Sunday, October 09, 2005
It's all in the ...
I was at my cousin's last night and we were having dinner. From across the table, she asked me to pass yogurt to her. I took the can and handed it over. Immediately then I went back and buried my face in my plate.
A third pair of curious eyes on the table, sitting on my left, was watching all this. They noticed that I had forgotten something in this apparently tiny insignificant transaction. After just a few moments, this creature got up, took a spooon and passed it over to my cousin, to be used with the yogurt.
Nothing too unusual about this, except that this observant creature is hardly 2 years old. Her name is Ruhi and is my cousin's daughter.
They say it's all in the genes. And never becomes more evident than when watching a child grow up. It's not that I did not intend for my cousin to have a spoon, nor that I didn't know that a spoon is needed to take yogurt - just that I didn't care about it spontaneously enough. Some things come very naturally to some people and other things have to be learnt. What comes naturally and what has to be learnt seems less a matter of efforts, more a matter of how you are hardwired. Ruhi was never trained to hand out spoons to people. Never was she told to keep observing people and give things they need. (If it was anybody who was trained to do such things, it was me.) It all came to her - naturally.
This year, my sis worked with a class of birds called New Caledonian crows at Oxford. These crows are supposed to be more intelligent than other species of crows. They know how to use tools. They can take right sized twigs, and twist, turn and break them to retrieve things. They can do so even with totally unfamiliar material and even in captivity.
At Oxford labs, they did an experiment where they raised these crows totally indepndent of their parents - the researchers got the eggs from the nests in the jungle (or wherever) and artificially incubated them. Hence since birth, these crows have only been inside a couple of rooms, never having met their parents and never having seen what a natural habitat is. However, that has not had any impact on their tools-usage skills - they are as skillfull as their natural-habitat-grown counterparts. And that is stunning. Check out some amazing movie-clips at (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/tools_main.shtml.
There are many more examples we come across in our day to day life. But sometimes we still fight against things that don't come to us naturally, waste our time and energy and in the end produce sub-standard results. So much for the sake of pride, vanity and socializing.
A third pair of curious eyes on the table, sitting on my left, was watching all this. They noticed that I had forgotten something in this apparently tiny insignificant transaction. After just a few moments, this creature got up, took a spooon and passed it over to my cousin, to be used with the yogurt.
Nothing too unusual about this, except that this observant creature is hardly 2 years old. Her name is Ruhi and is my cousin's daughter.
They say it's all in the genes. And never becomes more evident than when watching a child grow up. It's not that I did not intend for my cousin to have a spoon, nor that I didn't know that a spoon is needed to take yogurt - just that I didn't care about it spontaneously enough. Some things come very naturally to some people and other things have to be learnt. What comes naturally and what has to be learnt seems less a matter of efforts, more a matter of how you are hardwired. Ruhi was never trained to hand out spoons to people. Never was she told to keep observing people and give things they need. (If it was anybody who was trained to do such things, it was me.) It all came to her - naturally.
This year, my sis worked with a class of birds called New Caledonian crows at Oxford. These crows are supposed to be more intelligent than other species of crows. They know how to use tools. They can take right sized twigs, and twist, turn and break them to retrieve things. They can do so even with totally unfamiliar material and even in captivity.
At Oxford labs, they did an experiment where they raised these crows totally indepndent of their parents - the researchers got the eggs from the nests in the jungle (or wherever) and artificially incubated them. Hence since birth, these crows have only been inside a couple of rooms, never having met their parents and never having seen what a natural habitat is. However, that has not had any impact on their tools-usage skills - they are as skillfull as their natural-habitat-grown counterparts. And that is stunning. Check out some amazing movie-clips at (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/tools_main.shtml.
There are many more examples we come across in our day to day life. But sometimes we still fight against things that don't come to us naturally, waste our time and energy and in the end produce sub-standard results. So much for the sake of pride, vanity and socializing.
