This chapter evaluates the debate between behavior-rule and mindreading accounts of the abilities of some nonhuman animals. (Although the evidence concerns canids and corvids in addition to primates, we focus on the latter.) We show that although the data are by no means conclusive, they presently favor a mindreading account, suggesting that simple forms of mentalizing are quite prevalent among...

Plants are organisms whose great biological distance from humans has aroused cultural interest as powerful and/or dangerously unfamiliar creatures, especially during the Victorian period. «The Flowering of Strange Orchid» (1894), by Herbert George Wells, tells how an orchid collector is attacked to near death his latest acquisition. The plant attacks human with its «tentacle-like aerial rootlet...

While high altitude mountain climbers know that the human brain can eventually adjust to low oxygen levels, sadly the same is not true in the clinical setting. Within minutes of a stroke or heart failure, delicate neural tissue is already beginning to shut down as the processes that initially protected the brain begin to fail and irreversible damage ensues. But not all creatures suffer such dra...

In normal observers, gazing at one's own face in the mirror for a few minutes, at a low illumination level, produces the apparition of strange faces. Observers see distortions of their own faces, but they often see hallucinations like monsters, archetypical faces, faces of relatives and deceased, and animals. In this research, patients with depression were compared to healthy controls with resp...