Lizb
Member
Thank you. Lovely reply. Food for thought.And the lungs detoxify serotonin. If your lungs are damaged then serotonin might not be detoxified properly.
You'd have to talk to him to see exactly what he meant. Sometimes these little anecdotes he brings up can make him sound a bit eccentric because he fails to elaborate (give his opinion) on them. However, he has talked about stuff like this before and it is actually a fascinating subject. I think it was the Politics & Science podcast where he talked about ants. I don't exactly remember what he said but what I took away was he thought ants are a lot smarter than we think. He said something along the lines of "ants aren't stupid, they are just studied in stupid ways". I'm heavily paraphrasing that, but the idea is there. I really love that thought and I have no doubt it's true with a lot of things. Our knowledge of things is based on how we study them and the study parameters are created by humans, from a human perspective.
So, are animals smarter than we have historically thought? Take for instance goats... (I think someone posted something similar about sheep on the forum recently.)
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-goats-happy-people.html
Academic authoritarians, language, metaphor, animals, and science
"A traveling bird or dog can see a pattern once, and later, going in the opposite direction, can recognize and find specific places and objects. An ant or bee can see a pattern once, and communicate it to others.
If dogs and birds lived in colonies or cities, as bees and ants do, and carried food home from remote locations, they might have a need to communicate their knowledge. The fact that birds and dogs use their vocal organs and brains to communicate in ways that people have seldom cared to study doesn't imply that their brains differ radically from human brains in lacking a “language organ.”
People whose ideology says that “animals use instinct rather than intelligence,” and that they lack “the language instinct,” refuse to perceive animals that are demonstrating their ability to generalize or to understand language"