Orangutan Precognition

The “Blind Spot” Experiment

Move the diagram towards you and away from you until the dot disappears. That blank area, where the dot should be, is the blind spot for your right eye. Rotate the diagram until the cross is on the right side, and you can test for the blind spot in your left eye.

* * *

So here you are, looking at the world all day, and your brain is cheerfully making up stuff for you to see that’s not really there, in order to make up for all of the other stuff that it doesn’t let you see, even though it is there.

Now, I want to talk to you about both of these points, because they add together to come to an interesting conclusion. To keep things (including myself) from getting confused, I’m going to finish with this first part (about your brain creating your world) before moving on to the second part (about your brain censoring your world). Add these observations together, and the results are hair raising (and not in a good way).

* * *

To begin with, it is said that Nature abhors a vacuum (much preferring a rug beater… sorry, it’s an obligatory joke without which there would be a humor vacuum, and, well, you know). Your blind spot represents a discontinuity similar to the sociotemporal gap that we talked about earlier. Your brain wants to cover its butté (pardon my French), and fill in that gap.

What’s really interesting is that even if there’s something more complicated than just a dot in your blind spot, your brain will still fill it in, and it will use a pattern that is consistent with its surroundings; but there are limits. If tiny blue squares surround your blind spot, then tiny blue squares will also fill your blind spot; however, if you draw a long vertical line down through the dot in Figure 5, then your brain will fill in the line, but ignore the dot. That’s because it can get information about the line from the area outside of the blind spot, so your brain knows that the line exists, but the dot doesn’t exist, because it is completely hidden inside of the blind spot. In short, your brain will work hard to fill in the gap, but there are limits to what it can do.

It’s not unreasonable to suggest that your brain will work equally hard to fill in other sensory-deprived spots to maintain continuity. There’s a place on my shin that has been numb ever since I split the skin down to the bone in an awkward bench-tag accident. If you hold a lit match near that spot, I will say, “Are you crazy! You’re gonna burn someone with that thing!” but I won’t feel anything other than fear laced with a generous dollop of annoyance; however, if you aim a heat lamp at the area, then my brain will tell me that my whole shin is getting warm, including the otherwise numb place. My brain, and yours, prefers its network of sensation to remain massively interconnected, even if it needs to fudge the experience a bit. (Mmm… fudge.)

So, why shouldn’t your other senses, such as feelings of emotional pleasure and pain, work the same way? If you leave people and places without establishing a strong sense of emotional discontinuity (such as saying good-bye, or shaking the dust off your sandals), then I don’t see any reason why your brain wouldn’t try to blend the edges of this coming and going.

This sounds to me like it’s related to the notion of “object constancy,” which you develop when you’re still an infant. This cognitive function lets you understand that the pacifier (or nipple) being stuck into your mouth is the same exact pacifier (or nipple) as the one that you just spit out a moment ago. (Nipple, nipple, nipple… get over it.) Likewise, it helps you to learn that you don’t have an unlimited supply of different mommies and/or daddies (and similar) who just happen to look alike; you begin to figure out that you only have a very small number of mommies and/or daddies who keep wandering in and out of the room. When you play peek-a-boo, you start to realize that you don’t see a different face every time, but only the same face that comes and goes. You see, your brain starts brainwashing you (and who better to do so) when you are too young to resist.

Of course, this particular brain function makes good sense when you consider that the alternative would be for parents to stop loving their kids every time they were apart, and vice versa. I mean, if absence didn’t make the heart grow fonder (or at the very least didn’t keep the heart from growing significantly less fond), then there simply wouldn’t be any families. Larger social groups would be out of the question. Your brain remembers that you like people even when they’re not always with you, helping you to bridge the gap of their absence.

So, with Carl’s help, my brain seamlessly filled in our twenty-year contact gap.

And if one of my dead friends, relatives, or pets ever comes back into my life, my brain will work hard to get me to ignore the blurred sociotemporal boundaries. Basically, these people (human or otherwise) are alive for me until proven dead, over the strong resistance of my brain.

The default preference here is clearly for an ignorance of absence.

Which is related to one last phenomenon that we should discuss before getting on to the part about your brain censoring your world.

* * *

It turns out that in some cases, when a person unexpectedly returns to their family after having been given up for dead, their loved ones will actually resent them (much to everyone’s confused grief). You’d think that everyone would be overjoyed, but it seems that after people go through all of the pain of accepting the loss of a loved one, especially after supporting them through a prolonged illness, they resist taking the risk of trusting them again. Some of us, when we love someone, trust that person not to leave, and we include trusting them not to die, so dying is a betrayal of that trust.

Look, it doesn’t have to be fair; it’s just how some people feel.

Anger gets directed at the Lazaroid, because there’s no one else to take the blame for all of the pain and fear that turned out to be (in some sense) unnecessary.

Some of you are thinking that you would never feel anything but great joy at the return of a loved one, but the fact of the matter is that many of you, faced with the rare and raw reality of this situation, would find out much to your dismay that you were, in fact, angry, hurt, and afraid.

When someone has been alive, your brain (and extended apparatus) wants to continue to treat them as alive, even after you know that they’re dead, but when someone is irretrievably gone, then your brain (likewise) wants to continue to treat them as dead, even if it turns out that they haven’t left after all. If you try to get your brain to accept a change that won’t blend seamlessly into your life, it will try to snap you back into the old pattern if you’re not constantly on your guard. Your brain wants to maintain the continuity that it has established. If you do finally get it to surrender, then it will adopt this new continuity, and fight against you if you ever want it to switch back again.

I think that’s why, as a matter of reflex, we draw upon such strong emotions in times of great change. It would take ages to get your brain used to a change if you had to rely on purely rational processes; however, if you surrender to grief, or joy, or any other sense of being emotionally overwhelmed, then you can wantonly bludgeon your brain into submission. Your emotions will always dominate your higher cognitive functions in a time of crisis (to the degree that those are separate). This dynamic is not always convenient, but nonetheless it is usually the best way to go. You don’t want your brain to be explicitly calculating trajectories while some huge, hungry, angrily-toothed thing is bearing down upon you at high speed. What you really want to do at that point is to give in to fear and take full advantage of the glorious adrenaline flood. Run first; ask questions much later, if ever.

Maybe the same thing happens when this sort of anger is directed at a returned loved one. If you get angry, it doesn’t take you as long to get back to being happy, because you force acceptance of the change on your reluctant brain.

Then again, maybe it just happens because people are angry at being put through all of that grief for nothing. But that’s pretty horrible, so let’s at least pretend that people are doing something to get happy faster, rather than to stay angry longer.

Either way, it’s not really your brain’s fault; it can’t help the fact that it’s designed to identify new things as variations on old things… that’s how you learn (give or take). Your brain has a natural preference for the familiar because that’s what it uses to explain the unknown. It rejects change in favor of continuity, and does its best to disguise abrupt transitions, gaps, and other sensory irregularities. This strategy keeps things running as smoothly as possible in your life, so you can function without interruption.

Believe me, this is much nicer than grinding to a halt every time something in your environment strikes you as the least bit unusual; for example, some dogs bark incessantly when you leave the trashcan sitting just a few inches to one side of its normal position. They are obsessed until you put it back. The downside is that you can’t trust everything that your brain tells you, because it’s smoothing over the disturbing details. (You can’t trust everything that I tell you either, but unlike your brain, I’m honest about it. Really.)

So, yes, your brain loves you, but it’s overprotective. It never gets to the point where it thinks that you’re ready to move out on your own. My advice is to learn to live with it, because you won’t find any brain other than your own that will treat you with any more dignity than that.

* * *

So, let’s sum up this first part.

Your brain loves continuity, because it thrives on previously established networks of interconnections. This continuity helps you to learn, and to function without mass disruption of your behavior. To maintain this tranquil perspective on your world, your brain will play tricks on you to cover up gaps in your perception.

In short, your brain makes you sense things that aren’t really there.

Which can be terribly creepy when you’re alone.

Or when you hope that you’re alone.

Particularly because at other times your brain tells you that you’re alone, when you’re not.

Which brings us to the long-awaited second part...

* * *

Let’s start by talking about how your brain plays fast and loose with its portrayal of the world around you. Most importantly, I’m going to tell you about the big difference, as measured in brain time, between the moment that you sense something, and the moment that your brain actually lets you know that you have sensed something. When described properly (and you know that I never describe anything less than properly), this temporal disparity neatly explains such unusual types of cognition as natural precognition.

“What’s natural precognition?” you might ask, to which query I might answer, “Well, if you’ll just hold on a sec, I’ll tell you.”

Because I’m convenient (and so nice to myself about the imposition), I’m going to use myself as an example again. Here goes.

I happen to have very, very fast eye-hand reflexes (or did). I know this for a fact, because over the course of several years, I have repeatedly taken yardstick-grabbing and button-pushing tests at four prominent Science Centers in two different countries, and my test results were always remarkably consistent (hence I am remarking on them). And as you know, you can’t argue with informal, consistent test results. (Well, I can, but I’m not going to, because it would spoil the story.)

The test is simple. A yardstick dangles vertically from an electromagnet. You place your thumb and forefinger on either side of the yardstick, down at the very bottom, and when the test light goes on, the electromagnet releases, and you pinch the yardstick as fast as you can to keep it from falling. The distance marked by your fingers on the yardstick is an indicator of how fast your reaction time is.

The button-pushing test, in comparison, gives you an actual timed readout of how fast you react when the light goes on (or when a buzzer goes off... which, when you think about it, is a pretty weird way of saying that the buzzer goes on). This test gives you a measurement down to the millisecond, and according to the charts, I was one heck of a quick button pusher. (Too bad the rest of my body is so slow.)

The trick is that I don’t wait for my brain to tell me that the light has turned on; I just let my hand close whenever it’s ready, all on its own. When I’m calm, and thinking about something other than taking the test, observers tell me that my hand seems to move even before the light comes on; however, according to the timer, I never press the button too early. There’s nothing mystical about this, my hand is simply reacting to a part of my brain that registers the sensation of the light turning on, without waiting for another part of my brain to actually say, “Hey, you: the light turned on.” I react to the perception of that sensation, and not to the awareness of having experienced that sensation. I can safely take this shortcut because I’m familiar with this test, so I don’t need to wait for my brain to analyze the sensation and tell me what to do. I can just react without thinking.

I suspect that many athletes rely on these sorts of perceptive reflexes, rather than on the awareness of an event occurring. Their body gets so familiar with the game that they can avoid being slowed down by their brains, at least when it comes to the need for split-second reaction times.

Just in case you think that this is just more of my own special brand of mumbo-jumbo, I’ll point out that I’m not nearly the only one to make these sorts of claims. The results of non-invasive behavioral tests on non-human animals also support the portrayal of a crucial difference between perception and awareness. As it turns out, there are some species of birds, pigeons in particular, that seem to behave solely on a perceptive basis, and never an aware one. On the surface, the observed behavior can seem quite similar to what we think of as awareness; more to the point, to us humans, it certainly looks like those pigeons must have something akin to human awareness, but that’s only because we don’t think to question how pigeons could possibly do what they do do (shut up again) without having something like awareness.

We assume that whatever processing they have is different only in degree from human awareness (i.e., some sort of a pigeon-sized version), when what they really experience is a different kind of interaction with their world. We think that they fly away from us because they know that we’re getting too close, when in fact they fly away only because they perceive that we are approaching. In terms of the button-pushing test, you could say that pigeons react only to perceptions, because a pigeon’s brain doesn’t have the component that makes a human’s brain say, “Hey, you (something is too close).”

I won’t discuss the results of invasive tests, because I would not be comfortable deriving any personal benefit from the results of such testing; in fact, I am reluctant in general to profit from the misfortunes of others, even when (and perhaps particularly when) those others are animals (well, okay, other than eating them). Similarly, there are people whose cognitive functions, and related behavior, are highly unconventional (generally as the result of a brain injury); however, my reservations about tabloiding won’t allow me to draw upon their lives here, not for the sake of something as unimportant as supporting my reflection.

Having said that, however, it seems clear that there’s nothing to stop me from drawing upon unusual factors in my own cognition, especially when such stories illustrate my pseudoscientific theories. So here goes (once more)…

* * *

I had flown to Ottawa for a business meeting accompanied by Jana (“Word Woman”). We were met at the airport by Norm (“I Hate Computers”), a company sales rep who was driving us to the federal building to meet with the head of Heritage Canada. (Greg was also at the meeting, so why don’t I remember him in the car?) I was in the front seat, and although I had never been to Ottawa before, I was disturbed to find that once we got into the city, everything looked intimately familiar. No matter where Norm drove (streets, sidewalks, or lobbies as necessary to dodge the chaotic migration of traffiblivious peds), I felt that I knew each and every building; but that was clearly impossible (or, as the French would say, “impossible”).

And then it struck me: while I thought that I knew the buildings very well indeed, I couldn’t think of what we would be seeing next as Norm kept driving. I wasn’t able to picture anything beyond my field of vision, but as soon as new scenery came into view, I just knew that I had seen it before. On top of all this, the people and cars also seemed familiar, which ruled out any chance that I might simply have forgotten some trip to Ottawa that had otherwise burned itself into my subconscious. Something was simply making me feel as if I had already seen everything that I was seeing. It was an unusually prolonged, lucid episode of precognition. (Do you see? We’re getting closer and closer to the whole orangutan thing.)

For several minutes, my memory of the streets slipped in and out of sync with my vision, and I was so distracted by this sensory dislocation that I unreservedly clacked on and on (to my captive audience) about the very time delay theories that we’ve been discussing in this essay. My colleagues heard more about lights and yardsticks in those few minutes than most people will ever have to suffer in a lifetime. In retrospect, my impromptu lecture wasn’t the best way for me to inspire confidence in my sanity just before the Big Meeting with the Minister, but I had nothing to worry about. I’m sure that Jana wouldn’t have pushed me out of the car until Norm had swooped fairly close to a backyard pool. It’s one of those Canadian politeness things you always hear about.

Given our discussion to this point, it seems entirely plausible to suggest that I was reacting to the raw perception of what I was seeing, where that perception preceded the processed version or awareness of those sights. It was this time delay that was giving me the feeling of familiarity with my surroundings; in other words, by the time that I was actually aware of what I was seeing, I had been familiar with those sights, but only at the perceptual level.

* * *

So, there you are, bopping along, thinking some regular old thoughts based on your experience of the outside world, or maybe you’re just mulling over some pleasant meanderings inside your head, when all of a sudden your perception gets out of sync (or, to use a more technical term, whack) with your processed awareness of those very same thoughts. You slip into the sense of having already experienced the world in precisely that way before, thinking the exact same thoughts as before; however, despite this sense of having already had precisely the same experience, you find that you can’t think ahead and predict what will happen more than a moment into the future. Your familiarity is never more than a moment ahead of the actual event itself; in that sense, you’re not actually experiencing a broad temporal gap between two instances of awareness, but rather only a momentary gap between your perception and your awareness of an event.

Now, I’m not denying the existence of any supernatural cases of déjà vu, which might in fact involve large temporal awareness gaps, I’m just saying that you can add the notion of natural precognition to your understanding of the world, since it neatly explains that “tip of the future” feeling in your head. So this is something that might be happening in addition to any other weirdness (unnatural or otherwise).

* * *

So, what does precognition have to do with your brain censoring your experience of the world? The important overlap is the time delay between your perception and your awareness, which your brain uses to coordinate all of the incoming sensory information surrounding an event. It is this coordinated, coherent bundle that is fed to you as your awareness of that event.

That’s one hefty editing job, and you would be completely, complexly amazed at the amount of information that your brain filters out and in.

* * *

Just as your brain creates information to fill in empty spaces, as in the visual or sociotemporal gaps we were talking about earlier, it also deletes information before letting you know what’s going on at the awareness level.

Sometimes that’s a good thing. You don’t want to always be aware of every little sensation in your environment. Usually, you want to acclimate to the feeling of clothing against your skin, or the sound of the refrigerator humming in the background. In fact, the lack of an ability to habituate can cause you serious problems. (I don’t have room here for a long discussion of certain types of autism, psychosis, or Williams Syndrome, and so on, but I encourage you to find out more on your own.) Most of the time, your brain doesn’t bother you with any droning in the background, and it only interrupts you if there is a weird blip on the radar.

But sometimes your wily brain smoothes out a blip for the sake of maintaining its beloved continuity.

Ever wonder why people feel fear when there doesn’t seem to be any reason?

Ever feel like you’re not alone, even when there’s no one around?

Whenever your brain tells you not to worry, insisting that there’s nothing there, but your body is telling you to worry, because something is there… maybe you should listen to your body.

Your body is plugged into the perception that your brain only tells you about in edited form. Your brain wants to explain everything as a coherent whole, and if it can’t, it will fudge things a little… or a lot. In contrast, your body has no ulterior motive.

Don’t believe me?

Then let me ask you this: how often do you notice your nose? (Those of you with little button noses will just have to pretend that I’m talking about the frames of your glasses or something.) As you read these words, your nose is in the periphery of your vision, right by your, well, your nose. Go ahead, look up from this page for a minute, and as you look around, notice that your nose is still there. Don’t worry, that awareness is kind of a nuisance right now, but you’ll go back to forgetting all about your nose soon enough.

Why don’t you see your nose all the time? Because it would drive you berserk, that’s why. Sure, there are animals (even as large as tigers) that you don’t see until they move, even if they’re just inches away from your face, but that’s because they blend into the background. Your brain provides your nose with an even better disguise than camouflage. Your brain makes your nose invisible.

Your brain doesn’t let you see anything that it doesn’t think you should see.

* * *

Given that your brain hides your nose in the periphery of your vision, and the homeless in the margins of your social guilt, how much more do you think it can hide in the gap between your perception and your awareness?

And what if that gap is much larger than you think it is? What if your awareness is not mere moments behind your perception, but a matter of several seconds? Reach out and touch something near you. Did you feel the exact moment of contact? What if that exact moment actually happened a couple of seconds ago, and it just took that long for your brain to put everything together and tell you about it?

Don’t worry, it’s an interesting thought, but the gap really is only a matter of moments, otherwise you’d only ever be able to swat a fly as a matter of luck. Too much survival relies on fragment-of-a-second coordination for the conventional gap to grow beyond more than a few moments in a neurotypical person. It’s only a crack, but then again, so is the space between your sofa cushions, and think of all the stuff that has escaped through there.

So, what’s small enough to fit into such a small temporal gap, but big enough to make your body feel like you’re not alone, even when your brain says you are?

Well, you are, for one. I’m not talking about your personality, or your sense of self, which are forms of awareness. I’m suggesting that there is a perceptual version of your sense of self that can get out of whack with your personality. Add together all of the little sensations that we’ve been talking about as your perception of the world (the sights, sounds, feeling of your joints rubbing together, your thoughts, and so on), and you can create a rather impressive self, a prototype that your brain edits out of your awareness, but which your body can still perceive. The coordinated, coherent sense of self, the one that you think of as the real “you,” is an echo of this ghost.

How very insubstantial.

Not that there aren’t supernatural ghosts, but I’m not worried about them (at least not with the lights on). I’m just saying that before you react to the edited version of your world (i.e., your awareness), you can sometimes slip into the mode of reacting to the raw version (i.e., your perception). This will happen before your brain hides the perceptual version of your self.

So there really is a ghost in the room with you.

Right now.

Always.

It’s you.

Boo.

* * *

Okay, after all of that preparation, we’re finally ready to talk about apes. And when you’re done reading this section, if it doesn’t turn out to have been worth the wait, then I won’t be offended if you go back and unread this essay.

Promise.

* * *

In general, I want to know if ape brains are as deceptive as those of humans, and in specific, I want to know how orangutans feel about subjective events like precognition.

You see, apes and humans (unlike pigeons) have different degrees of the same kind of awareness, and they share the same kind of temporal gap between perception and awareness; therefore, we should expect apes to experience natural precognition and ghosting, just as humans do.

But is it really the same sort of experience for them?

Well, as arboreal creatures (to varying degrees by species), their brains must fill in their blind spots, because they don’t want to go reaching out for a tree limb with white patches in their field of vision. As prey (when they are children, if at no other time), it would be bad for a big blank spot to obscure a predator’s face that was hovering in the grass. Whether created or evolved, such oblivious species do not survive unless they reproduce in mass quantities (like pedestrians), which apes do not do. Besides, if there were a couple of white patches floating around all the time in their field of vision, they’d be spending all of their time trying to look at them, which they don’t. So ape brains do, in fact, edit their perceptions, just like human brains do.

Given what we now know about ape brains filling in perceptual gaps, it is natural for us to ask about sociotemporal ones. The question becomes whether apes are conscious enough of their senses of self, other, and absence, for specifically sociotemporal gaps to occur to them in the first place.

I think that this must be the case, because apes tell some sophisticated stories that not only distinguish between self and others, but which recount events in their past, and allow them to relive some of the emotions associated with those events. The canonical example is when Michael related the sadness he felt as a child, when his mother was murdered by poachers. (Yeah, I’m stretching the data to make a point, but I think it’s only a matter of time before stories like this are demonstrably truer in the specifics than I’ve portrayed here, rather than simply true. So this is good enough for entertaining plausibility.) So apes and humans share not just the same kind of awareness, but the same kind of consciousness, that is to say, they share a similar perspective on their place in their environment, including their family.

So what would Michael think if his deceased mother suddenly showed up and dropped a bunch of bananas in front of him? Would he think (and vigorously sign), “Mom! What are you doing in Stanford? Are those Witness Protection people nuts? And speaking of nuts, you wouldn’t happen to have any, would you? No? Rats. No, Mom, I like bananas, really, and I appreciate it when you cook for me, but… but… but hey… hold on just a fruit-pickin’ minute… I thought you were dead!”

Or, maybe he wouldn’t have this “book” reaction at all (i.e., it picks up right where you left off), but rather he would experience the relative sublimity of the “TV show” reaction, namely, “Yaiiigh! What the feces is going on here?!”

Now, imagine what it would be like to go through these sorts of disturbing events without being able to resolve your confusion, and fear, by sharing them communicatively with anyone.

* * *

Part of the problem is that all of these experiences are highly subjective, and they lose something when they’re not a conventional part of your culture. It’s much easier to talk about déjà vu with someone who has also experienced the phenomenon (ba DEE da dee dee). Most of us have felt this disassociation, so we know inside what it feels like, even if that doesn’t help us to describe it adequately in so many words. And we do have terms for it that everyone recognizes, like “déjà vu” and “precognition,” but sometimes that’s not much help. To truly understand the feeling, you just have to go there yourself, much like the House on the Rock (in Wisconsin… you’ll love it).

Humans have an unfair advantage in that they can say things like, “Omigawd! I just know that I’ve eaten this exact same banana before! This is so weird! Hey Huey! You’re about to say… wait a sec… oh dang, the feeling’s gone. Man oh man, this déjà vu stuff is like totally weird. Know what I mean?” And the thing is, you do know what I mean, even though it’s a messily described internal event, particularly if it has happened to you. We can also talk with each other about ghosts, and work together to come up with some sort of mythology that helps us to feel less worried about what’s happening to us. We can allay our fears at least to the extent that we have company in our fright. It allows us to rest assured that we’re no more crazy than all the other people who have had the same experience. The important point is that this is a communion denied to apes; that is to say, they have yet to show evidence of using communication (language in particular) to the degree required to convey these sorts of ideas, and they seem to be no more prone to telepathy than humans are.

Yes, some apes can use language to communicate very well about their everyday lives, but none of them has decided to show humans any evidence of exchanging ideas about complex subjective experiences. We have never observed a bonobo, for example, trying to convey any concept along the lines of, “O Ineffable! I just know that I’ve eaten this exact same banana before! This is so weird! Hey Huey! You’re about to say… wait a sec… oh dang, the feeling’s gone. Ape oh ape, this déjà vu stuff is like totally weird. Know what I mean?” Now, another ape might know what the bonobo was talking about, if that bonobo had a way of talking about it, but it doesn’t yet. They are socially alone in their experience of weird stuff like this. Unless, of course, there’s some particular grimace or other that represents that notion of déjà vu; perhaps this is the case, and I am just woefully underinformed. But special grimace or no special grimace, there is one major difference between the human and ape reactions to this sort of internal weirdness: apes don’t worry that they might be crazy. Apes have an implicit communion denied to humans, and if any given ape feels weird, it doesn’t wonder if it’s the only one.

So when a gorilla thinks that it is physically alone someplace, and it suddenly acts like it is terribly spooked by something, we have no reason (or rather we haven’t had any reason until now), to suspect the presence of natural spooks. Gorillas don’t seem to posit the existence of disembodied souls and so forth, and in fact they will have no (human) use for the “supernatural,” but they will still have problems with misaligned whack, just as humans do, and it seems reasonable to suggest that they will feel disoriented by this lack of sync. The difference is that any given disoriented gorilla won’t worry about whether it is the only gorilla beset by unidentifiable observers, and they will freak out only on the level of feeling watched, rather than being watched specifically by something spooky.

So we humans can no longer live in our blissful gardens of ignorance. From now on, when you see a gorilla going berserk, you’re going to have to wonder if it thought that it was being watched by an observer whom it could not identify in its surroundings. This sense of being watched might become especially nerve-wracking for those gorillas who are often under real covert observation; then again, maybe they just become jaded. Maybe humans should also become jaded by ghosts… which I suppose would be a whole lot easier if we could rest assured that we were just experiencing natural ghosts, and not supernatural ones. Gorillas can afford to be blasé, because they don’t have to worry that their ghosts will sneak up behind them and scream at the top of their incorporeal lungs.

Probably.

I wonder how many of the Gombi chimpanzees, after so many generations of being watched, now end up thinking, “Hello? Is there anybody there? Is that you, Jane?” Maybe that’s why they only rarely wander off alone; they just hate that spooky feeling of being watched by an invisible observer.

* * *

That’s all fine and good, as far as it goes, but I suspect that ape species differ in regard to their reaction to these subjective events. Please forgive the inaccuracy inherent in the following appeal to a few gross overgeneralizations, but gorillas are well known to be sweethearts, bonobos are peacemakers, and orangutans are the brains of the operation. That’s why I want to focus on orangutans in specific. If any ape has the potential to have brain problems like we do, it’s the orangutan.

Orangutans will puzzle out every little thing in their environment, and are famed in the zoo community for being escape artists. It seems that both orangutans and humans, then, share an obsession with figuring things out. (This will vary, of course, by individual in both species.) No lock is safe, and no reflective window goes unpunished, at least not until personal curiosity has been satisfied. So, given this need to analyze curious entities in their environment, maybe orangutans are more prone to worry about strange sensations than are the other apes. They’re certainly more prone to solve everything else.

More importantly, let’s talk about Chantek, an orangutan who was raised by Lyn Miles for nine years, and who then moved to the Atlanta Zoo in 1997. Last I heard, he was conversant in American Sign Language, with a vocabulary of about 150 words, and he would easily talk about remote places and things. His behavior was described as being comparable to that of a human 4-year-old, but I’m pretty sure that this refers to things like potty training and the like, rather than worrying about ghosts and so on. (I could be wrong.)

I have suggested that apes, in general, enjoy a communion that obviates the need for any further speculation about them associating a lack of whack with a feeling of difference from other members of their group.

But what if Chantek is already feeling different?

Admittedly, he still has no reason to form ideas about ghosts and the supernatural, not when he is used to being watched by unidentifiable observers who are hidden behind doors and one-way mirrors. If he feels like he’s being watched when he’s alone, he probably is, so he has no reason to figure out what’s going on.

Crucially, Chantek has experienced one whomping sociotemporal gap. His human mother, with whom he lived for nine years, can only visit him sporadically. Non-invasive behavioral studies show that humans and other animals maintain their hope of receiving just one more reward if those rewards are given erratically, as opposed to losing hope quickly if those rewards are first given regularly, and then stopped suddenly. Chantek is visited erratically, so he will continue to nurture a strong hope of receiving at least one more visit, even if the intermediate absences are prolonged. His brain will work overtime to fill those sociotemporal gaps, preferring continuity just as strongly as any human brain.

So, given all of the other information in this essay, here is the penultimate question: orangutans are the likeliest of the apes to puzzle over strange feelings like déjà vu, so how much more likely is it that Chantek, deprived of ape communion, recognizes his precognition as unusual?

* * *

The ultimate question then becomes: what do orangutans in general, and Chantek in specific, think about their precognition?

* * *

Well, it’s something to think about anyway, and now I feel better, because I’m no longer alone in worrying about it. We’re all equally crazy now, which means that we are all equally sane… about this issue anyway.

Which is a load off my brain.

Thanks.