Hello, Gorgeous!
“Know thyself.” It’s something we take for granted a large part of the time. But self-awareness is pretty huge in the whole scheme of things. Once we get the idea that we are an entity separate from others, we can start examining aspects of our own experience and think about others’ experiences from that context. Self-awareness lays the foundation for things like subjectivity and intersubjectivity, in which we interpret our own realities and the realities we create by interacting with others. Sorry, I have subjectivity on the brain because it’s a large part of what I’m writing about in my qualifying exams (from which I am currently taking a quick break).
Anyway, Happy is an elephant at the Bronx Zoo who has shown some evidence of self-awareness. Researchers used the ol’ “mark on the head” paradigm to show that Happy recognizes herself in the mirror. This sounds really simple, but most species can’t do this. I know my cats don’t do it, I’ve tried it.
More research is needed to determine the extent of awareness and see if it generalizes to other elephants (so far, Happy’s zoo-mates don’t pass the mark test). But still, pretty cool.
