Andy Norman’s essay “The Surprisingly Deep Roots of Mental Immunity Research” with a preview of a thinking gorilla got me thinking about how non-human animals (animals) avoid the use of misinformation and combat cognitive contagion.1 He begins: “The mind has an infrastructure for filtering information. This infrastructure functions like the body’s immune system: when it works well, it screens out the bad things – false, misleading and dysfunctional ideas – and lets the good things in.” , ideas that are accurate and useful.”
Andy’s teaser image made me think he would write something about animals, but he didn’t, and given my non-human tendencies, I reflected on how his new ideas developed more fully in his excellent book, Mental Immunity: Contagious Ideas, Mind Parasites and the Quest for a Better Way of Thinkingwould apply to non-humans and what an evolutionary, comparative perspective might add to future conversations about these groundbreaking ideas.
Following Andy’s suggestion that it’s possible to study mental immune systems in the same way we study other natural systems, I thought about how possible mechanisms to counteract misinformation — what he calls “mind parasites” — might spread to non-humans. have developed, although some also apply to humans.
Fixed and learned mechanisms to avoid being misinformed
In general, you may be misinformed whether you are human or non-human. Wild animals, and of course companion animals, need to be able to figure out – often instantaneously and on the run, so to speak – what or who is dangerous and what or who isn’t. A single mistake can be harmful, life-threatening or fatal and should be avoided at all costs.
There are some historical thoughts about some of these ideas in classical ethology. For example, several mechanisms have been developed to counteract misinformation, including behaviors called Fixed Action Patterns (FAPs) and Modal Action Patterns (MAPs). There are also phenomena such as: imprinting, behavioral and sensory polymorphisms, precocity, and altricity.
FAPs/MAPs: Classical ethologists and 1973 Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen (who shared the prize with Karl bon Frisch, discoverer of bee language) developed ideas about FAPs, recognizing them as “fundamental units of behavior that help organisms navigate the environment, avoid necessary resources, avoid danger and communicate with others.”
FAPs are innate, highly immutable or stereotypical, and genetically based. In different species, different warning sounds, colors, and actions called “tick stimuli” or “releasers” have evolved to elicit specific actions, such as following a trusted caregiver (imprinting), begging for food, or avoiding danger so that prevent animals from being misinformed, injured or killed. They are controlled by Innate Releasing Mechanisms (IRMs) in the brain.
The late ethologist George Barlow introduced the idea of ”Modal Action Pattern” to recognize that FAPs often show some variability and are not really “fixed”, yet can be recognized as important cues to make an organism do something specific.
Source: Marc Bekoff
A good example of a MAP is the play arc that dogs and other animals use to prompt other individuals to play and to maintain the “play mood” as it is essential to correctly and unambiguously convey their intentions – what they want to play with rather than fight with it, mate with or eat another dog(s) – and not be misunderstood. This is a way to keep the game fair and safe for the players.
ImprintingA concept that Lorenz is often credited with formalizing, involves a newborn or young animal quickly learning to pay attention to the first object or person they interact with through sight, hearing, or touch. In the natural world, the first individual is usually a harmless friend, such as their mother or another family or group member. Imprinting can help with species recognition and imprinting on sounds can take place prenatally.
Behavioral and Sensory Polymorphisms: Imprinting the right stimulus is so important that Pekin ducklings have created a fascinating back-up insurance mechanism so that they thrive when the ducklings are very young and need to stay close to their mother. This property is called a ‘behavioral polymorphism’. It turns out that some ducklings in a brood are more sensitive to sounds, while other siblings are more sensitive to visual stimuli. This means that ducklings will follow other ducklings, some of whom are more sensitive than they are to different stimuli. The researchers write, “variability in modality of susceptibility may be adaptive to the brood, as it generally tracks the most responsive individual in each situation.” Auditory imprinting occurs before visual imprinting, so ducklings who cannot hear very well will still follow their siblings.
Precocity and altriciality: Another safeguard against being misinformed is to be born in a relatively advanced state of development and be able to do what needs to be done to survive virtually alone. Some birds such as ducks and geese and mammals such as ungulates are born at a relatively advanced stage of development. Their eyes are open, they can thermoregulate to some degree, and they can walk or run. These youngsters are tagged precocial.
On the other hand, for babies born in an undeveloped helpless state, there is extensive parental care and also other adults who serve as caretakers and protectors until the young are able to care for themselves and take care of themselves. Babies born in this state will be tagged altricial.
Where to from here?
Taken together, the above mechanisms and perhaps others have evolved as adaptations to counteract misinformation. Of course, individual learning is also important for filtering the bad from the good, and many forms of learning, including dog training and other types of behavior modification, fall within the broad scope of mental immunity.
I see cognitive immunity as a ubiquitous umbrella for explaining a wide variety of ways that humans and non-humans avoid being misinformed. Applying some of the unifying underlying principles to non-humans is an exciting area for comparative research, and while there have been studies on some of the ways non-human animals avoid being misinformed and misled, they haven’t paid off. as forms of mental immunity.