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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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