Diverse Intelligences Surprises with Dr. Paco Calvo, Dr. Marcelo Magnasco & Dr. Diana Reiss
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Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, writer Tavia Gilbert, and along with journalist Richard Sergei, every first and third Tuesday of the month, we share conversations about the art and science of human flourishing. In our last episode, we shared more about one of our favorite subjects, diverse intelligences.

Today we're back with another exploration of the magnificence and mystery of the universe, talking with three researchers about their respective studies of plants and octopuses. I love that pairing because I can't imagine two subjects of study than flora and cephalopods that could be further removed from human phylogeny, or development, and human behavior.

All the researchers we meet today share not only a passion, but a respect for the species in their decidedly non-human, wildly intelligent subjects of research.

First, we meet Dr. Paco Calvo, a renowned cognitive scientist and professor of philosophy of science at the University of Murcia in Spain. Dr. Calvo has been called a philosopher of biology, and early in his career, he recognized that assuming humans were at the top of a vertical intelligence hierarchy was a really limiting belief.

we never quite get rid of ourselves as providing the gold standard. So even when we are not thinking of human level intelligence, like primates or mammals, vertebrates or fish, we can't help but to think that they are intelligent insofar as they resemble us. I just thought that was the wrong starting point. Like we needed to go back to basics.

And maybe the way was to get rid of this gold standard that we think that we provide. Maybe the idea was to say, hey, let's go and check the most dissimilar ones. We have neurons. Let's think of guys without neurons. We have a central nervous system. Okay, we don't want that. We locomote. Okay, let's see who doesn't locomote. So let's see who...

does things in a way apparently completely different from the way we do things. I thought that by studying plants, we might be able to learn a little bit more about ourselves. So plants was just like the perfect point to get started. Dr. Calvo thought our studies of animal intelligence could inform our studies of plant intelligence. If there is a good reason to track neural correlates of consciousness in the case of animals,

The same applies in the case of plants. Instead of rejecting the possibility that plants are intelligent in the way animals are, if only we remember that instead of having neural tissue, they have their own tissue. Hey, maybe you don't need neural tissue.

to speak of information flow and apply cognitive science. The vascular system of the plant is an information processing network. It's information flow. Throughout his career studying plant behavior, decision-making, and problem-solving, Dr. Calvo has come to honor plants. He even refers to them with an inspired term, plantasapiens.

I mean to say plantasapiens in the very same way we say homosapiens. We need to deflate what homosapiens means, because we have this distorted understanding of what human intelligence consists of, deflating our navel-gazing attitude towards our own type of intelligence. That's what takes you to diversity, to diverse intelligences.

They understand that our brand, our type of intelligence is but one more type of intelligence, not a privileged one, simply another one, a different one. Maybe by looking at what looks way different, we might find what unites us all. And then we might find that master key that unlocks the secrets of intelligence in any branch in the Tree of Life at all.

Looking for that master key is what led Dr. Calvo to spearhead research projects that explore the question: Can we interpret the inner life of plants not just by looking at their overt behavior through time-lapse photography, but also through the interpretation of their electrophysiological states?

What task performance has Dr. Calvo observed?

He says that there are many examples of not only communication, but manipulation in plants. Plants modify their behaviors depending on who or what is present, both above and below ground.

Plants can emit volatiles to attract natural predators of a species that is munching on them, or they might starve themselves to protect them from predators. They can identify and distinguish whether vibrations correspond to a predatory threat or an environmental stimulus such as the wind.

Or communicate stress to other plants nearby to signal to them that they should save energy because things are about to go wrong.

These are all highly intelligent behaviors. And Dr. Calvo thinks most researchers and laypeople alike demonstrate their own failure of intelligence in not recognizing how very smart plants are. What they do is astonishing. We need to train our eye and we keep missing many, many things. It has to do with our minimal intelligence, human intelligence, insofar as we don't quite get how smart plants are. Regardless of the kingdom,

plants, fungi, animals, whatever. If an organism exhibits a behavior, an overt response that is predicting into the future, behaving proactively,

That's a good reason to believe that there is somebody at the wheel. So it's the actual continuous interplay in between brain, body and environment. And that applies to plants as well. We don't see plant intelligence. We don't see plant sentience. But we don't see animal intelligence or animal sentience for that matter.

Even though exploring the sentience of non-human life forms didn't gain prominence until the 20th century, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution laid the groundwork for the study of cognition by modern-day scientists like Dr. Calvo. Charles Darwin's genius was his ability to see intelligence through species adaptation. We don't have the trained eye that Darwin himself had. I mean, Darwin

150 years ago was able to see plant behavior to the naked eye and see patterns of plant behavior that nowadays we still miss with the best technology. And it means that our frame of mind is not quite ready yet to appreciate it. So maybe plants are behaving, are learning, are memorizing, are exhibiting all these cognitive skills and abilities, and we keep missing it because we are not in the right frame of mind to appreciate it.

Dr. Calvo leads the Minimal Intelligence Lab, or MINT Lab, at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he investigates the complex interactions and adaptive responses of plants. Answering the question about whether or not plants are intelligent is, for him, a bit of a no-brainer.

At the Minimal Intelligence Lab, we time-lapse plants. We want to make their behavior conspicuous to the naked eye through time-lapse observations. One type of behavior, we can appreciate its flexibility, its anticipatory character, or its goal-directed character.

through growth and in other cases through locomotion, there is something that unites all these diversities in the ways their behavior is being exhibited. Any organism whatsoever, from unicellular to us, will need to integrate many sources of information, both from the external world and from the internal world. So the fact that they've got to integrate all these informational channels in order to deliver one single global adaptive response

that is adaptive, proactive, flexible, sophisticated, complex, and anticipatory. When you find those patterns, then we are talking intelligence. If plants are intelligent, does that necessarily mean that plants are able to learn? Dr. Calvo isn't sure yet, but it may not be that the plants he studied haven't given him ample evidence.

If you ask me, do you have robust scientific evidence of plant learning beyond habituation, which is the most primitive form of learning, the answer is not yet. We still don't have the empirical evidence robust enough to say we do know that plants can learn by association. If they are learning on a regular basis, it's a fair question to ask, well, why haven't we seen it yet?

Because we are missing something I think that we haven't seen it yet because we haven't trained our eye. Denying not only that plants are intelligent, but that plants are sentient shows how little some people really see non-human life forms, says Dr. Calvo. We have to learn new ways of recognizing intelligences that are not like ours.

I see them, I see they are sentient, they are doing all the stuff they do right in front of me, and I keep missing it because I don't quite learn their language. We need to learn how to resonate with them, scientifically speaking. But it's not just a question of science. I insist, a lot has to do with education. If we don't see it in the right frame of mind, we will keep missing the plot. And to me, that's the only way to create the type of awareness

through education, that is very much needed. Dr. Calvo recognizes that accepting the sentience of plants will challenge humans' morality. So if plants are sentient, oh, now what? Many people ask.

We are confronting an ethical dilemma. How do we handle them? How do we treat them? Do they have rights? Do they have dignity? So the same sort of issues we have when we think of animals. Once we grant their sentence, right? Dr. Calvo doesn't have all the answers, but he is willing to follow new lines of inquiry. I think we need to be more plural and follow many different threads.

Not because they will eventually get us to the right type of definition, but because we might learn different things, different aspects of intelligence by picking on different definitions that we might resonate to different aspects, different definitions.

faces, different angles that have to do with intelligence. That takes us to diversity. Dr. Calvo finds deep purpose in his work. He wants research like his to move people to consider the symbiotic relationship between plants and humans. We need to think that it's co-evolution, which means we are influencing and sculpting each other. So if through agriculture we are kind of sculpting the plant's phenotype,

By the same token, plants are scalping our phenotype and genotype as well, of course. Unless we understand it as truly horizontal, a pattern of coevolution,

which is hard for us to believe because we keep thinking that we are somehow special and we are at the top or something like this, at the top of the ladder. We need to embrace or think of those ancient collaborations in a more horizontal spectrum in which we are all on the same page and contributing to each other genuinely, symbiotically and reciprocally. We cannot think of plants as objects. We have to think of them as agents.

Why is it so important to acknowledge plants as agents? Dr. Calvo says that mindset might help us work our way out of the environmental crisis we've created. We simply think of them, oh yeah, we need them because, you know, to pump some oxygen, which comes very handy for our lungs. But to me, we would need to think of plants for their own sake.

because they have their own agency. So we need, in a sense, paradoxically enough, I know this is going to sound awkward, but if we are going to do something about all this mess, the way out has to do with forgetting about ourselves and our needs.

And think of plants as subjects, as agents with their own needs and think of them for themselves and in themselves. What do they need? What sort of meaning making they are engaging in as they interact with their surroundings? And if we care for them for their own sake,

the better we will do. Otherwise, this vertical rather than horizontal relationship only takes us back to this idea of treating them as objects and not subjects. But it's got to be a horizontal relation of collaboration in which we are all on the same page. It's imperative, says Dr. Calvo, that we get on the same page. Insofar as we only think of them as objects that we need as resources to exploit, we are doomed.

Like Dr. Calvo, our next two guests are deeply committed to the exploration of non-human intelligence, and they make a connection between what we can learn about our own minds through the study of diverse minds.

Neuroscientist Marcelo Mignasco is a professor of biophysics and head of laboratory at Rockefeller University, New York. He works closely with Dr. Diana Reese, professor of psychology at Hunter College. She's the director of the Animal Behavior and Conservation graduate programs. Together, they research the behavior of another decidedly non-human intelligence, the octopus.

What was the organizing question for their research? Dr. Rees says, Let's say animals are doing much more than we could ever imagine. The question used to be, do other animals think? And if you go back historically, it's been an ongoing debate. Can an other creature think and have intelligence without language? Well,

Communication is ubiquitous throughout the animal world. Animals have to solve problems. We have to solve problems. Animals have to make decisions. I think the question has gone from do other animals think to how do they think?

And I think that's where we are now. And now with AI, we have new tools for us to start looking at the nature of thought and communication. And there are so many studies that are coming from so many labs internationally that have shown, yes, other species think. Many people now are trying to decode the way they communicate.

Dr. Maniasco was also eager to add to the scientific record that intelligence is not an exclusively human characteristic. One of the issues with our studies of intelligence in many animals that are close to us is the issue of anthropomorphism.

I think that separating anthropocentrism from intelligence is extremely important because we want to know what is intelligence in its absolute form that's not just embodied in us. To study animal cognition, Dr. Magnasco and Dr. Rees needed to choose the right species.

We're trying to get into the diverse part of the diverse intelligences. We are trying to explore the cognitive world of the octopus as one example of diverse intelligences.

And we're trying to explore several different facets of the octopus's intelligence. And the octopus is literally as close as you can be to the antibodies of human beings in both phylogeny and behavior, right? And it's also very diverse from us in every aspect of its lifestyles.

I think that it's important to try to devoid ourselves of the preconceptions of our own embodiment and try to study intelligence as it comes. So I don't think you can find anything further from us than the cephalopods in general. And within the cephalopods, the octopus is a perfectly appropriate choice.

Not only are octopuses appropriate, they are just absolutely cool. They have 286 suckers or something like that, and each one of them has a separate individual sense of taste. So they can actually make these maps of taste, which to us are unthinkable. Dr. Magnasso says we already have evidence that there is a correlation between social structure and intellect.

So the fact that octopuses are known not to be social creatures gives the researchers a particularly meaningful reason to explore their cognition. The octopuses are asocial. They don't live in communities. They don't participate in communities.

and they have a remarkably short lifespan for being an intelligent animal, yet they are capable of solving extremely complicated puzzles, they learn a lot of things by themselves in the wild, they are curious, they act towards us in a way that I would call sociable,

This fascinates Dr. Rees. We're looking at these animals that we're told are not social, but when you're actually interacting with them and you're in close proximity, you see, first of all, personality differences in their behavior. And we never use the word personality. We talk about behavioral variations.

Now scientists are more comfortable using personality with frameworks, with ways of talking about these behavioral variations in a more scientific way. I am intrigued at how social they are, actually, with us. Dr. Magnasco agrees. It's pretty strange that an animal could be asocial and at the same time sociable.

They are sociable. They come towards you, okay, and they try to interact with you, even though they are not by themselves social animals. And our general mission is try to understand some facets of their intelligence.

There is actually evidence that asocial octopuses still have complex social interactions. These are animals that don't fit the social brain, you know, studying an animal from the social brain hypothesis.

These are short-lived animals that have shown complexity in their behavior before. I mean, the classic story I remember hearing happened in an aquarium where people kept on coming in in the morning and the tank next to the octopus's tank was devoid of fish.

in the morning and they didn't know what was happening to the fish. And when someone stayed and watched, they found that the octopus in the adjacent tank at night when no one was there was sliding off the cover, going in, moving the cover off the fish tank, eating all the fish and putting both covers back after he got back into, he or she got back into the tank. And that really takes some sense of awareness, right?

of other, what might others think? You know, it's quite interesting. And why would they slide it back? Why would they slide those lids back? That question is interesting. It's giving us already an opportunity to look at their behavior and to see they respond as individuals. They're quite different from each other behaviorally. And it's been pretty fascinating. So in their study of octopuses, says Dr. Rees...

What we're trying to do now is learn as much about these animals as possible and address their sensory systems rather than trying to get us to do what we want them to do. We've learned a great deal about the fact that they're highly tactile, they feel with their arms, they explore their world. So we want to make that world something that's similar enough to what they might normally do for them to show us their best stuff, so to speak.

How can we see what they're capable of in terms of interacting and integrating information, in terms of how they may construct or manipulate or change things in their environment? Dr. Maniasco adds... Because one of the things you see is that octopuses, the moment you put them in a tank,

they start rearranging all the furniture. Octopus immediately starts putting this here, this there, trying to rearrange the environment. And this manipulation of the environment is a fundamental component of the definition of intelligence.

One of the big questions I had was whether they could build things in addition to disassembling them, and if they could build something, whether they could actually build structures according to a mental map.

So one of the arms of the study is to give them various forms of toys to try to build things and to see whether they just put stuff on a heap or whether they actually purposefully try to assemble things and angle things.

Again, it follows by definition the idea of choice and control because then you are providing the octopus with elements and you're just leaving the room and leaving a camera running. Then we want to understand also how they explore in the environment, okay, and how they integrate information from multiple arms because they have these elements

very different sensory world to us in this very different organization. We can give them the ability to control aspects of their environment. Will they avail themselves of that? Will they be interested in doing that or not? And as we've learned, most octopuses are spending their lives avoiding becoming prey or finding prey. They have nothing to protect them.

One of the things that we provide for them is shelter. So they have shelter and they get themselves in there. It's important for them. They put things there to block the entrance. So one of the questions is if we remove their shelter and give them other objects, what

How might they use that in creating a new shelter? It's quite a simple question, but it's based on what we know about their behavior, letting them guide us, turning it over to them to show us what they do, given X, Y, and Z. As scientists, we try to learn as much as we can about them, observing them, seeing what seems to be important to them, and using that back in the kinds of experimental designs that we're doing.

What does Dr. Rees learn by observing octopuses make choices about their shelter? It's the power of appropriate selection.

be it in a human, a non-human animal or a machine. Given a set of circumstances, how does an individual respond? I really like that because it's free from biases about being human. For me as a scientist, giving these animals opportunities to show us how they interact with the world, what patterns emerge,

Do they show forms of self-organized learning without us directly training them? I think it's a really wonderful opportunity for us to see reflections of intelligence in others. Recognizing diverse intelligences offers us an opportunity to consider our value system, says Dr. Mignasco.

How great is our ability to value species other than our own? We are at a very strange point in time in which we as scientists are sandwiched between a culture of thinking that animals simply don't matter, that they are a property, that they are nothing, that they are not smart, and other people who, for instance, fetishize the intelligence of certain animals.

Respecting diverse intelligences, says Dr. Rees. I think it's humbling. We were always taught that we're at the top of that tree, that evolutionary tree. We're not.

Every species is at the top of their evolution right now and when their own evolution We share those upper branches with all these other species, you know, and I as a scientist I love exploring intelligence in other animals and one of the things that's always a challenge for me is thinking we tend to recognize and see what we do in other animals and

But what if they're doing something so different that we would be blind and deaf to those things? Because other animals can come up with ways of surviving and thriving in the world that's completely different than us. So it's humbling to see the capabilities of other animals. But it's also just quite wonderful.

There's also a deeper mission and purpose to Dr. Magnasco and Dr. Rees' work, reflecting Dr. Calvo's hopes for his research to inspire education and a change in how humans will interact with diverse species in the future.

Dr. Rees says: We face challenges with climate change and environmental changes. And I think that the more we learn about these animals, and as scientists share information publicly in programs like this, in books, in articles that we write, and just basic public science communication, hopefully we'll engage other people in being interested in these animals

appreciating them in their own right and treating them hopefully with more respect and being concerned about their environment which is our environment we share this planet and again I think that's the power of science of getting our scientific

findings out to the public, to politicians, and really engaging in what I call is ultimately translational science, getting people to change their views and perceptions and actions towards other animals on the planet and our environment.

We're not done with diverse intelligences yet, so come back in two weeks to learn more. If you enjoy the stories we share with you on the podcast, please follow us, give us a five-star rating, and share us with a friend. And be sure to sign up for the TWCF newsletter at templetonworldcharity.org. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and at storiesofimpact.org.

This has been the Stories of Impact podcast with interviews by Richard Sergei. Written and produced by Tavia Gilbert for TalkBox Productions. Senior producer Katie Flood. Assistant producer Oscar Falk. Production support by Mandy Morish. Music by Alexander Falibiak. Mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Executive producer Michelle Cobb. The Stories of Impact podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation.