varika:

crysiana:

elodieunderglass:

flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:

elodieunderglass:

flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:

I have had this on my mind for days, someone please help:

Why are dogs dogs?

I mean, how do we see a pug and then a husky and understand that both are dogs? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a picture of a breed of dog I hadn’t seen before and wondered what animal it was.

Do you want the Big Answer or the Small Answers cos I have a feeling this is about to get Intense

Oooh okay are YOU gonna answer this, hang on I need to get some snacks and make sure the phone is off.

The short answer is “because they’re statistically unlikely to be anything else.”

The long question is “given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?”

The reason that this is a Good Big Question is because we are broadly used to categorising Things as related based on resemblances. Then everyone realized about genes and evolution and so on, and so now we have Fun Facts like “elephants are ACTUALLY closely related to rock hyraxes!! Even though they look nothing alike!!”

These Fun Facts are appealing because they’re not intuitive.
So why is dog-sorting intuitive?

Well, because if you eliminate all the other possibilities, most dogs are dogs.

To process Things – whether animals, words, situations or experiences – our brains categorise the most important things about them, and then compare these to our memory banks. If we’ve experienced the same thing before – whether first-hand or through a story – then we know what’s happening, and we proceed accordingly.

If the New Thing is completely New, then the brain pings up a bunch of question marks, shunts into a different track, counts up all the Similar Traits, and assigns it a provisional category based on its similarity to other Things. We then experience the Thing, exploring it further, and gaining new knowledge. Our brain then categorises the New Thing based on the knowledge and traits. That is how humans experience the universe. We do our best, and we generally do it well.

This is the basis of stereotyping. It underlies some of our worst behaviours (racism), some of our most challenging problems (trauma), helps us survive (stories) and sharing the ability with things that don’t have it leads to some of our most whimsical creations (artificial intelligence.)

In fact, one reason that humans are so wonderfully successful is that we can effectively gain knowledge from experiences without having experienced them personally! You don’t have to eat all the berries to find the poisonous ones. You can just remember stories and descriptions of berries, and compare those to the ones you’ve just discovered. You can benefit from memories that aren’t your own!

On the other hand, if you had a terribly traumatic experience involving, say, an eagle, then your brain will try to protect you in every way possible from a similar experience. If you collect too many traumatic experiences with eagles, then your brain will not enjoy eagle-shaped New Things. In fact, if New Things match up to too many eagle-like categories, such as

* pointy
* Specific!! Squawking noise!!
* The hot Glare of the Yellow Eye
* Patriotism?!?
* CLAWS VERY BAD VERY BAD

Then the brain may shunt the train of thought back into trauma, and the person will actually experience the New Thing as trauma. Even if the New Thing was something apparently unrelated, like being generally pointy, or having a hot glare. (This is an overly simplistic explanation of how triggers work, but it’s the one most accessible to people.)

So the answer rests in how we categorise dogs, and what “dog” means to humans. Human brains associate dogs with universal categories, such as

* four legs
* Meat Eater
* Soft friend
* Doggo-ness????
* Walkies
* An Snout,
* BORK BORK

Anything we have previously experienced and learned as A Dog gets added to the memory bank. Sometimes it brings new categories along with it. So a lifetime’s experience results in excellent dog-intuition.

And anything we experience with, say, a 90% match is officially a Dog.

Brains are super-good at eliminating things, too. So while the concept of physical doggo-ness is pretty nebulous, and has to include greyhounds and Pekingese and mastiffs, we know that even if an animal LOOKS like a bear, if the other categories don’t match up in context (bears are not usually soft friends, they don’t Bork Bork, they don’t have long tails to wag) then it is statistically more likely to be a Doggo. If it occupies a dog-shaped space then it is usually a dog.

So if you see someone dragging a fluffy whatnot along on a string, you will go,

* Mop?? (Unlikely – seems to be self-propelled.)
* Alien? (Unlikely – no real alien ever experienced.)
* Threat? (Vastly unlikely in context.)
* Rabbit? (No. Rabbits hop, and this appears to scurry.) (Brains are very keen on categorising movement patterns. This is why lurching zombies and bad CGI are so uncomfortable to experience, brains just go “INCORRECT!! That is WRONG!” Without consciously knowing why. Anyway, very few animals move like domestic dogs!)
* Very fluffy cat? (Maybe – but not quite. Shares many characteristics, though!)
* Eldritch horror? (No, it is obviously a soft friend of unknown type)
* Robotic toy? (Unlikely – too complex and convincing.)
* alert: amusing animal detected!!! This is a good animal!! This is pleasing!! It may be appropriate to laugh at this animal, because we have just realized that it is probably a …
* DOG!!!! Soft friend, alive, walks on leash. It had a low doggo-ness quotient! and a confusing Snout, but it is NOT those other Known Things, and it occupies a dog-shaped space!
* Hahahaha!!! It is extra funny and appealing, because it made us guess!!!! We love playing that game.
* Best doggo.
* PING! NEW CATEGORIES ADDED TO “Doggo” set: mopness, floof, confusing Snout.

And that’s why most dogs are dogs. You’re so good at identifying dog-shaped spaces that they can’t be anything else!

Okay but this is also really interesting in the context of seeing young children learn new things. I know one of the stories I see float around tumblr somewhere is about the writer as a young child who insistently told her parents that there was a big dog in the kitchen. Which turned out to be a MOOSE. Children are still learning categories and also have somewhat limited vocabulary to describe new experiences, but now I’m just thinking of the child’s brain being like “Furry, snout, friend, bork bork unknown???? CLOSEST MATCH: DOG.”

Crysiana is precisely right on this.  This is, in fact, exactly how a child’s brain works.

Going further into elodieunderglass’ explanation, the human brain is hardwired to categorize, but much like having an empty filing cabinet drawer with no tabs, it does not start out with any real idea how.  But that’s okay, because categorizing inherently means categories, so our brains are hardwired to build those, too–they’re called “schemata,” or singular “schema.”

So that phase babies go through that often frustrates so many parents, where they will put literally everything in their mouths?  That is a huge part of the initial schema-building period.  Baby is going, “What is this?  Is it edible?  Is it soft?  Is it hard?  How does it taste?  What does it feel like in my hand?  What does it feel like in my mouth?  What does it smell like?  What is this thing!?” And the brain starts to be able to categorize these things, even before Baby has words yet.

That’s still some pretty limited information, though, because Baby is small and soft and squishy and responsible parents do not let them get too far.  Plus, Baby is learning words now.  These words get incorporated into schema, too.  Suddenly, there is a word for things that are hard and cold and taste like this thing:  metal!  But there are also words for the traits that metal has, like hard and cold, and cold has these traits and hard has those traits and taste has those traits, and each of those traits has other words!  It’s a lot to take in, especially when you’re just starting to build all these schemata for the first time.

This is why it takes children several years to become verbal.  It also seems to be why learning multiple languages when young makes it easier to learn more languages when older–because flexibility is built into your earliest schema of “language.”  Interestingly, pre-verbal children can also physically make the widest range of sounds they ever will in their lives.  As they learn language(s), the brain throws out sounds that don’t fit into those schemata, and trying to re-learn how to make that sound later in life is comparatively difficult.

So you’ve got very young children who have these schemata.  But they’re kinda loose, because they’re still building that stuff.  So it may start out when the only thing they know is that this other-creature (schema: living thing) (schema: animal) with four legs and fur (schema: body parts) is “dog.”  They may, the first time they see a cat, call it “dog.”  And they may call a cow “dog.”  Or a moose.  Now, as they get older, more detail is added to dog, such as “bark” and “larger than this size” and “legs of such proportional length.”  And every time they meet a new dog, those details get added, so by the time they’re an adult, they can glance at an animal and largely at least go “dog” or “not dog.”

But.  It’s not perfect, either.  See, here’s the interesting part:  your brain will classify information whether you have enough to make a real determination or not.  So you’ll be walking home at night and all of a sudden it’s OMG DOG….and then you find out it’s just a shadow.  That information was reclassified pretty quickly, but not so quickly you didn’t have an instant of not knowing it was “not dog.”  And if you aren’t laughing at yourself for having mistaken a shadow for a real dog, you might actually remember, from then on, “there was a scary dog on the way home that night.”  And because you didn’t have enough information at the time, your brain will dip into that schema and find details to fill out, so that over time, that memory will flesh out so you really think there is absolutely no way you could have mistaken a shadow for that.  You remember its teeth!  You remember its growl!  You remember its eyes glinting!  You remember how it stalked you like you were food!  Shadows don’t have any of that!  But those details?  They all came out of your schema for “dog,” not out of reality.  Reality was that there was a shadow on a wall that moved as a car went buy, and it had a vaguely dog-like shape.  There were never teeth, never a growl, never a glint of eyes, and it might have moved, but it definitely never stalked you.

Plus, sometimes your shemata actually exclude things that belong in them.  If you’ve only ever encountered large dogs before–like, not even come across small dogs on TV or in books–then you might not classify a corgi or a Pomeranian or a chihuahua as a dog at all at first, until someone else tells you, “Yeah, they’re small dogs.”  Now, this is fairly unlikely to happen with dogs just because dogs are, worldwide, fairly ubiquitous in all their sizes and shapes.  Possibly some people who come from tribal societies that don’t have small dogs might have this trouble right at first–you might get that wide-eyed wonder reaction of “That’s a dog!?  But it’s so small and fluffy and cute!”  Guess what?  That is the sound of a schema rewriting itself.

And you do it yourself, I guarantee.  Every time you encounter one of those “weird facts,” and go, “Woah, I never knew that!” in fact.  And sometimes it sticks and sometimes it doesn’t–”chartreuse is a pinkish-purple” is one I was reading about the other day that a lot of people have in their minds and sometimes just can’t get rid of.  (Chartreuse is a yellowish-green; puce is the pinkish-purple.  My problem is the other way ‘round–I have to remind myself that puce isn’t green just about every time I hear the word.)  And some people have an easier time adjusting their schemata than others, and all people have a harder time adjusting some schemata than others, and schemata even include reactions of yourself and others and emotions in them.

And one last note of interest–one theory about why we dream is that it helps us sort information from the day into and out of various schemata.  That the reason dreams are so weird, universally, is that we are comparing apples and oranges, so to speak, and making new connections and severing old, outdated connections in doing so.  So yeah, if you haven’t gathered by now that schemata pretty much control your life, well…they do.