neuroscience, art, and - surprisingly - elephant-ology
Once, a few years back, C and I went to the Berkeley Art Museum to see an exhibit of Chinese landscape prints, but we got distracted by a small room of elephant paintings. Paintings by elephants - endangered Thai elephants - not of elephants. Some of the paintings looked like nothing more than random tempera streaks on paper, but after standing in the room for awhile, I began to pick out paintings by certain elephants. Certain colors, specific groupings of lines. Elephants, it seems, can develop artistic style.
Since then, I've have this thing about elephants. Maybe it's the fact that I study cognition and their memories rival humans'. Maybe it's the fact that they have been shown to actually have behaviors that look a hell of a lot like culture. I'm just a little scared of them because they are incredibly dangerous in so many situations, but, at the same time, also touched by them, and their dwindling numbers.
A friend linked me to this recent story about elephant stories - it's brutal, but makes the old adage mean something.
And that reminded me of this old (2006), long, heartbreaking and hopeful story about Human-Elephant Conflict, and why some psychologists have come to believe that elephants can suffer from psychological disorders like clinical depression and PTSD - and, like us, be successfully treated for them. It's from the NYT Magazine, and I've been meaning to add it here for awhile:
It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.
Three years ago, Gay Bradshaw, then working on her graduate degree in psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute outside Santa Barbara, Calif., began wondering much the same thing: was the extraordinary behavior of elephants in Africa and Asia signaling a breaking point? With the assistance of several established African-elephant researchers, including Daphne Sheldrick and Cynthia Moss, and with the help of Allan Schore, an expert on human trauma disorders at the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at U.C.L.A., Bradshaw sought to combine traditional research into elephant behavior with insights about trauma drawn from human neuroscience...
What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level, weren’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression... It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, ‘‘locales lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family structures.’’
Since then, I've have this thing about elephants. Maybe it's the fact that I study cognition and their memories rival humans'. Maybe it's the fact that they have been shown to actually have behaviors that look a hell of a lot like culture. I'm just a little scared of them because they are incredibly dangerous in so many situations, but, at the same time, also touched by them, and their dwindling numbers.
A friend linked me to this recent story about elephant stories - it's brutal, but makes the old adage mean something.
And that reminded me of this old (2006), long, heartbreaking and hopeful story about Human-Elephant Conflict, and why some psychologists have come to believe that elephants can suffer from psychological disorders like clinical depression and PTSD - and, like us, be successfully treated for them. It's from the NYT Magazine, and I've been meaning to add it here for awhile:
It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.
Three years ago, Gay Bradshaw, then working on her graduate degree in psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute outside Santa Barbara, Calif., began wondering much the same thing: was the extraordinary behavior of elephants in Africa and Asia signaling a breaking point? With the assistance of several established African-elephant researchers, including Daphne Sheldrick and Cynthia Moss, and with the help of Allan Schore, an expert on human trauma disorders at the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at U.C.L.A., Bradshaw sought to combine traditional research into elephant behavior with insights about trauma drawn from human neuroscience...
What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level, weren’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression... It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, ‘‘locales lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family structures.’’