animal minds
Scicon Review
Resting states in unconscious monkeys
Nature has an interesting report from Marc Raichle‘s laboratory that studies the resting states in monkeys. This study not only demonstrates that resting states occur in non-human primates, but that it is possible to find...
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Smarter, sentient whales
Recent studies have shown that the brains of sperm whales is second in size only to human (relative to body size). It is about 60% larger in absolute mass than that of an elephant. How this brain evolution has occurred is the t...
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Scrub-jays plan for the future
A recent paper in Nature, which came out of Nicky Clayton’s lab at the University of Cambridge, reports on the ability of western scrub-jays to plan for the future. The findings of this paper, by Raby et al., suggest that scr...
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Jane Goodall Podcast
ABC Radio National in Australia has an excellent podcast on a talk by Jane Goodall , an English primatologist, ethologist and anthropologist, who is well known for conducting a forty-five year study of chimpanzee social and fam...
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Memory for what, where, when and who in nonhuman animals
Can birds remember who watched them do what, as well as when and where? Scrub jays have already been demonstrated to encode the “what-where-when” (what happened, where it happened and when it happened) of specific caching e...
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The chemical sense of retaining detailed memories
The levels of a chemical released by the brain determine how detailed a memory will later be, according to researchers at UC Irvine. The neurotransmitter acetylcholine, a brain chemical already established as being crucial for ...
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Detecting a touch
What happens in the brain when a stimulus is detected? How does the brain activity look when there is no such detection? This question has been addressed by study by de Lafuente et al. in a study of monkeys. Using somatosensory...
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Chimps to People: Apes show contrasts in genetic makeup
Despite sharing much of their genetic identity with people, chimpanzees exhibit previously unappreciated DNA distinctions, according to the first rigorous comparisons of the two species’ complete genetic sequences.
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Fishing For Birds
A crafty killer whale has devised a new way to catch a tasty bite. The orca spits regurgitated fish onto the surface of the water – and then waits. When a passing gull dives for the bait, the whale lunges at the feathery ...
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Does the duck-billed platypus dream?
You can see a dog dreaming: it twitches and whines, and its eyes move in “rapid eye movement” (REM) sleep. In fact, dreaming in dogs and cats is quite similar to human dreaming. But a recent study of dream patterns in the d...