Empathy: helps on the way

Empathy: helps on the way

I came across an article in Psychology Today discussing the  Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. You can read more about the declaration in the links below. Basically a group of scientists met in Cambridge and proclaimed their support for the idea that some animals have a consciousness. Don’t get carried away and confuse that with intelligence. Also the declaration doesn’t say anything about the treatment of animals. I was a bit annoyed that the Psychology Today article kept mentioning abuse, as if to stoke the ire of the animal rights activists. It’s interesting that the article mentions the Animal Welfare Act. It is true that there are some animal studies that the general population might find unsettlingly. However, there are so many regulations on what you can and cannot do when it comes to animal research, that I find the term “abuse” to be disingenuous. Contrast that with the article from io9.

I’m in total agreement that some animals have consciousness and that they should be treated humanely. Here’s an excerpt from the declaration.

The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.

I’ve talked about birds already (see the PET link below). The rest of this post will focus on something I shared back in December 2011. I shared it privately as I was new to G+. So I’m redoing it here. The image below is a screen capture of a study by a group at the The University of Chicago The video is in the link below, Helping your fellow rat.. Bartal et al showed that rats can demonstrate empathy by having a free rat rescue his or her cagemate, which is placed in a plastic restrainer. Once the rats learned to open the restrainer, they only opened it if there was a cagemate in it, i.e., if it was empty or had an object inside they left it locked. Also, when presented with a locked cagemate and a locked piece of chocolate, the free rat would unlock both and share the chocolate. That’s better than many politicians. Rats were initially startled by the door opening. In later repeated tests, the rats were no longer surprised by the door opening, i.e., it was an expected outcome.

The data suggests that females are more empathetic. All of the females became door openers while only 70% of the males opened the door. Also, the females learned to open the door sooner than the male rats.

Combined with the bird studies, there is mounting evidence that animals have more going on in their brains than some people think.

Links to references:

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

http://goo.gl/tXglo

Scientists Finally Conclude Nonhuman Animals Are Conscious Beings

by Marc Bekoff, Ph.D. in Psychology Today

http://goo.gl/wecrHZ

Prominent scientists sign declaration that animals have conscious awareness, just like us

http://goo.gl/tWh8t io9 George Dvorsky

Something to crow about: PET Bird Brains

http://goo.gl/8Xfg0k

Helping your fellow rat: Rodents show empathy-driven behavior 

http://goo.gl/oTwnn

Published in Science

Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats.

Ben-Ami Bartal I, Decety J, Mason P.

Science. 2011 Dec 9;334(6061):1427-30. doi: 10.1126/science.1210789.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=22158823

#ScienceSunday