G: The World's Smartest Animal

I'm not going to spoil what other unlikely creatures show up in this episode, but I will say that what you are about to hear will make you strain your brain. Trying to imagine your way into other animals. Umwelt, which is a fancy term for what they perceive and how they understand the world. And once you do that work of trying to de-center your own human self and imagine the world from an animal perspective, it takes you to some extraordinarily beautiful places. Okay, so here it is the world's smartest animal from Radiolab's G-series. Wait, you're listening.

Hey, this is Pat Walters coming at you today with the final episode of our Radiolab mini-series on Intelligence G. And so for this last episode, we wanted to shift the mood a little bit, because as we were putting this series together, we did lots of stories on human intelligence, but we also found ourselves thinking about intelligence in other animals. And so to get into that, we decided to host an event all about animal intelligence, and today we're going to share that event with you. Just a quick warning there are some curse words in the show, so bear that in mind.

So, and the reason that we're doing this is because. A couple of months ago, I ended up on the phone with a science writer I really love named Dan Engber. And Dan went on a rant about how messed up it is that we only seem able to talk about animal intelligence in terms of our own intelligence, he said. So much of animal intelligence research is built on making animals do stuff that we feel like humans would be good at doing. Instead of considering their intelligence on their own terms. And so tonight, we decided we would do an episode about animal intelligence. That shifts the focus from us to them, that considers their unique abilities on their own terms. And in doing so, hopefully, might help us redefine a little bit what we think about intelligence in general for all of us. And because we're humans and we like contests, we decided to make it a competition.

So here's how it'll work. We have four contestants who will engage in a series of head-to-head bouts to convince a panel of judges that their animal is the smartest. I'm going to bring up our first pair of contestants in a moment, but first, let's meet our judges.

Ooh, we got a little music, nice, okay? So first, please welcome. These two guys have done hundreds of stories about all kinds of smart animals. Please welcome the co-hosts of Radio Lab, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich.

Kind of had to use the guys, the obvious choices. But we also invited one more surprise judge, the real star of our judging panel. From humble beginnings in a shelter in Oklahoma City, she's risen to the highest levels of success in show business in New York. Her television credits include High Maintenance and The Leftovers, and she has appeared in more productions of The Broadway. Play Annie in the role of Sandy than any other actor. Like any great star, she goes by only one name. Please welcome Macy.

Macy is a dog, she's about 35 pounds, has a scruffy brown fur. She trotted right on the stage and hopped onto a chair next to Jad and Robert. Okay, so before we start, I just want to ask the judges here one question to kind of set the terms and make sure we all know what we're looking for. I want you guys to just define intelligence in, you know, two or three sentences.

How would you define what you're looking for in the contestants stories tonight? Robert, why don't you start?

And I'm going to give a special nod, I think, to creatures that show collective intelligence, or, like moral intelligence. If that's even a thing. So that's what I'm going to be paying attention to.

Okay.

We're fighting, we're fighting.

The Crows from Dumbo, they're dressed like street pimps.

Number one, they are extremely resourceful. Have you all heard of this dude named Aesop? He wrote some fables. One of them was about a crow who had to get a treat or something out of a pitcher or something. And so what he did was he dropped stones into the pitcher so that the water level would raise. Got what he wanted, and guess what? Crows really do that for real, in real life?

Crows can solve problems puzzles with as many as eight steps. Definitely none of my exes could do that.

They're black again, racist, just because they don't sing the same way. The parrots, do you know? It doesn't count, but their vocalization skills are really, really, really good.

When you get a chance, Google Talking Crow and you'll find some videos. I think we have one.

Hello.

Oh my god.

Point number C. Crows have funerals, right? But they have funerals for good reasons. not that humans don't have funerals for good reasons, but humans have funerals to make ourselves feel better.

Like, Oh my god, I miss Big Mama so much. I just need to see her one more time before she goes on to the Whatever in the sky.

Bless Rashad, he's just plop, Rashad is the crow.

So, in conclusion, crows should not be called a murder, they should be called something smarter, like a symposium of crows.

But guys, don't worry, I fricking looked it up. A slime mold is a brainless, single-celled, pulsating wad of yellow goo, I learned if you put a slime mold. In an environment where there is a complex decision to make, for instance, which direction to choose to find a good food source? This superorganism can solve that problem relatively easily by spreading its cytoplasm out, advancing and retreating in response to what it finds. So this is a superorganism composed of thousands of nuclei. And they will collectively decide to make a decision for the group.

Humans, on the other hand, are not at all good at collectively finding a good food source. Have you ever tried to order seamless with another person?

Not easy. What are we going to do? I'm Korean, Chinese sushi, my roommate, and I always end up choosing diarrhea.

There are three general types of slime mold plasmodial slime molds, cellular slime molds, and Gary Busey.

Plasmodial slime molds are masses of thousands of nuclei that move around by spreading out in a fractal pattern. Learning the lay of the land and even solving mazes and mapping networks with incredible efficiency. How efficient. It took human engineers years to map out a Tokyo rail system. It took a slime mold just hours. I read that in an article titled Watch this slime mold dunk on Japanese engineers.

I'm just kidding, I made that article title up, no one wrote that. The second type is a cellular slime mold. This spends most of his life as a single, freewheeling Amoeba, which sounds like a sitcom that just got greenlit on Fox.

This quirky, freewheeling Amoeba just got the consulting job of her dreams, but can she balance love, work and New York City? Check out all the single-celled ladies starring Zooey Deschanel as The Slime Mold.

This superorganism then releases spores to find more food and then dies. Chemotaxis shows that slime molds are altruistic beings. They'll sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the species. I, on the other hand, will never die for the benefit of others. I won't even give my subway seat up to an elderly, pregnant woman who's carrying a piece of furniture.

Finally, the last category of Slime mold is Gary Busey, an Oscar-nominated American actor who has appeared in over 150 films, including Lethal Weapon, The Firm, and Piranha 3DD.

In conclusion, slime molds are very smart. Please vote for me because I'm Asian, and if you don't vote for me, that's racist.

Each individual.

But also I was leaning in that direction. But just to sort of give the crow a fair shake, if a crow can see a person and then remember it and disseminate the reputation.

For five years.

She does.

Oh well, she did study them once.

She is parcel to Gary Busey, which has confused her.

Dan Engber is a writer for Slate and The New York Times magazine. And Laurel Braitman is the author of the bestselling book Animal Madness and a teacher at Stanford Laurel. What animal are you entering into the mix?

They probably even have stronger social and emotional bonds than we do. Young males go off on their own to find a new pod, and then everyone else stays together for life. Sperm whales communicate a lot like us, too, physically and with language. But they also have a third way, and I think we should consider it like a sixth sense. Maybe you think about echolocation, like boat sonar.

Like a ping goes out, and then it bounces, the sound bounces off a thing in their environment, and then it comes back and gives that boat like a grainy shape of whatever that object is. And dolphin and whale sonar does this too, and so do bats, but animal sonar also comes back as a physical feeling. In the case of sperm whales, it's really loud too, they make the loudest sounds of any animal on Earth, up to 230 decibels.

And it's like, it's a terrible word. They probably have another word for it that's better, but it's like a huge built-in megaphone in their head.

It's just like that, but way louder like, way loud, so loud that it would hurt us to be listening to it. And this echolocation is so powerful that they can track a squid up to a mile away, and their social messages probably travel just as far. So knowing what we know of our planet, we know that there's a lot of things that we don't know.

And we know that our really complex social lives, their sixth sense, likely comes with its own emotional experiences, too. But we can't name those because we don't know what those feelings are like. So I want you to try to imagine it, though. What would it be like to be reading a book while suddenly finding out, just by feeling it, that your ex-girlfriend is coming around the corner of an underwater shelf a half a mile away?

Now she broke up with you.

Major alcohol culture. You've been so lonely, but now you know the signal is meant for you just because of how it feels when you pick it up. And not only that, but you have an immediate, accurate picture of exactly what she looks like. Not just the shape of her, but the perfect curve of her jaw, her sexy 12-inch layer of blubber.

That you've missed so much. But also, you can also immediately tell how much she cares about you, too, and that's why she's coming back. Also, you've been hunting a giant squid this whole time. So, sperm whales might have a particular emotion that goes along with experiences like these, and they maybe even have a different sense of self.

In the mid-1980s, a neuropsychologist named Harry Jerison proposed that echolocated communications that are emotional in nature. So, like grief or joy, might be experienced by whales and dolphins as more than shared information, they actually might come in as shared feelings, shared emotional experiences. Jerison thought that this might give rise to something called the communal self, meaning that whales and dolphins might not say I, they might always be a we.

We are sad, we are sick, and there's some evidence for this. So, like in whale strandings, for example, when a bunch of whales will come up to the shore and strand themselves and die. But when we actually do studies on the whales, we find out that maybe only one or two in a hundred was actually sick.

Something is going on here and I think it may be we sick.

Wow.

What looks like extreme empathy to us might just then be being themselves. Or maybe it's a new kind of intelligence, one that requires a kind of communal feeling, as opposed to thoughts about other people's feelings. So thank you.

Willie wasn't unique. Birds like him were once a pretty common carnival attraction. Their popularity peaked in the early 80s. When trained chickens were shipped around the country, rented out for $200 a day or sold for several thousand dollars each. And these chickens were so good at tic-tac-toe that humans were getting demoralized. At least one distributor started having the birds lose on purpose every fifth game to make it seem more fair.

Now it turned out this whole thing had started years earlier in the south, at a place called the IQ Zoo in Hot Springs, Arkansas. There, a pair of scientists, Marion and Keller Breland, had built a business out of training up strange animal behaviors. Their zoo was like a product showroom, a place to demo the ducks they'd taught to play piano, or rabbits that drove around in little fire trucks, or hamsters on trapeze.

But the Breland's?

You don't have to be that smart to go on Trapeze. The Breland's most popular and enduring act was the Bird Brain, a chicken in a box which disappeared behind a screen to peck O's onto a game board. Chinatown Willie was one of those, or maybe someone else's knockoff. In any case. I watched that chicken play a lot of tic-tac-toe, peering over Rob's shoulder. I tried to figure out the chicken's secret strategy.

But then last week, really last week, I discovered that all those observations were for naught. As I got ready for tonight's talk, I stumbled across a copy of an old instruction manual which the Breland's would send out with their bird brain units. And according to that manual, the chicken in the box wasn't really playing tic-tac-toe at all. In fact, behind the screen, there was nothing but a single light bulb and a switch. When the light went on, the chicken pecked and an O appeared somewhere on the board in the spot chosen by computer.

I found this kind of devastating.

Partly because I'd promised pat a talk on the intelligence of chickens.

But here's the reality Chickens are kind of dumb.

As we've seen, they're even dumb compared to other birds. They don't have funerals or make tools like crows, they don't learn to speak like parrots.

They don't have any physical talent at all. It's that when you chop off its head, it can go on acting like a chicken for days or weeks, or even months.

But still, I think there's something amazing about Willie and the other bird brains. It's not that these chickens were smart enough to beat us at tic-tac-toe because they weren't, it's that we humans were dumb enough to lose.

I mean, tic-tac-toe is not a complicated game, actually. If you can think ahead just a bit, you ought to be able to play any round of tic-tac-toe to a draw, even against a computer. And yet, it seems we humans can't or won't succeed even at this very modest test of our intelligence. And I think that's useful to remember, especially tonight, because this whole project to rank species according to their smarts, takes it as a given that a gulf exists between the very dumbest and the very smartest. Animals. That the chicken and the chimpanzee, or the sperm whale, or the crow, live on separate continents of cognition.

But I call that vanity. That's what Willie taught us that there we were standing in the same arcade, befuddled by the same computer, each unable to succeed at the same simple game. We were joined together across several hundred million years of evolution, by what we couldn't do. Judges, a vote for chicken is a vote for finding that common ground.

It's a vote for unity and kinship, a vote for chickens is a vote for all of us. Thank you.

Okay, wow, this is so...

You know, I don't know whether the other judge is awake, but.

What's she saying? Doesn't like streep.

Oh, because she's a Broadway star herself.

And I love it just because I avoid my inbox or whatever. It feels like some form of email, right? Like, you send it at a great distance, but it's emotional and you pick it up with your face.

Next up, we had another round of competition. Same basic idea we asked each of our four contestants to bring a smart animal to the table to make a case for. But this time, we threw a couple curveballs at them. That, and the final crowning of the world's smartest animal after a quick break.

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Many Americans are looking for a moral response.

I think a lot of us imagine that we may be among the smartest animals in the animal kingdom. Some of us won't, but we decided, let's do some furry mammals. But the challenge was not to do any of the usual suspects. So no humans, of course, no chimpanzees, no elephants, no dogs.

Sorry, Mason. Come up with an unexpectedly smart furry mammal with your new former enemy teammate. So first up were Dan and Laurel, who had absolutely no trouble at all agreeing on a smart furry mammal.

It was obviously a raccoon. Why?

It was not the only story of its kind. In those years. Raccoons were often touted by reporters for their high intelligence, or their sagacity, or their skill at making mischief. This is the odd and tragic story of how we came to understand, briefly a century ago, that raccoons were among the very shrewdest animals of all. And then we forgot.

The link between an animal's slipperiness and its smarts was once well-established among scientists at Columbia University. Edward Thorndyke had been testing the intelligence of cats and dogs.

To seal the box with latches, bolts or string pulleys and leave a snack outside as motivation. This was Houdini in the lab, an escape room, but for animals. Then, in 1907, a psychologist in Oklahoma named Lawrence Worcester. Cole thought to put raccoons through those same puzzle boxes to learn, as he put it, their proper place in the scale of mammalian intelligence. And he found some amazing things. His raccoons, Tom, Jim, Jack, and Dolly, would at times break free of the puzzle box and then ignore the food reward. It was as if they'd gone through the exercise, not in service of their hunger as other animals might do, but to satisfy an inner curiosity.

Cole also found that his raccoons, unlike cats, could learn to escape a given box just by watching humans do it. And based on this and other work, a soft consensus came together.

To put a rat high on the scale of mammalian intelligence, much higher than a cat or dog at any rate, and maybe even on a par with primates. But, alas, this whole idea was soon to be challenged and erased. In the same year Cole published his research, the president, Teddy Roosevelt, lashed out against the tendency of nature writers to ascribe human-like abilities to raccoons and other animals. The president.

Within a few years, some of Cole's most impressive findings with raccoons were challenged by his peers. Even scientists who believed in Cole's research would find it hard to follow up. For one thing, the raccoons they meant to study kept escaping, and a new paradigm was spreading through psychology. One that had little time for musings on a raccoon's imagination, or its curiosity, or its loneliness. In place of Tom and Jim.

So raccoons vanished from the lab, and then, as cities grew, they vanished from our lives, out of sight and for a while, out of mind.

Turns out, as people moved out of the country and into the cities, the raccoons followed us, and our urban spaces aren't just the perfect place for raccoons to demonstrate their intelligence.

Today, though, the people that know the most about urban raccoons are the people whose job it is to get them out of our urban spaces. Like Mr. Raccoon, a.k.a. Junio Costa, the number one no-kill humane raccoon trapper of the California Bay area.

He told me that the animals are bold and curious, and they eat pretty much everything raccoons move into our attics and our crawl spaces.

They use their hands to manipulate locks and latches, or pry out loose nails. They gnaw things open, and then they take running leaps, also to knock things over. A raccoon will work on a problem, like lifting up a garage door or prying open a window, or prying a vent cover off of a basement. For hours. Until they figure it out, sometimes they'll come back, like night after night, to work on the problem.

And he told me that once he got a call every night from the same neighborhood for like, two weeks. Because one ambitious raccoon figured out they were all tract homes, and so what would work to get into one of these tract houses would work in the entire neighborhood. So she just went house to house, to house to house.

So raccoons are really one of the only animal species to fare better as humans spread all over the planet.

They outsmart us, we try to outsmart them. It's unclear to me which of us is getting more intelligent, faster.

And agreeing on an animal was a little harder than they expected. Okay, so what did you end up doing?

And we ended up with this adorable little creature called the Quokka, which looks sort of like a chubby squirrel with these teddy bear eyes and little black gloves.

This is your life. Are you ready, judges? Are you ready, Macy?

She's into it, okay?

Here's why the quokka is the smartest animal when?

Serious business when approached by.

If a parent is with their child, they will throw the child at the predator.

To distract it while it runs away. So I need to describe this image for the people who cannot. Where did you get this?

Right this way, Quokka was like, Oh shit, I like Emily, but I can make another, I can make Emily, the second Emily.

And that's that. The quokka goes on to live another day. The Quokka goes on to survive longer than anyone else will.

Thank you.

It's your turn if you still want to go.

Here's how dumb koalas are. Their brains only take two percent of their body mass, which is apparently one of the smallest brain to body mass ratios of any mammal koalas. Brains are also super smooth, which is bad because the more folds your brain has, the smarter you are. The human brain is like Marie Kondo.

Lots of folding, shout out to my condo, heads out there, sparking joy. You know who you are? Honestly, I love her so much. Guys. Koalas are so dumb, they even sound dumb.

Listen to this.

Perhaps koalas aren't conventionally intelligent, just like how choosing koalas for this presentation wasn't conventionally intelligent.

But I propose that we rethink intelligence. Partly because I'm stuck with this animal, but mostly because I believe that this animal is in many ways smarter than us. Perhaps koalas are, like how my mom describes me, smart in their own special way.

Let's compare koalas and humans to see who looks smart by comparison. This is a koala's daily schedule.

A koala sleeps 20 hours a day, while the remaining 4 hours they spend eating and mating. Incredible. Imagine only being awake for the amount of hours you need to eat and have sex. I mean, I'm not a huge fan of sex because I'm, quote unquote, awful at it, but boy do I love eating. The human schedule, on the other hand, is horrendous.

We sleep on average 6.

8 hours a night we wake from our nightmares, then spend 10 hours reading emails and worrying. 5 hours on a conference call and 2 hours eating dinner out of a big bowl while watching billions. And hoping to God, that Paul Giamatti's voice can lull us to sleep again. In conclusion, Koalas have optimized themselves for life's greatest gifts. Eating, having sex for those who enjoy that kind of thing, and sleeping without the need to listen to Paul Giamatti's voice. And that's smart.

Now, who sounds stupid still koalas?

I Uh.

I realize I clapped with everyone else.

But, uh, you know what, I am proud of myself.

On this week's On the Media.

Wow, okay, so we've heard from both pairs raccoons and marsupials slash quokka and dumb slash smart koala. So after that, let's proceed with you guys. It was time for the final judging. There's a lot.

Objection, objection. What is this? What's happening here?

Laurel Braitman has walked a giant bone across the stage.

We're going to do it here, I think. The winner of the contest The smartest animal in the world.

One more time for Laurel Braitman winning our competition.

She flew here from California with the leg of an animal.

Congratulations.

Thanks to our judges Jad Obermrod, Robert Krowich, Macy and Bill Berloni, her assistant.

Thank you to the Radiolab staff who put this night together Rachel Cusick, Nora Keller, Susie Lichtenberg and the whole team here at the Green Space.

Tonight's show and all our reporting on the Intelligent series that's starting to come out next Thursday. Has been supported by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. We're very grateful to Simons and additional support.

There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's on the Media. Want to understand the reasons?

That's on the media's specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts.