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As earth-bound creatures, human thinking reflects our essentially two-dimensional environment. Most of us travel through life thinking like a car driver at an intersection whose only choices are left or right turns when it comes time to change course. To open new vistas of possibility, a third dimension may need to be added to our psychic landscape.
That, it turns out, is a relatively tall order.
We humans can and do think multi-dimensionally whenever we navigate through three-dimensional space, but doing so typically requires a great deal of technological support. Think airplane pilot or submarine captain. Think elaborate panels of dials and switches. Think support crew and years of training.
And yet, some animals manage quite nicely in the wild blue yonders of sky and sea with no more equipment than what evolutionary biology has physically – and mentally – endowed them with.
Can we learn to penetrate, and benefit from, the mysteries of their complex, multi-dimensional mental abilities? Or would such thinking overload our circuits and blow our minds?
The answer is it might – at first.
In my former career as a civilian dolphin trainer for the U.S. Navy, I had the pleasure of working with an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin named Moe. Moe was an adolescent born in captivity, I was a novice trainer, and we both had a lot to learn.
Moe was being asked to overcome his fear of the open water – not an unusual phobia in non-wild dolphins – and leave the comforting confines of his enclosure for the wide-open spaces of San Diego Bay, where he would learn to take cues from human handlers in preparation for active naval duty.
The critical interspecies bond necessary for ongoing open water work is initially encouraged by coupling human interaction with fish snack rewards. In principle, Moe could only receive a reward by venturing beyond the open gate of his pen to the side of a nearby boat where his trainer would praise and feed him for his efforts.
In the training game of gradual behavioral approximation toward a goal, and to maintain learning at a comfortable level for the dolphin, progress is measured in small, incremental stages. As a consequence, early in Moe’s training, the boat he was being asked to approach was parked immediately adjacent to the gate of the dolphin’s enclosure.
To a two-dimensional thinker relying solely on visual information – which was precisely the kind of thinking I was accustomed to at the time – the boat projecting from the pen had the visual cut-off effect of a 16-foot-long wall along the surface of the water. In essence, Moe was being asked to swim through an open door and meet me a third of the way down a short hallway for a fish reward.
Moe wasn’t so keen.
To him, the boat wasn’t a wall at all, but something rather more like a dense cloud floating at the surface of his world. It didn’t shelter him from the intimidating openness of the bay in any way.
I asked Moe to the side of the boat with a standard “please come” cue while simultaneously retrieving a fish from his bucket in anticipation of reward. When I glanced at the fish in my hand, I noticed that it was slightly damaged, partially torn by the rough edges of ice in the fish bucket.
A brief word about fine dining is in order. Navy dolphins eat like royalty. They are fed only top grade, restaurant quality fish. And the rule is if you wouldn’t serve it to a guest at a five-star establishment, you don’t even think about offering it to a working dolphin.
So, like the champion two-dimensional thinker I was environmentally raised to be, I discarded the fish by pitching it over my shoulder, beyond the “wall” of the boat. Moe must have been bemused watching the fish sink and drift from the water on the far side of the boat to within easy reach of his open gate. Naturally, he stuck his head out several inches beyond the confines of his enclosure and snatched it up: “Thanks for the reward.”
It was, of course, hardly the level of effort I meant to reinforce. But in that moment, I learned something about the limits that environmental conditioning had placed on my own thinking. On numerous occasions, working with animals whose physical environment had shaped them into multi-dimensional thinkers caused small, but meaningful shifts in my own perspectives on the world. These days, as a college English teacher, I find myself deeply gratified whenever students tell me at semester’s end that our work together challenged them to think “outside the box.”
As a species, we collectively intuit the value of fresh perspectives to such a degree that we have developed a whole menagerie of strategies devoted to achieving them. In order to shake the mental dust and break free, we take vacations, practice meditation, or pick up new hobbies. But for my money, nothing can beat direct apprenticeship to nature’s masters of multi-dimensional spaces when it comes to launching us into creative thinking.
Of course, it’s a little inconvenient to keep a dolphin in the bathtub. But parakeets have plenty to offer in the way of tutorials on multi-dimensional thought. It turns out that even animals with a brain roughly the size of an almond can help us unlock our own thinking potential. The key, naturally, is having the willingness to leave the cage door open.
Copyright © Seth Slater, 2016
