw in the mirror.

We prepared for the rouge test, following the same sham-mark procedure as Diana had applied to dolphins. A paint company had provided us with white face paint and a container with exactly the same paint in which a single, odorless component had been changed so that it showed no visible pigmentation. Large X’s were painted on both sides of the elephant’s head above each eye, on the right with the visible paint, on the left with the invisible one.

Happy, a thirty-four-year-old Asian elephant, did all the right things to indicate that she connected the mirror image with herself. She first walked straight to the mirror, where she spent ten seconds, then moved away. We were disappointed. But without having touched
the mark, she returned seven minutes later. She moved in and out of the mirror’s view a couple of times, until she moved away again. While turning away, she began to feel the visible mark. She then returned to the mirror and, while standing directly in front of it, touched and investigated the mark multiple times with her trunk. According to our videotapes, Happy directed a dozen touches at the visible mark and none at the sham mark.

With a big white X painted on her forehead, Happy walked up to the mirror. She could not see the mark without the mirror, but began feeling and touching it.

The great thing, compared with dolphins, is that the elephant is an animal that can touch itself. By any standard used for apes or children, Happy passed the rouge test. We tested two more elephants, including Maxine, but they failed. This is less surprising than it may seem, because for even the most intensely tested primate, the chimpanzee, the proportion of individuals passing the rouge test is far from 100 percent, and in some studies it is less than half.

To see Happy rhythmically swing her trunk in the direction of the big white cross that she couldn’t know about without the mirror, closer and closer, until she began to carefully and precisely touch it, was a sight to behold. We were elated. It was the first indication that elephants have the same capacity for mirror self-recognition that humans, dolphins, and apes have.

For the news media, our scientific report on this discovery appeared at a propitious moment, right after the midterm debacle of the Republican Party in 2006. Their proud symbol, of course, is the elephant. Newspapers couldn’t resist cartoons of an injured and bandaged pachyderm sitting in front of a mirror, staring dejectedly at itself. But the funniest opening line came from a widely carried
Associated Press piece: “If you’re Happy and you know it, pat your head.”

So, it seems that elephants too fit the co-emergence hypothesis. Obviously, we need to better understand their exact level of empathy, and it is paramount that more elephants be subjected to the rouge test. But for the moment I take our evidence as encouraging. Moreover, there is brain research to match, because as it turns out, all mammals with mirror self-recognition possess a rare type of brain cell.

A decade ago, a team of neuroscientists showed that so-called
Von Economo neurons,
or VEN cells, are limited to the hominoid (human and ape) brain. VEN cells differ from regular neurons in that they are long and spindle-like. They reach further and deeper into the brain, making them ideal to connect distant layers. John Allman, a member of the team, thinks that VEN cells are adapted for large brains, adding much-needed connectivity. In the dissection of the brains of many species, these cells were found only in humans and their immediate relatives, but were absent in all other primates, such as monkeys. The cells are particularly large and abundant in our own species, and are found in a part of the brain critical for traits that we consider “humane.” Damage to this particular part results in a special kind of dementia marked by the loss of perspective-taking, empathy, embarrassment, humor, and future-orientation. Most important, these patients also lack self-awareness.

In other words, when humans lose their VEN cells, they lose about every capacity that’s part of the co-emergence hypothesis. It’s unclear if these particular cells themselves are responsible, but it is thought that they underpin the required brain circuitry. Now, if VEN cells play such a vital role in what sets humans and apes apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, the obvious next question is whether they are an absolute requirement. Could other animals, such as dolphins and elephants, possess the same capacities
without
VEN cells?

But we don’t need to worry about this, because the latest discovery by Allman’s team is that VEN cells are not limited to humans and apes. These neurons have made their independent appearance in only
two other branches of the mammalian tree, which happen to be the cetaceans (dolphins and whales) and elephants.

The co-emergence hypothesis offers a nice, tidy story tying together ontogeny, phylogeny, and neurobiology. It’s not a story that sets humans apart, even though we have more of everything: more empathy, more VEN cells, and more self-awareness. We go beyond other animals, for example, in that we are self-conscious about our looks, and have an actual opinion about it: Some hate how they look, and some love it. We shave, comb, or decorate ourselves in front of the mirror every day. We not only recognize ourselves, but also care about our appearance. This may not be totally unique (one orangutan at a German zoo had a habit of piling lettuce leaves onto her head before checking out the results in a mirror), but our species is definitely the planet’s greatest narcissist.

We are part of a small brainy elite that operates on a higher mental plane than the vast majority of animals. Members of this elite have a superior grasp of their place in the world and a more accurate appreciation of the lives of those around them. But however tidy the story may seem, I’m inherently skeptical of sharp dividing lines. For the same reason that I don’t believe in a mental gap between humans and apes, I can’t believe that, say, monkeys or dogs have none, absolutely none, of the capacities that we’ve been discussing. It’s just inconceivable that perspective-taking and self-awareness evolved in a single jump in a few species without any stepping stones in other animals.

But let’s first look at the differences. In the early 1990s, my co-worker Filippo Aureli and I decided to study consolation in monkeys to see if they, like the apes, reassure distressed parties. Both of us had watched hundreds of aftermaths to aggressive conflict in a variety of species, and the setup of those studies had been similar to what we were now planning. The approach is to wait until a spontaneous fight breaks out in a primate group, and then document the events that
follow. This method offers unambiguous evidence for consolation in apes, so should do the same in monkeys, provided they have it. At the time, we had no reason to think they wouldn’t.

But to our surprise, we found nothing! Whereas reconciliation, in which former opponents come together, occurs in all monkeys studied, consolation is totally absent. How could this be? In fact, the monkey observations were shocking, because we’d see a defeated monkey crouching in a corner, and not even its own family seemed the least bit worried. After more failed monkey studies, Italian scientist Gabriele Schino reasoned that if there’s any situation in which one would definitely expect consolation it would be between a mother and her youngest offspring, because this is the closest bond. When Schino tested this on macaques on a large rock at the Rome Zoo, however, his findings were positively baffling. Mothers barely paid attention to their offspring after they had been attacked and bitten, and certainly didn’t actively comfort them. This is all the more surprising since macaque mothers do defend their young against aggression, hence recognizing this as an aversive event. And juveniles do run to their mother after an attack, often huddling against her with a nipple in their mouth, seeking comforting contact. They just shouldn’t expect their mother to go out of her way to provide it.

There are other indicators of a lack of empathy in monkeys, such as the “exasperating” stories of baboon watchers in the Okavango Delta of Botswana about adults ignoring the fear of youngsters facing a water crossing. Standing panicky at the water’s edge, young baboons risk getting killed by predators, yet their mothers rarely return to retrieve them. They just keep traveling. It’s not that a baboon mother is entirely indifferent:

Another Dickensian observation was made during an exceptional flood, which forced the baboons to swim from island to island. One day the adults crossed to another island, leaving almost all of the young stranded behind. The latter were highly stressed, tightly bunched together in a tree, emitting agitated barks. Fieldworkers following the adult baboons could hear the contact calls of the young in the distance, and the adults themselves occasionally oriented toward them but gave no answering barks. The juveniles later managed to swim across and reunite with the troop.

All of this suggests intact emotional contagion but an inability to adopt another’s point of view. This is a familiar deficit in many animals as well as young children. Sometimes it takes amusing forms. At home, we have a black-and-white tomcat, Loeke, who is scared to death of strange people, especially men with big shoes. He must have suffered trauma before we adopted him. As soon as visitors enter our house, he races upstairs in total panic and wriggles his way under our bedcovers. He can stay there for many hours at a time, but remains of course extremely visible. We see a bed with a conspicuous bulge and know exactly where Loeke is, but I bet he thinks that since he can’t see anybody, nobody can see him. The bulge even purrs if we whisper to it. As soon as we close the front door behind the departing visitors, we look at our watch to see how long it takes Loeke to return to the living. It rarely takes him more than twenty seconds.

But lack of perspective-taking can also take heartbreaking forms, as in the baboons above. I remember visiting a Japanese monkey park where the ranger told me how they needed to keep first-time mothers from entering the hot water springs, since they are likely to drown their babies. Young mothers apparently don’t pay sufficient attention to the situation of a baby clinging to their bellies, perhaps thinking that if their own heads are above the surface no one can possibly be in trouble. I have also seen captive monkeys performing dangerous acrobatics in a large spinning wheel in which infants had been playing, forcing the latter to cling to its frame for dear life. An injured young female macaque followed her mother around with a broken, lifelessly
dangling arm, without the mother ever adjusting even a tiny bit to her daughter’s handicap.

How different from a chimpanzee mother I knew, who accommodated every wish of her juvenile son who had a broken wrist, even to the point of letting him nurse, though he had been weaned years earlier. Until his arm had healed, she put him ahead of his younger sibling. Sensitivity to another’s injuries, other than obvious open wounds, requires appreciating how someone’s locomotion is hampered. Apes definitely notice this, as do dolphins and elephants. Examples of elephants helping humans are hard to come by, but Joyce Poole offers the account of a matriarch who had attacked a camel herder, breaking the man’s leg. The same elephant returned later, and with her trunk and front legs moved him to a shady spot under a tree, where she stood protectively over him. She occasionally touched him with her trunk and chased off a herd of buffaloes. She watched over him an entire day and night, and when a search party showed up the next day she was resistant to let them retrieve their colleague.

Monkeys, in contrast, ignore handicaps and seem to have little clue about grief or loss. A typical study is one by Anne Engh, who measured stress levels of baboons who had witnessed a family member being dragged away by a leopard, lion, or hyena. Predation accounts for a high percentage of deaths, and so Engh had many cases to study. Sometimes her baboons literally heard the fearsome predators crunch the bones of their kin. As one might expect, the ones left behind had an elevated stress level, which Engh measured by extracting corticosterone (a stress hormone) from droppings. She also found that bereaved baboons groomed others more, probably as a way to reduce stress and build new relationships to replace lost ones. About one female, she notes: “So great was her need for social bonding that Sylvia began grooming with a female of a much lower status, behavior that would otherwise be beneath her.”