At the turn of the 20th century, a famous horse named Clever Hans toured Germany. The horse stunned crowds as his trainer demonstrated the animal's alleged ability to understand German, tell time and ...

Human reading looks so ordinary that it is easy to treat it as the default way brains extract meaning from marks. Yet when I ...

Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don't? It's one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive ...

We’ve been wondering what goes on inside the minds of animals since antiquity. Dr. Doolittle’s talent was far from novel when it was first published in 1920; Greco-Roman literature is lousy with ...

In 2016, according a study by the GFK Group, it was estimated that more than half of the world's population owned a pet, with the stars of the household being cats, dogs, fish and birds. But even if ...

Little scientific work has been done on the “language” of animals. Partly because most animals are not very gabby, partly because they are shy, until lately the only available collections of animal ...

Some of the building blocks of human language appear to be present in a wide range of social animals. Key elements of grammar previously thought to be used only by humans have been found in animals as ...

An excerpt from Eva Meijer's book 'Animal Languages,' an exploration of how animals speak to each other and to humans. By Eva Meijer/MIT Press Reader Published Jul 29, 2023 7:00 PM EDT This article ...

I recently read a very interesting book by Dr. C. P. (Chuck) Rosenthal called How the Animals Around You Think: The Semiotics of Animal Cognition. He is a professor of narrative writing and theory at ...

First there was the myth than animals did not use, let alone make, tools. Then the assumption that animals do not have culture was proven wrong. A significant step in the growing realization that all ...

The COVID crisis throws into relief what happens when grief has—quite literally—nowhere to go. The evidence suggests that most people summon strengths that surpass their own expectations. Animals do ...