BLACKFISH: Q+A with the neuroscientist about Cetaceans

THIS IS A GREAT ARTICLE in found in THERAPTOR LAB:

ORDER FILM AT AMAZON.com

ARTICLE AT:
http://theraptorlab.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/inside-the-mind-of-a-killer-whale-a-qa-with-the-neuroscientist-from-blackfish/

 

Two weeks ago, I saw ‘Blackfish’, the fascinating new documentary about killer whales in captivity. Here’s the trailer.

I enjoyed the movie, but it left me with questions. A lot of questions. Neuroscience questions. What makes whales different from other animals? How do whales perceive humans? What did the filmmakers mean when they said that killer whales have a wide range of emotions? How smart are these animals, really?

So I called up Lori Marino, a neuroscientist prominently featured in ‘Blackfish’, and asked her to satiate my curiosity.

What are some characteristics that set killer whale brains apart from human brains? In ‘Blackfish’, you and the other scientists mention that a particular area of the orca brain is enlarged.

If you look at the limbic system — the emotion-processing area in all mammal brains — you find something really interesting. There’s some parts of the limbic system of dolphins and whales that have changed and actually gotten smaller, but there are other parts of it that are adjacent areas that are much larger and more elaborate than in the human brain. That area is called the paralimbic region.

So they have like an extra lobe of tissue that sort of sits adjacent to their limbic system and their neocortex. And, you know, you can infer from that. That lobe has something to do with processing emotions, but also something to do with thinking. It’s very highly elaborated in most cetaceans and not at all or not nearly as much in humans or other mammals, so it suggests that there’s something that evolved or adapted in that brain over time that did not occur in other mammals, including humans.

In the movie, this is said to be a sign of a range of emotions that possibly outranks that of humans.

CONTINUE READING CLICK HERE