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Animal Thinking
Discusses renewed interest in conscious mental experiences of animals and the possibility that thoughts and feelings of animals can be studied objectively
- GenresNonfictionScienceBiology
256 pages, Hardcover
First published April 27, 1984
69 people want to read
About the author
Donald R. Griffin
13 books18 followersDonald Redfield Griffin was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and considered the founder of the modern study of animal thinking and consciousness known as "cognitive ethology." He made his mark early in his career by helping to discover how bats navigate, and coined the term "echolocation" to describe the phenomenon.
"An emeritus professor of animal behavior at Rockefeller University, Dr. Griffin gave birth to the field known as cognitive ethology in 1978 when he broke a scientific taboo by suggesting that animals might have the capacity to think and reason, and that scientists should study these mental processes."
"In his publications, Dr. Griffin argued that the great complexity and adaptability of animal behavior, from the sophisticated food-gathering behavior of chimps to the clever fishing techniques of herons, suggest that animals are not mere automatons. Instead, he maintained, they are thinking beings, even if they might be thinking about different things, in ways entirely different from humans." Prior to this—and to a lesser extent even afterward—most scientists considered the matter of animal thinking to be a subject that belonged far outside the realm of scientific exploration. The field's natural connection to movements like animal rights advocacy continues to make some scientists wary.
Dr. Griffin died in Lexington, Massachusetts, at 88 years of age. (New York Times obituary.)
"An emeritus professor of animal behavior at Rockefeller University, Dr. Griffin gave birth to the field known as cognitive ethology in 1978 when he broke a scientific taboo by suggesting that animals might have the capacity to think and reason, and that scientists should study these mental processes."
"In his publications, Dr. Griffin argued that the great complexity and adaptability of animal behavior, from the sophisticated food-gathering behavior of chimps to the clever fishing techniques of herons, suggest that animals are not mere automatons. Instead, he maintained, they are thinking beings, even if they might be thinking about different things, in ways entirely different from humans." Prior to this—and to a lesser extent even afterward—most scientists considered the matter of animal thinking to be a subject that belonged far outside the realm of scientific exploration. The field's natural connection to movements like animal rights advocacy continues to make some scientists wary.
Dr. Griffin died in Lexington, Massachusetts, at 88 years of age. (New York Times obituary.)
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 30, 2025
A COGNITIVE ETHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO CONSIDERING ANIMAL ‘THINKING’
Author and professor Donald Griffin wrote in the Preface to this 1984 book, “The aim of this book is to rekindle scientific interest in the conscious mental experiences of animals. This subject was a central concern of both biologists and psychologists during the half century following the Darwinian revolution… But animal minds have been largely neglected by scientists since the First World War, primarily because behavioral scientists convinced themselves that there was no way to distinguish automatic and unthinking responses from behavior involving conscious choice on the animal’s part. Now, however, because of impressive progress in ethology and psychology, animal thinking is again receiving serious scientific attention. A cognitive approach to ethology offers the hope that testable hypotheses can be developed, along with methods by which the thoughts and feelings of animals can be studied objectively… This book describes and analyzes several of the more significant new developments in ethology, psychology, and neurobiology from a cognitive point of view… I am using ‘cognitive’ in a literal sense to refer to conscious thought and knowledge.” (Pg. v-vi)
In the first chapter, he explains, “First, I will consider a much wider variety of animals, with emphasis on the rich store of information about their behavior and possible thinking under natural conditions, where they cope with problems that have been crucially important to their species over the course of evolution. Second, from this naturalistic and comparative perspective, I will come to grips with the subjective aspects of animal consciousness. Under natural conditions animals make so many sensible decisions concerning their activities, and coordinate their behavior so well with that of their companions, that it has become reasonable to infer some degree of conscious thinking, anticipating, and choosing. In their social interactions some species appear to communicate their thoughts and feelings to each other. Communicative behavior offers an especially promising opportunity for ethologists to listen in and thereby gather useful information about the nature of animal consciousness.” (Pg. 3-4)
He acknowledges, “I will take it for granted that behavior and consciousness in both animals and men result entirely from events that occur in their central nervous system. In other words, I will operate on the basis of reductive and emergent materialism… I will thus assume that there are no immaterial or supernatural processes involved in the small fraction of human or animal brain events that result in conscious subjective thoughts and feelings… One can appeal to spiritual influences as ultimately determining the nature of the physical universe but my discussion will stay out of such territory.” (Pg. 8)
He suggests, “We are less likely to find evidence of conscious thinking in routine repetition of stereotyped patterns than in behavior that is adjusted to changing needs and circumstances. It seems most promising to concentrate on situations in which animals successfully cope with challenging problems by choosing among alternative behavior patterns. Some species and some types of behavior have been studied thoroughly enough that we can make some inferences about thoughts or feelings that may precede or accompany it.” (Pg. 15)
He asserts, “The issue of determinism versus freedom of choice is only indirectly related to the question of whether nonhuman animals are conscious or not. Their conscious experiences could be the completely determined result of prior experience of genetic makeup, for example; or their choices might be free in the sense of not being predetermined, yet involve no conscious thinking.” (Pg. 20)
He notes, “Behavioral ethologists have recently recognized that many animals employ very effective tactics in choosing a particular pattern of behavior during such activities as searching for food, courtship and mating, and doubtless in many other aspects of behavior that have not yet been studied in detail.” (Pg. 24)
He argues, “We have no evidence that organisms lacking a central nervous system are capable of thinking about objects and events. To be sure, plants … and even viruses react, grow and replicate, and all these processes require some sort of information storage and processing. Some thoughtful scholars feel that it is so preposterous to postulate conscious thinking by insects that one might as well go on to include plants, viruses, or even atoms. This seems an unjustified overreaction, but we are handicapped by our lack of hard evidence concerning the essential processes giving rise to conscious thoughts in the human brain, where we know that they do occur. There may not be any hard and fast boundaries between the organized central nervous systems of flatworms and the nerve nets of coelenterates…The organelles of ciliates function in a coordinated manner, but nothing in their makeup seems capable of storing and processing sensory information as effectively as the central nervous systems of complex multicellular animals.” (Pg. 31)
He observes, “One very important attribute of animal behavior that seems intuitively to suggest conscious thinking is its adaptability to changing circumstances. If an animal repeats some action in the same way regardless of results, we assume that a rigid physiological mechanism is at work, especially if the behavior is ineffective or harmful to the animal… When members of our own species do things that are self-damaging or even suicidal, we do not conclude that their behavior is the result of a mechanical reflex. But to explain the moth flying into the flame as thoughtful but misguided seems far less plausible than the usual interpretation that such insects automatically fly toward a bright light… conversely, if an animal manages to obtain food by a complex series of actions that it has never performed before, intentional thinking seems more plausible than rigid automatism… Another criterion upon which we tend to rely in inferring conscious thinking is the element of interactive steps in a relatively long sequence of appropriate behavior patterns.” (Pg. 35)
He summarizes, “All this adds up to the simple idea that when animals communicate to one another they may be conveying something about their thoughts or feelings. If so, eavesdropping on the communicative signals they exchange may provide us with a practicable source of data about their mental experiences. When animals devote elaborate and specifically adjusted activities to communication, each animal responding to messages from its companion, it seems rather likely that both sender and receiver are consciously aware of the content of these messages.” (Pg. 39-40)
He proposes, “If we postulate, tentatively, the presence of simple thoughts, a great deal of animal behavior can be understood as a consistent adaptive pattern. Explaining all the variations in predator-distraction behavior solely on the basis of conflict between motivations requires numerous separate and ad hoc assumptions to account for false incubation, the rodentlike gait, making oneself conspicuous to the threatening predator (but not near the nest), and leading away from the nest or young. But if we recognize that the parent bird simply wants the predator to move away from its young, the behavior patterns fall into place as reasonable procedures to achieve a vitally important goal.” (Pg. 94)
He suggests, “Most of an animal’s thoughts and subjective sensations are probably confined to the immediate situation rather than ultimate results… When a female wasp digs a burrow, provisions a nest, or makes other arrangements for an egg she has not yet laid, in a future she will not live to experience, it is unreasonable to imagine that she thinks about her eventual progeny, primarily because there is no way for information about the progeny to reach her central nervous system. But this inability to know the long-term results of her behavior in no way precludes conscious thinking about what she is doing, for she has abundant opportunity to perceive what she does and to observe the immediate results.” (Pg. 116-117)
He states, “Perhaps experimental conditions could be arranged that would be comparable to the human experiments that discriminate between male and female names. It would be especially interesting to use the calls used by highly social animals for social communication, especially since these sometimes also serve for individual identification, at least in monkeys.” (Pg. 153)
He asserts, “it has been a serious error to assume that monkeys exchange only crude messages. The versatility of animal communication may have been overlooked because students of animal behavior have been so thoroughly convinced that it was unthinkable. Ethologists should now be alert to the possibility that semantic communication occurs in a wide variety of social animals.” (Pg. 169)
He reports, “the whole elaborate pattern of symbolic communication employed by honeybees remains a neglected area, despite its implications for additional revolutionary discoveries. Even when von Frisch and his colleagues present incontrovertible evidence that the bees employ a flexible and symbolic communication system, there is enormous resistance to the inference of any conscious thinking. If the same evidence were uncovered in one of our close relatives, such as apes or monkeys, it would be interpreted far differently.” (Pg. 185)
He notes, “One reaction to the general ideas I have discussed is that ‘all those little animals have correspondingly meager thoughts.’ This is appealing enough until we realize that ours are not the largest brains on the planet… Both in captivity and under natural conditions cetaceans demonstrate impressive behavioral versatility, and a great deal of it is even more strongly suggestive of conscious thinking than that of beavers, bees, or bowerbirds.” (Pg. 191)
He concludes, “We can also discern, dimly and just over the horizon, new vistas of experimental analysis that may lead to more direct information about subjective feelings and thoughts. The prospect of using communication as a window on the feelings and thoughts of animals seems the most promising if only because it is so useful with our own companions. In one sense animals may already be using the window, as they succeed in conveying to one another their feelings and simple thoughts. If other animals can get these messages, cognitive ethologists with the advantage of the human brain should be able to do as well.” (Pg. 209-210)
This book will be of great interest to those studying such issues of animal thinking.
Author and professor Donald Griffin wrote in the Preface to this 1984 book, “The aim of this book is to rekindle scientific interest in the conscious mental experiences of animals. This subject was a central concern of both biologists and psychologists during the half century following the Darwinian revolution… But animal minds have been largely neglected by scientists since the First World War, primarily because behavioral scientists convinced themselves that there was no way to distinguish automatic and unthinking responses from behavior involving conscious choice on the animal’s part. Now, however, because of impressive progress in ethology and psychology, animal thinking is again receiving serious scientific attention. A cognitive approach to ethology offers the hope that testable hypotheses can be developed, along with methods by which the thoughts and feelings of animals can be studied objectively… This book describes and analyzes several of the more significant new developments in ethology, psychology, and neurobiology from a cognitive point of view… I am using ‘cognitive’ in a literal sense to refer to conscious thought and knowledge.” (Pg. v-vi)
In the first chapter, he explains, “First, I will consider a much wider variety of animals, with emphasis on the rich store of information about their behavior and possible thinking under natural conditions, where they cope with problems that have been crucially important to their species over the course of evolution. Second, from this naturalistic and comparative perspective, I will come to grips with the subjective aspects of animal consciousness. Under natural conditions animals make so many sensible decisions concerning their activities, and coordinate their behavior so well with that of their companions, that it has become reasonable to infer some degree of conscious thinking, anticipating, and choosing. In their social interactions some species appear to communicate their thoughts and feelings to each other. Communicative behavior offers an especially promising opportunity for ethologists to listen in and thereby gather useful information about the nature of animal consciousness.” (Pg. 3-4)
He acknowledges, “I will take it for granted that behavior and consciousness in both animals and men result entirely from events that occur in their central nervous system. In other words, I will operate on the basis of reductive and emergent materialism… I will thus assume that there are no immaterial or supernatural processes involved in the small fraction of human or animal brain events that result in conscious subjective thoughts and feelings… One can appeal to spiritual influences as ultimately determining the nature of the physical universe but my discussion will stay out of such territory.” (Pg. 8)
He suggests, “We are less likely to find evidence of conscious thinking in routine repetition of stereotyped patterns than in behavior that is adjusted to changing needs and circumstances. It seems most promising to concentrate on situations in which animals successfully cope with challenging problems by choosing among alternative behavior patterns. Some species and some types of behavior have been studied thoroughly enough that we can make some inferences about thoughts or feelings that may precede or accompany it.” (Pg. 15)
He asserts, “The issue of determinism versus freedom of choice is only indirectly related to the question of whether nonhuman animals are conscious or not. Their conscious experiences could be the completely determined result of prior experience of genetic makeup, for example; or their choices might be free in the sense of not being predetermined, yet involve no conscious thinking.” (Pg. 20)
He notes, “Behavioral ethologists have recently recognized that many animals employ very effective tactics in choosing a particular pattern of behavior during such activities as searching for food, courtship and mating, and doubtless in many other aspects of behavior that have not yet been studied in detail.” (Pg. 24)
He argues, “We have no evidence that organisms lacking a central nervous system are capable of thinking about objects and events. To be sure, plants … and even viruses react, grow and replicate, and all these processes require some sort of information storage and processing. Some thoughtful scholars feel that it is so preposterous to postulate conscious thinking by insects that one might as well go on to include plants, viruses, or even atoms. This seems an unjustified overreaction, but we are handicapped by our lack of hard evidence concerning the essential processes giving rise to conscious thoughts in the human brain, where we know that they do occur. There may not be any hard and fast boundaries between the organized central nervous systems of flatworms and the nerve nets of coelenterates…The organelles of ciliates function in a coordinated manner, but nothing in their makeup seems capable of storing and processing sensory information as effectively as the central nervous systems of complex multicellular animals.” (Pg. 31)
He observes, “One very important attribute of animal behavior that seems intuitively to suggest conscious thinking is its adaptability to changing circumstances. If an animal repeats some action in the same way regardless of results, we assume that a rigid physiological mechanism is at work, especially if the behavior is ineffective or harmful to the animal… When members of our own species do things that are self-damaging or even suicidal, we do not conclude that their behavior is the result of a mechanical reflex. But to explain the moth flying into the flame as thoughtful but misguided seems far less plausible than the usual interpretation that such insects automatically fly toward a bright light… conversely, if an animal manages to obtain food by a complex series of actions that it has never performed before, intentional thinking seems more plausible than rigid automatism… Another criterion upon which we tend to rely in inferring conscious thinking is the element of interactive steps in a relatively long sequence of appropriate behavior patterns.” (Pg. 35)
He summarizes, “All this adds up to the simple idea that when animals communicate to one another they may be conveying something about their thoughts or feelings. If so, eavesdropping on the communicative signals they exchange may provide us with a practicable source of data about their mental experiences. When animals devote elaborate and specifically adjusted activities to communication, each animal responding to messages from its companion, it seems rather likely that both sender and receiver are consciously aware of the content of these messages.” (Pg. 39-40)
He proposes, “If we postulate, tentatively, the presence of simple thoughts, a great deal of animal behavior can be understood as a consistent adaptive pattern. Explaining all the variations in predator-distraction behavior solely on the basis of conflict between motivations requires numerous separate and ad hoc assumptions to account for false incubation, the rodentlike gait, making oneself conspicuous to the threatening predator (but not near the nest), and leading away from the nest or young. But if we recognize that the parent bird simply wants the predator to move away from its young, the behavior patterns fall into place as reasonable procedures to achieve a vitally important goal.” (Pg. 94)
He suggests, “Most of an animal’s thoughts and subjective sensations are probably confined to the immediate situation rather than ultimate results… When a female wasp digs a burrow, provisions a nest, or makes other arrangements for an egg she has not yet laid, in a future she will not live to experience, it is unreasonable to imagine that she thinks about her eventual progeny, primarily because there is no way for information about the progeny to reach her central nervous system. But this inability to know the long-term results of her behavior in no way precludes conscious thinking about what she is doing, for she has abundant opportunity to perceive what she does and to observe the immediate results.” (Pg. 116-117)
He states, “Perhaps experimental conditions could be arranged that would be comparable to the human experiments that discriminate between male and female names. It would be especially interesting to use the calls used by highly social animals for social communication, especially since these sometimes also serve for individual identification, at least in monkeys.” (Pg. 153)
He asserts, “it has been a serious error to assume that monkeys exchange only crude messages. The versatility of animal communication may have been overlooked because students of animal behavior have been so thoroughly convinced that it was unthinkable. Ethologists should now be alert to the possibility that semantic communication occurs in a wide variety of social animals.” (Pg. 169)
He reports, “the whole elaborate pattern of symbolic communication employed by honeybees remains a neglected area, despite its implications for additional revolutionary discoveries. Even when von Frisch and his colleagues present incontrovertible evidence that the bees employ a flexible and symbolic communication system, there is enormous resistance to the inference of any conscious thinking. If the same evidence were uncovered in one of our close relatives, such as apes or monkeys, it would be interpreted far differently.” (Pg. 185)
He notes, “One reaction to the general ideas I have discussed is that ‘all those little animals have correspondingly meager thoughts.’ This is appealing enough until we realize that ours are not the largest brains on the planet… Both in captivity and under natural conditions cetaceans demonstrate impressive behavioral versatility, and a great deal of it is even more strongly suggestive of conscious thinking than that of beavers, bees, or bowerbirds.” (Pg. 191)
He concludes, “We can also discern, dimly and just over the horizon, new vistas of experimental analysis that may lead to more direct information about subjective feelings and thoughts. The prospect of using communication as a window on the feelings and thoughts of animals seems the most promising if only because it is so useful with our own companions. In one sense animals may already be using the window, as they succeed in conveying to one another their feelings and simple thoughts. If other animals can get these messages, cognitive ethologists with the advantage of the human brain should be able to do as well.” (Pg. 209-210)
This book will be of great interest to those studying such issues of animal thinking.
June 16, 2013
Considering that this book is almost as old as I am, it's hardly surprising that I didn't realise quite how much resistance there was to the idea of animals having conscious thought. I think this book produces a compelling argument suggesting that animals do think, even insects. I've known people who have referred to insects as mindless robots, but how they can equate that with the honeybee dances that we learned about in primary school, is beyond me. Presumably a lack of thinking on their part. I'd like to read some more up-to-date books on the subject, if anyone has any recommendations.
February 25, 2021
One of the early pioneers of animal cognition, Griffin lays out a cohesive argument that is made stronger by modern science. Anyone interested in the beginnings of animal thinking and cognition should read Griffin's book.
November 26, 2016
Great read with numerous resources to further reading. The amount of information collected is vast and spans what would seem to be most of the animal kingdom. Invertebrates to primates are all given a 'proverbial' voice to what they may be thinking. Communication, dreaming, and much more are all covered in a depth which is not overwhelming nor understated. For anyone interested in animal cognition this is a must own book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews