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LIVING FOR CHANGE
Hyenas: Sociable, and Smart
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, May 4-10, 2008
I can't get out of my mind an article on the social intelligence of hyenas
by Carl Zimmer that I read two months ago in the Science Times section of
the March 4 New York Times.
Zimmer tells the story of what Michigan State University Professor Kay E.
Holekamp learned about brainpower from her studies of spotted hyenas.
For two decades Dr. Holekamp studied these hyenas on the savannas of
southern Kenya. She watched cubs emerge from their dens and take their
place in the hyena hierarchy, saw alliances form and collapse, and
observed clan wars in which dozens of hyenas joined together to defend
their hunting grounds against invaders.
"It was like following a soap opera," she said.
Holekamp was impressed by the comparatively large size of the frontal
cortex in the brains of these hyenas.
That led to her thinking about the size of the human brain which is seven
times larger than one would predict for an average mammal of our size. Many
of our extra neurons are in a region called the frontal cortex, where much
of the most advanced thinking takes place. Our fellow primates. also have
large brains, although not as large as our own. Those with a big frontal
cortex tend to live in large groups.
That's how Holekamp arrived at the hypothesis that the relatively large
size of the frontal cortex in the brain of spotted hyenas is probably due
to their living in community and solidarity.
If this is true about hyenas, then maybe the dumbing down of Americans over
the last fifty years is not just the fault of the media but a result of
our increasing abandonment of the social ties which down through the ages
have been a normal and natural part of human life. When families stopped
eating meals together , when we started using dryers instead of hanging our
wash on backyard clothes lines, when we stopped walking to the corner to
catch the trolley or the bus, when we began entering our homes through our
garages without even waving to our neighbors, our living in community began
to decline and with it our intelligence.
Maybe we watch so many sitcoms on TV because we are trying to relive that
social experience, if only vicariously.
Maybe so many college students get involved in community service-learning
because they hope it will increase their brainpower.
Maybe we urgently need to work on those youth-adult partnerships that Zakia
Carpenter projected in her recent article.
It is a disgrace that more educators are not mobilizing against
Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program because it focuses so narrowly on
tests in basic Reading and Math instead of creating a new paradigm for
schools based on what modern neuroscience tells us about how learning takes
place.
For example, neurologist and pianist Frank Wilson writes, "For the
brain to work it needs information that can only come from the hand acting
on objects or from tactile and kinesthetic perception." " There is not and
cannot be anything called intelligence independent of the behavior of the
whole organism, or of its entire and exclusive history of interactions with
the world." (The Hand: How its Development Shaped the Brain, Language and
Human culture, Pantheon 1998).
Renate and Geoffrey Caine warn us that our factory-type schooling is
failing because it ignores the inner and community life of students and
deprives learning of meaningful contact. Instead of recognizing the
complex, creative and self-correcting potential of the human brain, it
"fragments learning into subject areas, substitutes control for the natural
desire to learn, coopts naturally active children for hours in assembly line
classroom structures…destroys opportunities for learning from elders, from
each other and from the new generation." (Making Connections: Teaching and
the Human Brain, 1991, and Education on the Edge of Possibility, 1997,
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development).
But the tide may be turning. In the last few years the Boggs Center
has been receiving a growing number of visits and reports from teachers
all over the country who are engaging their students in activities
(like gardening, recycling, beautifying neighboring parks, etc.) that involve
the hand as well as the brain and also provide a community context for
learning.
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