What does it mean to be intelligent and why is ignorance bliss?

The animal friends edition.

Lately, I’ve been feeling the call of the wild. And though that sentence seems like one of the truest things I’ve ever written, the analytical part of my brain wants to break it apart into a million pieces to figure out whether it’s the best way to express what I’m feeling. “What do you mean lately, girlfriend?” my inner editor says, noting that I spent 2020 pacing around my little craftsman home in the city of Seattle like a cat in a cage. And as Kintsugi, my sopping wet golden retriever comes and places his head on my lap, I am reminded of all of the moves I’ve made since that time to be surrounded by nature. So perhaps, a better sentence would be, “Lately, I’ve been hearing the call of the wild more loudly than usual.”

But this call feels different than the one I experienced during the pandemic. At that time, I was singularly focused on the need to see the stars at night. The pull I’m feeling now is not to surround myself with nature. It’s my inner wild I’m driven to connect with. For the first time in my life, the animal friend I’m most interested in getting to know is myself. So perhaps, a better sentence would be, “Lately, I’ve been feeling the call of the wild within me.”

Now allow me to place this call into context for those who don’t know me well personally. I think it would be fairly uncontroversial amongst my friends and family to claim that I am not the most tame of the human animals I know to begin with. And though I’m approaching my 50s, which seems like a great (if somewhat stereotypical) time to stop giving a fuck and start “Tawandaing[1]” my way through life, this wildness is not new for me.

Ask my mom about my first dance class and you’ll get some idea of my history. I was four years old, standing at the barre, and wearing my uniform—a leotard and tights, with my hair pinned into a bun—like the other little girls. The teacher started the music and demonstrated some of the fundamental positions: toes out, heels in, arms at sides with fingers gently pointed up, plié.

Then she handed me a scarf and it was game over.[2] My untamed and untethered little self went flying across the floor, leaping, spinning and waving that damned scarf like it was the peacock tail mother nature forgot to bestow on me. In that moment, I was entirely free, and entirely me.

My teacher, however, was not that into my solo routine. After class, my mom and I debriefed and came to an agreement that ballet and I were not a good match. And though I have taken many different types of dance classes since then, I’ve never had any desire to learn ballet. Sure, I have come to appreciate, intellectually, how its fundamentals give rise to some of the other forms of dance that I love, but I have zero desire to spend that much energy trying to hide the effects that gravity has on my body.

And this moment of eccentricity was by no means an isolated incident. Fast forward a year or so to my first parent-teacher conference in kindergarten. The walls of my classroom were decorated with twenty firetrucks colored by my classmates and I after a visit to the fire station. “Can you guess which one is Chantel’s” the teacher beams at my mom? Looking around, amidst the 19 red firetrucks, she finds one that has been painstakingly decorated with “mermaid scales” using every color in the box. She guessed correctly.

If asked, I might describe my younger self as precociously non-conformist. This feels somewhat nicer than saying I was born weird, though both seem true. But of course, we all eventually get conditioned out of our quirky ways of being to some degree as we grow up. What is school really for, if not to instruct us on how to be tame animals that can be given jobs and become functioning members of whatever society they are being enculturated into? Given this history, perhaps a better sentence would be, “Lately, I’ve been feeling a call toward rewilding.”

And this resonates, because who on Earth would’ve guessed that the creative sprite in those stories would grow up to be a neuroscientist? If you’ve never tried a scientific career, you’ll have to trust me when I say there are way more pliés involved in the process of getting here than there are opportunities to let the music move your body without instruction or intervention. And in my opinion, far too few people in my field consider the entire set of colors in the box when creating something new.

But I’m not ready to quit my day job just yet. After all, it’s the quest to understand and celebrate differences that called me to this career in the first place. And though we may be the exception to the rule, there are other wild scientists out there who I deeply respect[3] that understand why doing research in a vacuum isn’t going to lead to inspired theories of nature. And let’s not forget that understanding nature is precisely the job description that the scientific process was developed for. So perhaps a better sentence would be, “Lately, I’ve been feeling the call to better understand my nature.”

And from this space, after taking you through the twists and turns of my life, career, and word choices, we come at last to the discussion of intelligence.[4] You see, I’ve been studying how peoples’ brains work in the laboratory for over twenty five years now, with the goal of learning how different brains come to make sense of the world in unique ways. But it’s the time I spend with animals that has taught me the most about my own nature, about who I am, and how I define success. Much like my work with humans has highlighted the tradeoffs associated with different brain designs, and how they don’t necessarily map onto more or less intelligent ways of being, my connections with animals have shown me how dramatically different creatures[5] with distinct personalities, ways of making sense of the world, and acting upon it, can find wildly different solutions for living their best lives. And in my most magical moments of sharing space with them all, I ask myself over and over, what makes humans believe that we are the most intelligent of all?

When I asked Google AI—you know the software we created to think and learn for us—what intelligence means, the first thing she told me was that “intelligent means having or showing the ability to learn, understand, and solve problems.” From where I’m standing, this is the entire point of having a brain, and every behaving animal with a nervous system does it. But then Vocabulary.com told me “Intelligent means smart, or having the ability to process and understand information (including dictionary definitions).”

Well isn’t that cheeky? The parenthetical turns intelligence into something only humans can do—learn about something by reading it on the internet, even if they have no real-world experience with that thing. And how well has that served us?

Believe it or not, though, the point of this musing was not to prove that animals are smarter than humans—though Justin Gregg wrote a fun book called If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal that makes a convincing argument if you’re open to it. Instead, the idea I’m noodling on in more related to the point of intelligence, which can be found in the Latin root of the word—intelligere—“to choose between.”

When it comes to intelligent behavior, the success of humans, like all other animals, depends on having a repertoire of different ways to behave, and a system for deciding how “to choose between” them given the specific situation one finds themselves in. Unlike other animals, however, humans have two ways to learn, and two systems for making these choices. The first is one we share with all vertebrates—a dopamine-based learning system that simply keeps track of what works for us and what doesn’t over time through trial and error.

The second, possibly uniquely human ability[6] requires language or other symbolic representational systems and allows us to learn through instruction. Whether we read them in a book, learn them in a dance class, or absorb the summaries generated by AIs, information we gain through instructions can be used by our frontal lobe coordination systems to guide our decisions about how to behave—even without any real-world evidence that the choice we’re making will work for us. And since this is my line of work, I don’t even have to go out on a limb to tell you that this gets particularly problematic when you’re a little different, since most maxims floating around about how to do smart things adopt a “one-size-fits-all” approach to choosing what’s best.[7]

But wait, there’s more.

What if there isn’t actually a best choice?

What if the sentences:

Lately, I’ve been feeling the call of the wild;

Lately, I’ve been hearing the call of the wild more loudly than usual;

Lately, I’ve been feeling the call of the wild within me;

Lately, I’ve been feeling a call toward rewilding; and

Lately, I’ve been feeling the call to better understand my nature;

are different, but equally good sentences, that just have slightly different foci? What if one of the shittiest things about being a human is the sheer number of options we have for behaving in any circumstance, coupled with a total dearth of evidence about how well most of them will work for us?

This whole idea makes me envious of my animals, who will never—ever—make a choice simply because I told them to, without either a demonstrated record that I make good choices, or concrete evidence about the consequence of my suggestion. It makes me wonder whether we’ve lost track of a critical part of our shared nature—our brain’s desire to learn how to move us through the world in ways that find the good things and avoid the bad ones. And perhaps it’s this simplicity of noticing where I am, trying different things, and being present to how I feel as a result that’s calling to me now.

“Hold on just a second,” my inner editor volunteers in a voice that sounds eerily like my old ballet teacher, “I do have a favorite sentence!” But it’s too late. I’ve already decided this post is good enough, and I’m dancing out to the barn with my scarf in hand.

---

[1] IYKYK, but if you don’t, you should watch Fried Green Tomatoes.

[2] Or game on, if you’re a Chantel-like animal.

[3] Dr. C. Brandon Ogbunu is one of my role models in this realm.

[4] If you’re wondering at this point whether this is actually just a thinly veiled vanity piece intended to highlight my own intelligence the answer is—God, I hope not!

[5] In my lifetime, I have had the privilege of befriending a great variety of them, ranging from the garden variety dogs, cats, and horses, to more fun (ducks) and exotic (otters, elephants, and a giant pacific octopus) ones.

[6] Though I wouldn’t be surprised if toothed whales and birds who evolved vocal learning also have some system for instruction, I’m not aware that this has been demonstrated elsewhere!

[7]For example, what’s good for the goose in my house quite often diverges from what’s good for the gander (though he does love a happy goose)!