Yesterday was so delightful I slept in an extra hour! If this keeps up you may start getting an afternoon beaver post! It also gave me free time to think about what I – the child retired psychologist – want most to say about Mike Dugout’s outstanding newest film.
I want to teach you about “Dishabituation”.
Psychologists want to learn things about children and infants but sometimes they can’t tell us everything we want to know and we have to find other ways to get the data. For example, we’d like very much to know about what babies LEARN and what they REMEMBER of what they learned. But we can’t ask them of course.
One way around this is to observe when babies are “surprised”. Because this allows us to inter that they had already learned to expect the world to be a certain way and were startled to find out when it wasn’t. This is called “Dishabituation” for obvious reasons. And researchers do all kinds of clever experiments designed to show when it happens and thus prove infant learning has previously occurred.
(If you thought that babies weren’t learning about the world think back to that day when you’re kid dropped his bottle 43 times on the kitchen floor and you had to bend and pick it up every single time. S/he was discovering gravity that day. Because at a certain point babies have discovered that things usually fall DOWN when you drop them. If you rigged up a study so that bottles could float away when a baby dropped them you would find out whether dishabituation occurred. And depending on the age of the baby I’m willing to bet it would.)
Which brings us to one of the things I love BEST about beavers. They are entirely unflappable. They very rarely act surprised. All the researchers with all the clipboards in all the world waiting to spot dishabtuation behind the two way glass would be waiting for hours without success. Because it almost never happens. I watched beavers at close range for a decade and I saw one beaver once react with surprise. And that was a kit. Mostly they just roll with whatever comes. And its not because they haven’t learned about the world. Because they have.
Mike from Saskatchewan shared the PERFECT film to see what beavers know about the world. And if ever there was going to be a chance for observing beaver dishabituation this is it. And I invite you to notice how entirely UNFLAPPABLE the beaver is instead.
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Isn’t that wonderful? That beaver obviously KNOWS that chopping down a tree should make it fall. So it understands gravity as well as your infant with the bottle. But that tree clearly isn’t falling. And the beaver tries a little more. But exhibits no surprise, And then nibbles a little something. Tries again. Gives up again. Tries a different way. And then quits altogether.
It’s almost like you can hear his inner monologue saying, huh, Some fuckers don’t fall. Oh well.
When you think about the life of a beaver and its dependence on water it makes sense. A beaver needs to know about hydrology and physics. But it also needs to understand the most important concept in fluvial geomorphology that humans fail to learn.
Things don’t always do what you expect them to.
I asked Mike to check back on the tree the next night and he confirmed that it had eventually been hauled away. Because physics or no, beavers are persistent.
