Pour commencer, une lecture absolument réjouissante (on a bien besoin de choses réjouissantes, en ce moment, non ?) : Amia Srinivasan se penche sur l'intelligence du poulpe. Radicalement autres, presque aliens, les pieuvres sont tout à la fois solitaires, curieuses, rebelles et joueuses – un mollusque selon mon cœur…
“Octopuses encountering divers in the wild will frequently meet them with a probing arm or two, and sometimes lead them by the hand on a tour of the neighbourhood. Aristotle, mistaking curiosity for a lack of intelligence, called the octopus a ‘stupid creature’ because of its willingness to approach an extended human hand. Octopuses can recognise individual humans, and will respond differently to different people, greeting some with a caress of the arms, spraying others with their siphons.”
Comment penser l'expérience subjective du monde des animaux non-mammifères ? Pour le moment, nous avons choisi des contextes expérimentaux en laboratoire et de mesurer leur intelligence à l'aune de leur capacité à se conformer aux protocoles qu'on a inventé pour eux.
“Yet it can take octopuses a surprisingly long time to be trained in new behaviours, which some researchers have taken as a sign of their cognitive limitations. Much of the early work on octopus intelligence was done at the Naples Zoological Station. In 1959, Peter Dews, a Harvard scientist, trained three octopuses there to pull a lever to obtain a chunk of sardine. Two of the octopuses, Albert and Bertram, pulled the lever in a ‘reasonably consistent’ manner. But the third, Charles, would anchor his arms on the side of the tank and apply great force to the lever, eventually breaking it and bringing the experiment to a premature end. Dews also reported that Charles repeatedly pulled a lamp into his tank, and that he ‘had a high tendency to direct jets of water out of the tank; specifically ... in the direction of the experimenter’.
[…]
Octopuses have a high curiosity drive, and a knack for repurposing things around them for their own ends. Perhaps there are tasks that octopuses find it hard to learn. Or perhaps they just have better things to do.”
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Ce texte de David Graeber – sur le jeu comme principe organisateur du monde physique – est complexe (au meilleur sens du terme) et passionnant.
“Play does exist across the animal universe. And exists not just among such notoriously frivolous creatures as monkeys, dolphins, or puppies, but among such unlikely species as frogs, minnows, salamanders, fiddler crabs, and yes, even ants—which not only engage in frivolous activities as individuals, but also have been observed since the nineteenth century to arrange mock-wars, apparently just for the fun of it.
[…]
I’m not even saying that the position I’m suggesting here—that there is a play principle at the basis of all physical reality—is necessarily true. I would just insist that such a perspective is at least as plausible as the weirdly inconsistent speculations that currently pass for orthodoxy, in which a mindless, robotic universe suddenly produces poets and philosophers out of nowhere.”
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Un de mes threads préférés sur twitter (attention, si vous n'aimez pas les animaux à plus de 4 pattes, je déconseille vivement de cliquer), à lire en écoutant la chanson Boys de Lizzo, évidemment.
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J'avais l'intention de vous présenter Charlie Ravioli depuis février 2019, mais je n'avais pas trouvé l'occasion pour… il s'agit d'un ami imaginaire très spécial.
“'But have you ever heard of an imaginary friend who’s too busy to play with you?'
She thought about it. 'No,' she said. 'I’m sure that doesn’t occur anywhere in the research literature. That sounds completely New York.' And then she hung up.”
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Comment les parents Inuit inculquent la régulation émotionnelle à leurs enfants : par le jeu.
“When a child in the camp acted in anger — hit someone or had a tantrum — there was no punishment. Instead, the parents waited for the child to calm down and then, in a peaceful moment, did something that Shakespeare would understand all too well: They put on a drama. (As the Bard once wrote, "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.")
[…]
"When you try to control or change your emotions in the moment, that's a really hard thing to do," says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University who studies how emotions work. But if you practice having a different response or a different emotion at times when you're not angry, you'll have a better chance of managing your anger in those hot-button moments, Feldman Barrett says.”
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“Il faut donner une chance à l'expérience informe, aux pulsions créatives, motrices et sensorielles de se manifester ; elles sont la trame du jeu. C'est sur la base du jeu que s'édifie toute l'existence expérientielle de l'homme.”
Donald W. Winnicott dans Jeu et réalité.
