Wyatt takes a more moderate position: “ pheromones have been identified in almost every animal you can think of if the entire kingdom is awash with airborne aphrodisiacs, why should we be any different?” (p. Some have thus rejected the notion of human pheromones. Despite tantalising research in humans by way of lap dances, smelly t-shirts, female menstrual cycles*, and speed-dating on (androgen) steroids, we have yet to close the circle Butenandt-style and identify the substances involved. 183), according to zoologist Tristram Wyatt. By identifying and then synthesizing the chemicals in question, it “ created the model for how we should go about pheromone analysis” (p. Classic research by Adolf Butenandt showed pheromone communication in moths. “Classic research by Adolf Butenandt showed pheromone communication in moths Despite tantalising research in humans we have yet to close the circle Butenandt-style and identify the substances involved.”
Human sentience skin#
And catfish have a skin that is covered in taste receptors, to the point that they “ do not possess a tongue, as we know it. The nose of the star-nosed mole looks like a hand and provides a sense of touch, but acts more like an eye, having taken over the visual cortex in the mole’s brain. According to neurobiologist Justin Marshall, “ 400 million years ago, one of them got hold of an optics text book and now they are a physics lesson on a stick” (p. The eyes of the mantis shrimp contain some twenty different types of photoreceptors, perceiving not just colour but also properties such as polarization. Several chapters deal with the classic five senses and introduce exceptional animals.
Sentient is a smart survey of twelve such senses with each chapter juxtaposing research on animals with that on humans. We have many more sensory receptors, with the total anywhere from twenty-two to thirty-three, depending on who you ask. This research, as Higgins points out at the start, is upending the classic notion of “the five senses” of touch, taste, vision, smell, and hearing that Aristotle posited. There are plenty of fascinating critters in this book but the clue is in the subtitle- Sentient is as much about human senses and their neurological and psychological underpinnings. I admit that I initially misjudged Sentient, thinking it was going to be another book about the wonderful world of animals senses à la Martin Stevens’s Secret Worlds. That twist is called machine learning, but before that we have to go back to the classroom and talk about algorithms.Sentient: What Animals Reveal About Our Senses, written by Jackie Higgins, published in Europe by Picador in June 2021 (hardback, 344 pages) Like similar experiments GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) from Elon Musk-backed OpenAI and Google’s earlier BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), these experiments are best thought of as amped-up versions of the algebra you learned at school, with a twist. As the name might suggest, it’s a tool designed to create a “model” of language so people can talk to it. It’s an acronym for language model for dialogue applications. Lemoine believes that Lamda is sentient and aware of itself and describes the machine as a “coworker.” He told the Washington Post that part of his motivation for going public was because his belief that “Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices” about what to do with it. The overwhelming reaction among artificial intelligence experts was to pour cold water on these claims. In recent days, Google researcher Blake Lemoine grabbed headlines for getting suspended after releasing transcripts of a “conversation” with the company’s Lamda artificial intelligence research experiment.
Hollywood loves a story about a sentient robot destroying humanity in order to survive. Media coverage of artificial intelligence tends to invoke tired references to “The Terminator” or “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in which a HAL 9000 computer kills a spaceship’s passengers.
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