Do animals ever want to ‘get out of their heads?’
Have you ever seen your dog or cat have a “mad half hour”, also known as “the zoomies”? The animal charges around the place at full tilt, randomly rushing here there and everywhere, bumping into things, knocking objects down and generally going crazy? This is a common occasional behaviour, and there’s debate about why it happens. A colleague recently suggested a possible reason and I think they may be onto something: could these animals be “getting out of their heads”?
Everybody knows about humans having a need to “get out of their heads”. While drinking alcohol in moderation may have its place as a way of helping people relax, it’s all too easy for people to take too much., and they may then say that they “were out of their heads”.
When you look into the science of this, it seems that there are good reasons why humans sometimes feel a need to “get out of their heads”. When the human brain is resting, people’s thoughts default to unhelpful self reflection, worrying about the negative aspects of their lives. A Harvard study used smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts and feelings at random times of the day, and they found two significant facts. First, people think about what is not happening almost as often as they think about what is happening around them. And second, this type of thinking makes people feel unhappy. So people feel a need to stop these naturally introspective thoughts, and alcohol seems to provide a short cut to doing this. Unfortunately, there are many negative aspects to excessive alcohol consumption. There are far better ways to “get out of your head”, including focussing completely on something else (e.g. going to a movie), meditation, or doing what those animals seem to be doing: undertaking strenuous physical exercise.
Could animals suffer from the same type of melancholic introspection as humans? Could this be why they rush around madly sometimes, in an effort to distract their thoughts?
The challenge in solving this question is that animals are unable to communicate with us. We can’t tell what they are thinking: it all goes on silently, inside their heads. However, science does offer us some clues.
The traditional starting point of this discussion is to note that animal brains are generally smaller, relative to body size, compared to humans’. In particular, the human cerebrum is larger: the part of the brain that controls reasoning, emotions and learning. Simply on the basis of this one feature – the size of the brain – it has been said in the past that only great apes, elephants, and cetaceans (dolphins and whales) have sufficient mental capacity to be able to experience the same complex type of consciousness as humans.
Within the past decade, someone even went so far as to state that only only humans can speak, laugh, cry, think, suffer from mental disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, fall in love, and believe in God. This opinion was strongly challenged by behavioural scientists at the time, and now it would be more strongly contested than ever. There is good evidence to suggest that animals can, indeed, have these types of experiences ( Yes, even “believing in God”: Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees dancing around waterfalls in a way that she felt could be some type of primitive religious worship).
The truth is that we still know very little about the details of how the brain works, and it is not necessarily true that a bigger brain equates to a dramatically different type of consciousness. Charles Darwin described the development of the range of animal species as a process of “evolutionary continuity”. In other words, humans are not as different from animals as black is different from white: rather, we are a different shade of grey. Our physical structure – and presumably our mental and emotional consciousness – started out from the same place, and has changed gradually. We share many qualities with animals, but we have simply developed further. So if you compare the brains of humans and animals, many of the features are closely similar. And if dynamic imaging is used to visualise electrical activity in the brain, the same areas of the brain light up when animals feel fear, pain or confusion as in humans, just as similar areas light up when animals feel pleasure, exhilaration or contentment.
The area of brain imaging is continuing to develop: as well as electrical activity, scientists are now able to observe interactions between proteins, and the uptake and release of various chemicals directly, in the brains of living animals. This is taking us ever closer to actually being able to watch thoughts and emotions forming (although obviously, we are still a long away off from being able to do that.)
So we now know that consciousness is not uniquely human. And therefore, animals probably do, indeed, have sad, introspective thoughts.
Those occasional mad episodes of rushing crazily around may well be a way for animals to escape from their internal sadness. So when you see them doing this, laugh with them, and enjoy the moment. Life, for us all, animals and humans alike, deserves to be celebrated sometimes. Why not express exhilarated, unbounded, crazy joy by rushing around like a mad thing?