Funny Birds

One morning at dawn, just before the sun lit the upper reaches of the trees, I passed a forty-acre alfalfa field on my way to work, and there in the middle stood an ostrich. The bird was remarkable on two counts: how it happened to be where it was—unconfined, free to travel; and its posture, its seeming inclination to the world.

First, of course, that it was loose, an escapee. Raising ostriches has become vogue in the last decade or two as an alternative to traditional livestock operations, a diversifying venture, so they're not unusual in the country. But ostriches are expensive—sometimes hundreds of dollars each—so you see them, always, confined in pens rather than traipsing around the country at will. And secondly, this big bird stood inert in nearly the exact middle of the field and never moved in the half-minute I rubbernecked as I passed. It stood—and they do look comically ungainly in the best of circumstances—leaning forward on one leg and holding the other poised, as if in mid-step and unsure what to do with itself. The cartoonist in my mind slapped a balloon caption over the bird's head: What the hell do I do now?

I wondered several things about the ostrich. Had it longed always to get beyond its cage, and finally managed the trick? Or, maybe due to an accident of a loose gate latch, had it just wandered out without any particular agenda? Regardless of how it got to the middle of that field, it seemed to confront a world of vastly expanded opportunities, yet with some reluctance. And, given forty uniform acres of alfalfa, two dozen steps in any direction would not change the bird's circumstances much. Yet there it stood, noticeably inclined and unmoving.

It's funny also that I should put a question mark over the bird's head, considering that birds hardly question anything. (Anthropomorphizing is the most natural thing in the world, surely wired into our archetypal imagery circuits.) If animals have extremely limited reasoning capacity (forget the if—they do), then birds define the limits of limited. I don't know about the term "hare-brained," but I've kept enough chickens, ducks, peacocks, and turkeys to know where "bird-brain" comes from. Progressing backward from human rationality, you go quite a ways past the horse and dog, for instance, before you arrive at the bird.

My view of the ostrich imputed a certain predicament—what the hell do I do now?—as if it were confronted with multiple options, a stifling mass of possibilities (which reflects my common dilemma, perhaps). But quite possibly it hesitated not because it faced too many prospects but because it had none, because no appropriate option presented itself. If the ostrich were accustomed to feed or security or company in its normally compact, fence-constrained world, maybe now it found none of those. And too, maybe that bird hesitated, frozen in mid-step, for no more reason than because its foot was cold.

But regardless of why the ostrich stopped where it did, it was not wondering or considering anything: birds don't know about what they do, they merely do; they react. A bird feels hungry, but does not know I'm hungry; feels hurt, but does not know I'm hurt. Birds and other animals lack subjectivity; an animal can't step outside itself to consider its circumstances, as we do. An ostrich could no more consider itself than it could stand outside its pen and watch itself inside. Its cerebral frame of reference limits its mind just as the pen it lives in contains its body. Although an ostrich perceives the wire that circumscribes the known world of its pen and is physically driven to enlarge or escape that world, it does not reason: I'm trapped in here; I can't reach that other stuff outside; I wish I could—. The bird could never finish that thought, can't wish for, or conceive, more than its immediate circumstances. A bird senses the wire of its pen about as much as we sense gravity.

We humans are accustomed to a consciousness that includes ourselves as objects, which is known as subjectivity, a function of our highly developed neocortex. So we tend to forget that other animals react to stimuli, automatically. But get this: apparently we do the same, for the most part. Research by neuroscientists shows that our brain manages much of its work below the level of consciousness, even when we believe we're consciously in control. We know, for instance, that we don't consciously engineer each bit of breathing or walking or buttoning a shirt-sleeve. But, apparently, much of what we think we are consciously managing, we have already done, a split-second before it's available to our consciousness.

Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, in his 1998 book The Mind's Past, titles the first chapter "The Fictional Self," because our mind apparently reconstructs the automatic activities of our brain into a coherent narrative—after the fact. (All this subconscious operation does not, however, resurrect Freud: we're not talking of seething conflicts of guilt and repression, sexual tensions, or patricidal urges.) Gazzaniga's book results from several decades of research on split-brain patients. Radical surgery to relieve epilepsy by severing the corpus callosum, the neural trunk-line which connects the right and left brain hemispheres and communicates between the two, has created a unique population: people whose left and right brain hemispheres function independently. For any given thought or task, each side of the brain becomes a control group compared to the other. Like twins raised apart, these two operators are a researcher's wet dream.

One particular aspect of this research is the discovery of an "interpreter" in the left hemisphere that explains or makes sense of our experience. The left hemisphere is adept at problem-solving, at pattern-making and intuiting relationships. Present it with images of water, a pot, and fire, and it can jump to a pot of boiling water; without specific direction, the right brain would find no connection between the three. These intuitive leaps of the left brain have taken us from gnawing bones at an open fire to the atom-crashing particle accelerator. The system works well and efficiently, within limits. When our minds operate in familiar territory with relatively simple information—which is to say, most of the time—they tend to make correct assumptions, and our interpreter tells us, correctly, that we've solved a problem. Our interpreter tells the truth when, like an ostrich enclosed in a familiar pen, we deal with things we know, inside our pen.

But beyond our limited reasoning powers, we can be easily fooled and not know it. In fact our interpreter will do its best to convince us that we're on top of things, even when we're not—like another bird I once saw. Once, when I lived in upstate New York, I was walking up the road to the mailbox. In a recently harvested hay meadow stood a bittern: a cousin to the great blue heron, it stands about two feet tall. You rarely find one in the open like this—in all that acreage of unvarying brown-green stubble, only two inches tall, nothing appeared but the bird. Normally you find bitterns in marshy ponds, usually standing stock-still in the shallows among the cattails and reeds, where their mottled brown feathers blend with their surroundings and disguise them from predators, and from their prey. The bittern's only non-vertical feature, however, is its long yellow-brown beak which, as it stands in the shallows, appears perpendicular to the vertical lines of the cattails and reeds, thereby spoiling the camouflage effect. So when a bittern standing in the rushes spots a big, predator-like thing—an essayist walking along a road, for instance—it instinctively tilts its head and points that beak straight up, blending vertically into its surroundings. I've spotted many a bittern before it tilted its head, but after that line-trick it disappears; it's uncanny—look away, and you'll not find the bird again. Then, as you pass, it swivels its head, almost imperceptibly, to keep an eye on you. So here in the hay-field stubble stood this bittern—the biggest, most prominent thing in a quarter mile—and it tilted its head and pointed its beak skyward, turning ever so slightly to keep a crafty eye on me as I walked by.

That bird's adaptive hardware functioned poorly outside its normal territory. Had the bittern had an interpreter like ours, it would surely have told the bird it was hiding, because this determined faculty for finding order and pattern, cause and effect, works overtime: it finds order even where there is none. Experiments with split-brain patients show that even when the right brain responds to a definite, identifiable stimulus—unknown and unknowable to the left brain—the interpreter in the left brain inevitably concocts a narrative to explain it, no matter how harebrained it sounds to those in the know. And—little surprise—the interpreter's default setting is to rationalize us as the hero of every situation. Which is a good thing: our history of problem-solving motivates us to solve further problems.

Had I wanted dinner, rather than the mail, the bittern's neocortical deficiency might have been its death sentence. But it makes me wonder what we look like if some higher intelligence comes strolling by to check the mail. If you plot intelligence on a scale we'll come out a good deal further along than a bittern or an ostrich, but if you measure the difference between us and the birds on the scale and then plot a point that much further beyond our intelligence, I'm sure we have our moments of hiding in the open field with our beaks pointed skyward. Gazzaniga's researchers have actually demonstrated some of these. [example here]

David Dunning's research shows that if you lack the ability to do something well, you can't recognize that you're not doing it. His example: if you can't write correct English grammar, you won't recognize your grammar mistakes unless someone points them out. So our interpreter is apparently quite capable of explaining that I'm standing in an open field craning my neck so that the guy walking by won't see me. (Pinker, 20–21?)

Another bird, a chicken I once saw on the highway median. Speeding along one afternoon on an interstate I passed a chicken, a solitary white leghorn, stranded on the grass median. Stranded because (even if it had wished to cross the road) steady traffic on both north- and south-bound lanes confined it to the median. Most likely the bird fluttered free somehow from a passing truck, one of those big rigs loaded with crates that transfers no-longer-productive egg-layers from the egg factory to the Campbell's Soup kitchen. No matter where it came from, it presented a picture that begged a cartoonist's caption—almost any would do. I imagined myself plunked down in the median, less familiar than any moonscape, as the stream of hulking giants whizzed past. The chicken turned its head and peered about; it walked and scratched the ground. Having lived all its short life in an uncomplicated world of concrete and wire, where granular feed was delivered by conveyor—it had no experience to even vaguely resemble the highway median. It had tumbled suddenly into a new world. Even if it had had the powerful reasoning and imagining machinery that we have, it could hardly have conceived of such a place or what to do with it. Dumped into an alien world, how would it react?

The ostrich, bittern, and chicken: each lives within biological limitations, yet knows nothing of its limitations. It makes me wonder what limitations we're unaware of. How do we appear from a frame beyond our own. It ought to be plainly apparent that our view of the world with ourselves at the center is an illusion hardly less comical than any bird's view of things. Since we can consider ourselves and our circumstances subjectively, from beyond the frame of our immediate sensations that lower animals are limited to, we're tempted to assume we can see ourselves objectively. But even the slightest glimpse of objectivity is an illusion. How could it be otherwise? Sure, we can ignore the signals of our immediate situation, but we can never turn off all that we know and all that we feel, without turning off all knowing. Objectivity is always a subjective endeavor.

It's true, but hardly news, that we humans are wonderfully endowed. But what I wonder is this: imagine a frame of understanding as far beyond human knowing as human knowing is beyond birds' intelligence.

In a sense we may all be standing in the median, traffic whizzing by, as we cluck and wonder.