Customer Reviews

Nature: Animal Minds

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Animal consciousness is neglected topic among documentaries. Even David Attenborough's epic "Life of ..." series does not have a single episode dedicated to animal consciousness. "Nature: Animal Minds" is the only existing documentary (right now) that addresses both how we can know whether an animal is intelligent and what we can know about animal intelligence. The topics dealt with in the first program that probe the features of animal intelligence are: navigation, insight, tools, abstract thought, and language. The second program deals with other features of animal intelligence including: emotions - fear and happiness, sadness, stress, love, and "secondary emotions." In the third program the topics are: consciousness, awareness, the neo-cortex of larger brained animals, language, knowledge of self-awareness, pain, and death. Throughout the 3 programs both optimistic and pessimistic scientists and philosophers are interviewed about their contributions to the field of studying animal consciousness.
It is not enough to read about animal consciousness; it is a profound experience to watch video of animal behavior to see for yourself the relative degree of awareness of nonhuman animals.

This set includes three hours of video combining summaries of current research, demonstrations, and excellent footage of animals behaving. A remarkably good job of translating key experiments into visuals and reenactments. A plus is that in most cases, the video interviews the scientists about their work. This keeps the films from being just "gee whiz" animal stories. I recommend this for teachers of introductory animal behavior courses, high school or college level. Production values are very high. My students watched all three hours with rapt attention.