Sources: animals

Very useful and coherent argument that our standard conception of intelligence, and our many attempts to define it, is deeply anthropocentric and misguided in its tendency to look for intelligence as a thing present in entities we want to call intelligent, or as a property or product of some part of anatomy — like the brain.

Excellent antidote to the usual discussions and assumptions of intelligence and refreshingly free of firm conclusions.

Article describing research done on mice that sees them consistently breaking trained patterns of behaviour in a way the researchers come to see as strategic. “Mice are surprisingly using higher-order approaches to learn even simple tasks” — as usual, the question is: why is this surprising? Why isn’t it the initial assumption to test in the hypotheses relating to animal cognition? Good read.