Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [7]
Many consider learning to be a hallmark of intelligence. It turns out that almost all of the known nine thousand species of birds have a song, but about half of them have to learn how to sing. If they lack the opportunity to learn, they develop songs different from those heard in nature. Young birds must listen to adults, then practice on their own. Birds even appear to practice singing in their dreams. Research shows that sleeping songbirds fire their neurons in intricate patterns similar to those they produce when singing. Some songbirds, like canaries, change repertoires every year. Scientists correlated this to changes in the birdsâ brains and went on to find that adult canaries generate a steady stream of new neurons. This overturned a century of scientific theory which held that brains in adult animals do not change. Now it appears that all animals including humans grow new neurons throughout their adult lives. On this count, our brains are not so different from those of birdsâfortunately.
Indigenous people in the Amazon and elsewhere have long said that birds and other animals can communicate with humans. Shamanism is all about attempting to dialogue with nature. When shamans enter into trance and communicate in their minds with the plant and animal world, they are said to speak the language of the birds. Historians of religion have documented this phenomenon around the world.
Scientists and shamans could join forces to try to understand the minds of birds and other animals, I told myself, gazing into the waters of the Urubamba.
Our canoe approached a break in the forest cover on the right bank of the river. This was where an international consortium led by an Argentinian petroleum company was building a center of operations called Las Malvinas (the Falklands). Pristine forest gave way to bulldozers and earthmovers. There were huge mounds of orange clay, deep pits filled with water, makeshift housing for construction workers, giant tubing lying in stacks, and a landing pad for helicopters. Beneath the Urubamba Valley lies one of the worldâs largest known deposits of natural gas. Matsigenka communities own the lands, but the Peruvian state owns the subsoil and has granted the right to exploit it to the petroleum consortium.
Traditionally, shamans around the world report dialoging with nature about the extent to which humans may exploit it. In particular, shamans in numerous indigenous societies refer to an entity known as the âowner of animalsâ with whom shamans negotiate in their trances for the release of game. The owner of animals is said to protect plants and animals, and place limits on the productive activities of humans when they act recklessly or greedily.
What, I wondered, would the owner of animals say about driving a pipeline into the heart of world biodiversity? Perhaps that we are birdbrains.
Chapter 2
AGNOSTIC VISIONS
Prior to traveling in the Urubamba Valley, I had visited an Ashaninca shaman named Juan Flores Salazar, who lives in the Pachitea Valley, in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon.
The hike from the Pachitea River up to Floresâs place in the hills took me through primary rain forest. The air smelled musty and fertile, like in a greenhouse. In the thick vegetal tapestry all around me, every plant seemed different from every other. Even the trees that towered up into the sky all seemed different from one another. And those that had partially fallen over and begun to decompose, had arrays of plants growing out of their rotting trunks. Rain forests stand on poor soils, but they embody exuberant life.
Two years before, I had asked Flores to administer ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew, to three molecular biologists who had come to the Peruvian Amazon to see if they could obtain scientific information in such conditions. Flores had risen