I am currently a Psychology Major and my initial plan was to take that and become a therapist after grad school, I am now wondering if adding a biology minor now and going to grad school for animal psychology will be a path I can take or if my undergrad will need to be something more related to animals to become an animal psychologist?
The following is a transcript of an interview. Luna is the interviewer, Barrett the interviewee.
Kaitlin Luna: And moving on to pets. I know you said animals, mammals, do go into REM sleep but you know if you've watched your pet dog on the ground when they start falling asleep, my dog barks and she, you know, twitches her legs, that sort of thing so it looks like they're dreaming, you know, as far as we can tell but so do animals dream and how would we know if they do or don't?
Deirdre Barrett: Well, that's a very good question. I tend to assume that they do. We know that that all mammals except cetaceans, whales and dolphins do not have REM sleep, they have this strange sleep where they sleep with one half of their brain at a time, but all other mammals alternate between non-REM sleep and rapid eye movement sleep and their brain has activity that looks very similar to ours when we are dreaming . So I am willing to make the leap and say that I think that mammals are dreaming.... Some of my colleagues would not would not say that, I mean some of my colleagues would not assume any consciousness to other mammalian species or only past a certain level in the evolutionary hierarchy but yeah, I think they have the same brain state that we dream in. I think they're probably dreaming in some way.
The only slight evidence for dream reports from animals are Penny Patterson who had the gorillas Koko and Michael. Koko died, I believe. But Koko used to sign kind of fantastic scenarios right upon awakening and no other time, so she'd sign about cars flying through the sky or she'd signed something about seeing a person who she actually hadn't seen in six months and those sort of signing, not real fantastic things. Only seemed to happen upon awakening. So Penny assumed that those were dream reports, and you know you could argue about that but I think that sounds quite likely and the gorilla Michael, who didn't have quite as big of a signed vocabulary, but I guess he's still learning he's certainly still alive and well, he was known to have had his entire extended family group killed by poachers and then he was picked up as an infant and sold through several iterations and eventually went to Penny's reserve, so he had a very traumatic killing of all of his family in front of him. And she said that he used to wake up signing, “Bad people kill
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Hi Reddit! I have published research examining the evolutionary forces behind one-night stands, belief in God, homicidal fantasies, political choices, and irrational financial decisions, as well as more staid cognitive processes, such as attention and memory. My recent book The Rational Animal (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465032427/ ) explores the evolved wisdom behind many of our seemingly senseless decisions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZV9SyOEIAI)
For more information about my research: http://douglaskenrick.faculty.asu.edu
For my blog on Psychology Today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-murder-and-the-meaning-life
Ask away!
