Monkey Mind

[Illustration from "Living in the Tao", by Mantak Chia and William U. Wei]

Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,

   freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;

   self-complete, brave, and aware

     in our minds so be it.

- Gary Snyder, "Prayer for the Great Family"

In 1967, four gibbons at the Chicago Zoo took part in an experiment designed to test their intelligence. Gibbons are small, tailless primates native to southeast Asia who, though they belong to the same family of large-brained apes as chimpanzees and humans, had repeatedly failed tests which other primates such as baboons, lower on the evolutionary hierarchy, had repeatedly passed. In those trials, morsels of food were placed outside the animals’ enclosure, attached to strings lying on the ground. Tugging on a string would have brought the food within reach. But the gibbons ignored it. Researchers had concluded, therefore, despite their understanding of primate evolution, that gibbons were less intelligent than baboons.

This time, instead of attaching strings to food lying on the ground, the researchers attached them to food suspended above the roof of the enclosure. “[I]mmediately the gibbons grasped them, tugged, and got their snacks,” writes James Bridle. “In one swift motion, the gibbons suddenly became ‘intelligent’ – according, that is, to the narrow definition of the scientific method.” They explain:

"The 1967 experiment was designed to account for the fact that gibbons are brachiators. In their natural forest habitat, they spend almost all their time in the trees, and move around by swinging from branch to branch. This results in physiological – as well as, it seems, cognitive – differences to other apes (including us). To make climbing and swinging easier, gibbons have elongated fingers. While an excellent adaptation for an arboreal lifestyle, this makes it harder for them to pick up objects lying on flat surfaces. It also, some researchers believe, makes them less likely to notice such things: their attention and interest, and therefore their problem-solving and planning, points upwards. They notice and make use of tools when they’re where (and what) they expect tools to be. Put another way, the gibbon’s umwelt is arboreal..."

Bridle recounts this story in their book Ways of Being, which explores intelligence and what it means in the twenty-first century, especially given the rise of digital (or “artificial”) forms. What do we mean by intelligence? “This is not only the most crucial question we could ask,” they write, “but also the most diverting, and ultimately the most shattering and generative – because, honestly, nobody really knows.”

For nearly five hundred years, however, the most consistent and well accepted definition has been simply what humans do.

**

Our family tree, if you will, dates to the moment when the lineage that would become Homo sapiens ("the thinking man") diverged from Australopithecus.

“Around ten million years ago, our hypothetical ancestor, the Miocene ape, will have spent his days in the high-canopy rain forest which covered most of Africa at the time," writes Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines. “Like the chimpanzee and gorilla, he will probably have spent each night in a different spot, yet confined his wanderings to a few unadventurous square miles of territory, where food was always available, where the rain fell in runnels down the tree-trunks and sunlight then spattered the leaves; and where he could swing to safety from the ‘horrors’ on the forest floor…”

“The fact is that, at a date some time after 2.5 million [years ago],” Chatwin continues, “there appears in eastern Africa a small, agile creature with a very startling development to his frontal lobes. In all three stages of Australopithecus, the proportion of body to brain stays constant. In man, there is a sudden explosion.” He describes studies of skull fossil endocasts:

“Not only does the brain increase in size (by almost half), but also in shape. The parietal and temporal regions—the seats of sensory intelligence and learning—are transformed and become far more complex. Broca’s area, a region known to be inseparable from speech co-ordination, makes its first appearance. The membranes thicken. The synapses multiply: as do the veins and arteries which irrigate the brain with blood."

Chatwin posits that human brain development occurred as a result of predation by big cats. “The evolutionary record is full of ‘arms races’ between predator and prey, since Natural Selection will favour prey with the best defences and predators with the best killing equipment... [W]hereas God gave animals their natural limbs for defence, he gave man the ability to think. The power of thought allowed him to manufacture weapons – lances instead of horns, swords instead of claws, shields in place of thick skins – and to organise communities for producing them. Since any one individual was powerless against the wild animal, especially the predatory animal, man could protect himself only through communal defence."

Historian Yuval Noah Harari has called this period the "Cognitive Revolution", defined by the emergence of fictive language and the formation of elaborate social structures called culture. Development occurred most rapidly in the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive functions and a strong sense of self, to master the skills necessary for living in small bands as hunter-gatherers: Task prioritization, prediction and long-term planning, an agile working memory, impulse control, and a sophisticated ability to read and interpret social cues.

“We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages," Harari writes. But they’ve come at a price. "Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons. It's hardly a foregone conclusion that this was a good strategy for survival on the savannah. A chimpanzee can't win an argument with a Homo sapiens, but the ape can rip the man apart like a rag doll."

**

There’s another drawback to such advanced processing power, one that continues to haunt our present.

"Once you’ve learned to think you can’t stop,” said Alan Watts, one of the leading communicators of Eastern philosophy to Western audiences in the 1960s and 70s. Most of us, he said, are "addicted to thought, like a drug, a real dangerous one. Compulsive thinking going on and on and on and on and on, all the time.”

Our large brains crave constant input. Yet the dangers to which they're adapted no longer exist. All that energy, therefore, has become redirected, our minds occupied with other things. I balk at the time I spend dwelling in useless worry for the future or in rumination about the past. I get distracted and confused by fictions run amok. Driven by split-second urges and reactions, I speak and act without thinking, inflicting pain on myself and others.

Eastern traditions such as Taoism and Buddhism have a name for this. They call it the "Monkey Mind".

Consider how we use the word monkey: A person who is naughty or mischievous, especially a child; a synonym of idiot, a person of minimal intelligence; a person dancing to another’s tune, controlled or directed from outside. Monkey Mind, then, acknowledges that we are at the mercy of the unruly aspects of our own psyche, the tendency to be lost in the cacophony inside our own heads.

"Can you allow your mind to be quiet?", Watts once asked. "Isn’t it difficult, because the mind seems to be like a monkey, jumping up and down and jabbering all the time."

“Yoga is, initially, stopping that," said Watts. “And you really have to stop if you want to be sane. Because if I talk all the time, I don’t hear what anyone else has to say, and I’ll end up in the situation of having nothing to talk about but my own talking. Well so in exactly the same way, if I think all the time, I won’t have anything to think about except thoughts. And that’s the academic fallacy.”

The science of mind from the East offers a different way. Yoga, as it’s called, refers to a range of physical and spiritual practices such as stretching, breathwork, chanting, and meditation that tame the monkey mind by cultivating equanimity. This means two things, according to Watts. First, a mind that is not going in vicious circles; and two, a mind free from the "hypnotic influence exercised by thoughts, ideas, [and] words.”

"There's nothing exotic about meditation," said the poet Gary Snyder, himself a student of both Native American and Zen Buddhist traditions. "It's a birthright of everybody. Animals know all about it. Animals have the capacity for sitting still and tuning in on their own inside consciousness, as well as the outside consciousness, for great periods of time. And they can restore themselves by doing that... The calmness of deer at rest in midday is the order of meditation."

**

Research on animal intelligence has come a long way since that 1967 experiment in Chicago. “It turns out that there are many ways of ‘doing’ intelligence," writes James Bridle, "and this is evident even in the apes and monkeys who perch so close to us on the evolutionary tree." Though it sought to identify human capacities in animals, perhaps the most surprising and impactful result of that work has instead been to realize the animal nature in ourselves. One researcher's experience of offers an example:

In a remarkable 2001 paper titled “Encounters with Animal Minds”, primatologist Barbara Smuts describes her experience studying a troop of baboons over the course of two years in east Africa’s Great Rift Valley. At first the baboons were wary. Convincing them she was not a threat was the “obvious first step”.

Smuts approached the baboons on open ground, halting whenever they began to move away. By tuning into subtle signals, such as warning calls that females issued to their young, she learned to stop before the troop got nervous. Soon the baboons let her come much closer. Smuts spent as much time as possible in their presence. “I joined the baboons at dawn and travelled with them until they reached some sleeping cliffs at dusk,” she writes. “I repeated this routine seven days a week.” Eventually, Smuts was “increasingly often welcomed into their midst, not as a barely-tolerated intruder but as a casual acquaintance or even, on occasion, a familiar friend.”

Smuts’ approach was far from conventional. As a graduate student she was told by more experienced primatologists that should an animal try to interact, she should ignore it or slowly move away. Ignoring, it was thought, would discourage the animal from paying attention to the researcher, allowing for better observations. Smuts learned the opposite was true.

"[A]lthough ignoring the approach of a baboon may at first sound like a good strategy, those who advised me to do so did not take into account the baboons’ insistence on regarding me as a social being. After a little while, I stopped reflexively ignoring baboons who approached me and instead varied my response depending on the baboon and the circumstances. Usually, I made brief eye contact or grunted. When I behaved in this baboon-appropriate fashion, the animals generally paid less attention to me than they did if I ignored them. It seemed that they read my signals much as they read each other’s. By acknowledging a baboon’s presence, I expressed respect, and by responding in ways I picked up from them, I let the baboons know that my intentions were benign and that I assumed they likewise meant me no harm. Once this was clearly communicated in both directions, we could relax in one another’s company."

When speaking about her work at professional gatherings, Smuts has used the accepted scientific term, “habituation” to describe her passage in baboon society. "The word implies that the baboons adapted to me, that they changed, while I stayed essentially the same. But in reality, the reverse is closer to the truth. The baboons remained themselves, doing what they always did in the world they had always lived in. I, on the other hand, in the process of gaining their trust, changed almost everything about me, including the way I walked and sat, the way I held my body, and the way I used my eyes and voice. I was learning a whole new way of being in the world — the way of the baboon.”

**

At this point language becomes inadequate. The word primitive, for example, is used pejoratively, meaning savage or backward, undeveloped, stupid. But to think that our primate minds are a liability is a mistake.

"There are many things in Western culture that are admirable," writes Gary Snyder. "But a culture that alienates itself from the very ground of its own being—from the wilderness outside (that is to say, wild nature, the wild, self-contained, self-informing ecosystems) and from that other wilderness, the wilderness within—is doomed to a very destructive behavior, ultimately perhaps self-destructive behavior."

The remedy he describes is not intellectual. There's nothing to figure out. It’s a natural function of our minds; An antidote to quotidian psychological suffering; An ancient bodily intelligence encoded in our genes, honed through millions of years of evolution, and expressed in the reciprocal relationship we share with all life.

Snyder goes on to comment on the resilience of so-called "primitive" societies, those that reject the convenience and trappings of the modern world. "[I]t may well be that they are close to an original source of integrity and health."

**

Over time, Smuts’ experience deepened. Increasingly, her subjective consciousness seemed to merge with the “group-mind” of the baboons. “I sensed the mood of the troop as soon as I arrived in the morning,” she writes, and “could usually tell whether we were going to travel a short or long distance that day. Often, I anticipated exactly where we would go, without knowing how I did it.” This shift, she writes, is “well described by millennia of mystics but rarely acknowledged by scientists.”

One evening, Smuts witnessed a mysterious behavior:

"[The] baboons were travelling to their sleeping trees late in the day, moving slowly down a stream with many small, still pools, a route they often traversed. Without any signal perceptible to me, each baboon sat at the edge of a pool on one of the many smooth rocks that lined the edges of the stream. They sat alone or in small clusters, completely quiet, gazing at the water. Even the perpetually noisy juveniles fell into silent contemplation. I joined them."

“Half an hour later,” she writes, “again with no perceptible signal, they resumed their journey in what felt like an almost sacramental procession.”