Lars Chittka: The Mind of a Bee

LARS CHITTKA Our guest today is Lars Chittka. Lars is professor of Sensory and Behavioural ecology at Queen Mary, University of London, and has been a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study (WIKO) in Berlin. His book The Mind of the Bee (2019) is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. Excerpt from "Insects such as bees and ants are often held up as the epitome of the robotically mechanistic approach to animal nature. Scientists have long known that these creatures must possess a large behavioural repertoire in order to construct their elaborate homes, defend against intruders, and provision their young with food. Yet many still find it plausible to look at bees and ants as little more than 'reflex machines', lacking an internal representation of the world, or an ability to foresee even the immediate future. In the absence of external stimuli or internal triggers such as hunger, it's believed that the insect's mind is dark and its brain is switched off. But perhaps the problem is not that insects lack an inner life, but that they don't have a way to communicate it in terms we can understand. It is hard for us to prise open a window into their minds. So maybe we misdiagnose animal brains as having machine-like properties simply because we understand how machines work – whereas, to date, we have only a fragmentary and imperfect insight into how even the simplest brains process, store and retrieve information. However, there are now many signs that consciousness-like phenomena might exist not just among humans or even great apes – but that insects might have them, too. Not all of these lines of evidence are from experiments specifically designed to explore consciousness; in fact, some have lain buried in the literature for decades, even centuries, without anyone recognising their hidden significance. Consciousness, to the western world (and I am personally adding this since to ancestral cultures it is a different story) consciousness then, is an evolutionary invention like wings or lungs. It is useful to us; it's therefore most likely to be useful to other organisms with traits deeply homologous to ours. They share with us the difficulties of moving, probing the environment, remembering, predicting the future and coping with unforeseen challenges. If the same behavioural and cognitive criteria are applied as to much larger-brained vertebrates, then some insects are likely to qualify as conscious agents."

You can listen to Lars Chittka: The Mind of a Bee online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Lars Chittka: The Mind of a Bee is an episode from Masters of Regeneration Radio by Tomas Rayes.

This episode is 01:14:10 long.

This episode was published on Feb 11, 2020.

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