Temple Grandin's dilemma

Temple Grandin (born 1947) came to my attention only recently. I discovered the movie first, with Claire Danes in the title role. At the time, I thought that the name sounded familiar, and I finally remembered that a lecturer I'd heard at UNC (Dr. John Ratey, on exercise and the brain) had dedicated one of his books to her (A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain, 2002).
    And now I'm reading one of her books, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, 2005. Much more even than the books of Karen Pryor (e.g., Reaching the Animal Mind, 2009), Grandin's book thrills me on a subject that reaches to the very bottom of me.

It is a terrible irony for me, then, that Temple Grandin is a consultant to the livestock industry and well-known in those circles for her innovations in the design of slaughter systems. While I can approve taking steps to avoid alarming animals as they're herded to be killed, the whole enterprise is repugnant to me.
    I googled on "temple grandin moral dilemma" and found (on the Vegan Soapbox website) that

Temple Grandin’s reply to those who have identified the inherent contradiction in the statement “I design slaughter houses and I love animals,” is: “some people think death is the most terrible thing that can happen to an animal.” It follows according to Ms. Grandin that “the most important thing for an animal is the quality of its life.”

    Whoever's on the soapbox for the website immediately retorts:

Ms. Grandin’s argument is derived from an underlying ontological worldview that assumes a dualism between “human” and “animal.” This is a factual inaccuracy. Biological “animality” exists on a continuum: a human animal is a member of a species of bipedal primates in the family Hominidae—“higher primates.” It is from this invalid assumption that Ms. Grandin’s argument tries to follow. Her claim, then, is baseless and open to the challenge of blatant selective reasoning.

I'm not going to take a final position on Grandin's ethics, for I assume I don't know the whole story (yet). But I don't see how her reply quoted in the article could rectify her presumed cognitive dissonance. Just look at how she talks of "animals and humans" to see how closely related she acknowledges that they are:

It turns out that all animals and humans have what researchers call a built-in confirmation bias. Animals and humans are wired to believe that when two things happen closely together in time it's not an accident; instead the first event caused the second thing to happen.
    For example, if you put a pigeon in a case with a key that lights up right before a piece of food appears, pretty soon the pigeon will start pecking the lighted key to get food....
    The pigeon is acting like a person who thinks his team will win the baseball game if he's got his lucky rabbit's foot with him....
    Confirmation bias is built in to animal and human brains, and it helps us learn. We learn because our default assumption is that if Event 1 is followed by Event 2, then Event 1 caused Event 2. Our default assumption isn't that Events 1 and 2 happened at the same time by coincidence. Coincidence is actually a fairly advanced concept both for animals and for people. That's why in statistics courses you have to formally teach students that a correlation isn't automatically a cause. [David Hume argued for coincidence over causality in the eighteenth century.] Our brains are wired to see correlations as causes, period. Since in real life a lot of times Event 1 does cause Event 2, confirmation bias helps us make the connection.
    The downside of having a built-in confirmation bias is that you also make a lot of unfounded causal connections. That's what superstition is....
    ...The same part of the brain that lets us learn what we need to know and find the things we need to stay alive is also the part of the brain that produces delusional thinking and conspiracy theories. [pp. 98-100]

As a matter of fact, humans are animals. We have a common ancestor with every other animal [and life form¹] on the planet.
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1. Thanks to Carolyn for reminding me that I myself had realized this later, but without doing anything about it at the time.

I'm lucky, but I could be toast....

This morning, one of those rare occasions when I had toast for breakfast, I fumbled a piece and it landed butter-side-down on the floor. Then, a few minutes later, a section of my kiwi fruit jumped off the cutting board. One of those days?, I vaguely wondered.
    Of course, the day is still young and it might yet be "one of those days" (I could even die today or suffer a horrible accident), but I still feel lucky that things will generally go my way. As Bill said in his comment on yesterday's post, my luck [usually] far exceeds my embarrassment.

Karen Pryor's 2009 book, Reaching the Animal Mind, has to be one of the most eye-opening, inspirational books I've ever read. The opening of Chapter 12, "Intention":

Gerry Martone was working for the U.S. Peace Corps when he ran into a particularly dangerous situation. Gerry was assigned to a country in Africa where the political situation was becoming highly unsettled. During a sudden and bloody uprising he and some other aid workers, inadvisedly walking through the capital city, are captured by a band of militants and hauled away in a truck.
    This is not a good thing. No one is really in charge of these rebel soldiers, and there are no rules. Aid workers and other innocent bystanders in similar situations in other countries have been held for ransom, killed out of hand, or beaten and tortured and then killed for no known reason. The natural reaction of the hostages is anger and panic. Gerry's coworkers start crying, arguing that they are harmless noncombatants, and pleading for release. That natural response emphasizes their victim status. It also emphasizes the captor status of the bunch of guys in the front of the truck, who are already exhilarated, drunk, stoned, and a bit out of control.
    Gerry takes a different tack. He thanks his captors whenever they do something that is, even in the smallest way, a comfort to the hostages. He thanks them for driving smoothly through a sharp turn. He thanks them when they pass the water jug to the back. He says a thank-you for their letting the captives sit down rather than keeping them standing. As they drive through ferocious scenes of looting, fires, and wreckage, he praises and thanks the militants for having picked them up in the first place, thus protecting both the aid workers and themselves from these dangerous conditions.
    What happens? Instead of taking their captives away for malicious purposes, the renegade soldiers deliver them to the safe house of another aid worker on the outskirts of town. Then the soldiers post a guard around the house all night to keep the house safe from other armed militants. A change in the captives' own behavior led to a corresponding change in the other group's behavior, from that of predators to that of protectors.
    Crying and pleading are emotional expressions of submissiveness. Bullying and aggression are emotional expressions of dominance. We share these feelings and these kinds of social displays not just with the primates but with lots of mammals and some birds. No wonder it feels natural; it is. No wonder stopping and thinking and then deliberately doing something else feels contrived, artificial, even morally wrong.
    But using reinforcement isn't really about changing the behavior of others; it's about changing what you do yourself. And while on the surface that may seem artificial, changing your own behavior by intention is a fundamental act of survival in the natural world. [pp. 213-214]

Seeking

Karen Pryor's wonderful book previously cited, Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us about the Animal Mind, asks in Chapter 9, "Why is the click so much fun?" (She's referring to the fun manifested by animals during clicker training.)
    Her search for answers led her to several neuroscientists, finally including Jaak Panksepp, who "is interested in the positive emotions, including having fun. He is somewhat notorious for his paper on laughing rats." Watch Panksepp tickle a rat in the "Laughing Rats" video in Chapter 10 at www.reachingtheanimalmind.com.
    Pryor writes:

One of Panksepp's primary interests is the hypothalamus, another part of the primitive brain [besides the amygdala, involved in fear responses] that is associated with basic emotions....
    Given stimulation in the same area of the hypothalamus, human medical subjects report a sense of excitement, a sort of restless eagerness, quite enjoyable really, although agitating. It seems as if something really marvelous is about to happen, if you can just figure out what it is. Panksepp identifies this phenomenon as being part of a system he calls the SEEKING circuit (this formal scientific term is spelled with capital letters)....
    There's a good evolutionary reason for searching for necessary resources, and the occasional success reinforces the process; however, there's more to it than that end goal. The urge to seek and explore needs to function not just when you are in need of food or warmth or shelter, but when you're feeling quite relaxed and happy already. That's when you have the energy and the desire to go exploring, so exploring needs to be reinforcing in itself, or we wouldn't get up and do it for "no good reason." [pp. 184-86]

Having borrowed a copy of Panksepp's 1998 textbook, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, from a UNC library, I began reading it yesterday as I waited to be seen by my neuro-ophthalmologist. Chapter 8 is about "SEEKING systems and anticipatory states of the nervous system." It begins with a striking quotation (which I only vaguely remembered) from Oliver Sacks's 1973 book, Awakenings:

"I feel saved," [Leonard L.] would say, "resurrected, reborn. I feel a sense of health amounting to Grace....I feel like a man in love. I have broken through the barriers which cut me off from love." The predominant feelings at this time were feelings of freedom, openness, and exchange with the world; of a lyrical appreciation of a real world, undistorted by fantasy, and suddenly revealed; of delight and satiety with self and the world.

    When I lay in bed this morning, creaky and reluctant to get up, I reminded myself of what I'd read in Panksepp. After only half a minute of only half-attentive "meditation" on the subject of the reading (was I stroking my own hypothalamus?), I induced in myself sufficient eagerness to arise and meet the world.

Touches mean so much

I had recently read an article about human touching (including humans engaged in competitive basketball), "Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much," published February 22 in The New York Times on the web, in which its author Benedict Carey wrote:

The evidence that [touches] can lead to clear, almost immediate changes in how people think and behave is accumulating fast. Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, studies have found. A sympathetic touch from a doctor leaves people with the impression that the visit lasted twice as long, compared with estimates from people who were untouched. Research by Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute in Miami has found that a massage from a loved one can not only ease pain but also soothe depression and strengthen a relationship.
    ...In a paper due out this year in the journal Emotion, Mr. Kraus and his co-authors, Cassy Huang and Dr. Keltner, report that with a few exceptions, good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams....[I sent a link to Roy Williams, the coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels, whose league standings might benefit by a little more touching among his players. Or not.]

So naturally the following paragraph jumped out at me this morning from Karen Pryor's 2009 book, Reaching the Animal Mind. She had been conducting dolphin research underwater inside a huge tuna-fishing net, toward finding ways to avoid harming dolphins:

I think of one more curious event I witnessed in the net: a message about connection. I am taking data on a senior-male group of four animals, cruising slowly beneath me, when I realize, by her slimmer build, that the central animal in the group is an equally senior and black-masked female. She is "holding hands," overlapping pectoral fins, with the male on her left, and with the male on her right. A third male swims slightly below and behind her; as I watch, she reaches down with her tail and pats that male gently on the forehead. The hussy! Or maybe, since they look to be age-mates, they all grew up together and were cousins. One thing I am quite sure of, though: she is truly fond of them all. [p. 115]

    Most of us Mother Nature's living organisms—be we basketball players, dolphins, pets, or pet owners—touch, and mean so much by touching. I love it when Siegfried comes over and briefly touches my hand with his nose. I think I know what he means by it.