Atlas · Other minds
Animals
Creatures whose memory, play, and self-regard press on the border of the human.
Animals
The Mark on the Glass
A creature touches a spot on its own body that it could only have seen in a mirror, and a debate about self begins.
Laboratories, then field and farm · 1970
Animals
A Mind with Eight Arms
An animal without a backbone unscrews a jar from the inside, and the old maps of mind look provincial.
Oceans, and a few laboratories · 2010s, with older roots
Animals
A bird hides food, watches who is watching, and later recaches, as if it knows what another mind might do.
The Thief Who Remembers Being a Thief
Western oak woodlands, and Cambridge aviaries · 1990s–2000s
Animals
The Tick’s World
A Baltic-German biologist asks you to leave the human living-room and enter the few signs that make a tick’s entire universe.
On the page, from Hamburg and the Baltic · 1934
Philosophy
What It Is Like
A philosopher chooses a bat, not as a mascot, but as a limit: a mind we can study and still not occupy.
Princeton, on the page of *The Philosophical Review* · 1974
Animals
They Gather to Learn
American crows come to a dead crow. The paper’s title is danger, not a funeral. The gathering is still a fact.
Seattle, and sites around it · 2015
Animals
An African grey parrot, in a long experiment, uses English words for color, number, and the category of a match. The words are data. They are not a confession.
Same and Different
Chicago, then Purdue, Northwestern, Arizona, MIT, Brandeis, Harvard · 1977–2007
Science
A Gill, a Memory
A sea slug learns to flinch less, then more. A laboratory traces the change to particular cells. Memory, here, is a bodily habit with a diagram.
Columbia University, of the work · 1960s–2000
Animals
A Map Danced on Wax
A bee, back from a dish of sugar, turns a figure on the comb. Distance and direction, Karl von Frisch claims, are in the dance.
Brünn, then Munich · 1920s–1946
Animals
A Twig, Stripped
On a Tanzanian lakeshore a young Englishwoman watches a chimpanzee fish for termites with a tool. The watching will take decades. The inner life of the chimpanzee is not in the first notebook.
Gombe Stream, Tanzania · 1960