Can awareness exist without language?
Infants, animals, blindsight, the right hemisphere, the octopus. Report is our usual door. It is not the only possible room.
Science
A man says he is blind in part of the field, and still posts letters through a slot he claims not to see.
Seeing Without Seeing
Britain, then many labs · 1974 onward
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
The Thief Who Remembers Being a Thief
A bird hides food, watches who is watching, and later recaches, as if it knows what another mind might do.
Western oak woodlands, and Cambridge aviaries · 1990s–2000s
Science
A cut intended to stop seizures reveals that a person can contain more than one witness.
Two Reports, One Skull
California laboratories · 1960s–1970s
Ancient World
Once He Dreamed He Was a Butterfly
A sage wakes and cannot tell which side of the dream is home.
The state of Song, traditionally · c. 4th century BCE
AI & Machines
The Imitation Game
A mathematician, tired of the question “can machines think?”, replaces it with a game that can be played.
Manchester, on the page of Mind · 1950
Animals
A Baltic-German biologist asks you to leave the human living-room and enter the few signs that make a tick’s entire universe.
The Tick’s World
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
Sacred Traditions
Mountains Walking
A thirteenth-century Soto Zen teacher says that mountains walk, and that to know this is not a metaphor you can keep at arm’s length.
Eihei-ji, Echizen · 1240
Science
A listener is asked to repeat one voice while another voice speaks into the other ear. Most of the ignored speech is lost. A name sometimes is not.
Two Ears, One Name
Imperial College, London · 1953
Philosophy
What English Calls Mind
A Ghanaian philosopher refuses to let a European noun assemble an Akan person.
Legon, and on the page · 1980s–1990s
Ordinary Life
The Word at the Pump
A child who cannot hear or see has water run over one hand while letters are spelled into the other. Something that was wet becomes a name.
Ivy Green, Tuscumbia · 1887
Animals
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.
A Map Danced on Wax
Brünn, then Munich · 1920s–1946
Language / Etymology
A Language with No Parents
Deaf children in Managua, brought together in new schools, make a language that none of their teachers signed. Grammar appears in a generation.
Managua · 1977–1986
Ordinary Life
A Book in the Snow
A Sámi wolf-hunter dictates, to a Danish artist, the first book a Sámi writes about Sámi life. The weather in it is not a capital’s weather.
Guovdageaidnu / Kautokeino, and the pages written in a turf hut · 1910