My cat has no time for resolutions
With no thoughts for the future and no dwelling on the past, Hattie is more mindful than me
Like many people around the world, I’ve used the start of the new year to initiate positive changes in my life, including starting this newsletter (which is equal parts exciting and terrifying). But it got me thinking about this strange ritual, this compulsion we have to use a single point in the passage of time to reset our lives. We can’t help but think back to the year just gone, reliving joyful occasions or things that could have gone better. And we also can’t help thinking about the days and months ahead, planning holidays and important dates, visualising what’s to come and how it will make us feel.
All of this is possible because our immensely powerful brains are capable of what’s been termed ‘mental time travel.’ This is the ability to disassociate from the present and mentally project ourselves backwards and forwards in time, re-experiencing things from our past or pre-experiencing what may lie ahead. Re-experiencing the past hinges upon our capacity for ‘episodic’ memory, which is the personal, subjective form of memory that allows us to relive a specific event in our mind (compared with semantic memory, which is essentially our storage of facts). By pre-experiencing what’s coming up, we can also adjust what we do to better serve our future needs. That, in essence, is what we’re doing with resolutions, and while this cognitive capacity may not stand out as being a particularly impressive one, given its ubiquity in humans (compared, say, with being a chess grandmaster or being fluent in six languages), it’s critically important in our lives. No other animal comes close to having the same capacity for mentally moving in time.
Our cat, Hattie, for example, is currently stretched out on the office floor in a patch of sun. She is sort-of sleeping, in that her eyes are closed and she’s making little snuffling sounds, but in that particular way that cats are able to rest while still being entirely aware of what is going on around them. While I can’t be certain, because I can’t ask her, there is no evidence to suggest that Hattie is contemplating what’s to come in 2024. And even if she held January 1st in some special regard, it is highly unlikely that she has the capacity to think about her future self. Cats, as far as we know, have a limited grasp of the future and that is typical of most other animals. Indeed, the consensus among researchers for many years was that the behaviour of other animals was driven only by their current motivational state, i.e. by their present feelings of hunger, thirst, sexual arousal and so on, meaning that they were essentially ‘stuck in time’.
There’s little about cats that challenges this view. Although experimental trials on future planning have not been done, the consensus among cat researchers is that their much simpler brains do not allow them to make long-term plans. Specifically, their frontal lobes are less well developed compared with other animals, particularly primates and more specifically, great apes. As cat expert John Bradshaw has written for Psychology Today:
Carnivores (which include domestic dogs and cats) have proportionally much larger olfactory bulbs than those of primates, reflecting their much greater reliance on scent to inform them about the outside world, while their prefrontal cortices, the “thinking” part of our brains that cover the frontal lobe, are much smaller.
In the other direction, some studies have been done to investigate how cats process the past, in terms of both working and long-term memories. Working memory (i.e. what is kept in mind at any moment) has been studied by hiding a treat in front of a cat, preventing the cat from retrieving it for certain lengths of time, and then seeing if it can correctly locate it. Across studies, the answer seems to be ‘sort of’ - cats could identify the correct location at above chance levels up to a delay of 60 seconds, but their performance declined rapidly over this time; in fact, they got worse at locating the treat even after a few seconds. Cats seem to have a short attention span, a fact that will surprise none of their owners.
Their long-term memory is more advanced, as demonstrated by a study looked into evidence for episodic memory. In this, individual cats were presented with four different bowls, two of which contained food, and allowed to eat from one of them. They then had a fifteen-minute break before the bowls were presented again, this time all empty. If the cats had simply learned a positive association between the bowl they’d eaten from and the reward of food, they would be expected to go back to that one. If, on the other hand, they had remembered incidental details about the experimental set-up and the fact that they had already eaten from one bowl, they would be expected to investigate the other bowl that had contained food. This is what the researchers found, leading them to conclude that cats can encode ‘what’ and ‘where’ information from a single experience. Since episodic memory comprises information about the ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ of an event, this suggests that cats may have ‘episodic-like’ memory capabilities, in common with dogs, apes, corvids, cuttlefish and more. So, their memories may be more developed than their planning abilities, but it’s still unlikely that they spend any time reliving those experiences. Hattie, I’m pretty sure, is not a ruminator.
That doesn’t mean that she has no sense of time because that’s clearly not the case. She, in common with most domestic cats, follows a very predictable daily routine, including knowing when to start pestering us for food. Her feeds are not equally spaced through the day, so her begging can’t just be down to having an empty stomach. In fact, researchers think that cats do have a sense of time, but it’s likely not the same as ours. Yes, they have an internal body clock (circadian rhythm), which will be influenced by things like daylight hours and the position of the sun. But they are also exceptionally well attuned to changes in their environment, and they use regular environmental cues to build their daily routines. When we start moving around in the morning, we hear Hattie jump down from where she’s been sleeping on the sofa, and then she waits for us at the bottom of the stairs. If it takes too long for one of us to come down, she’ll start plaintively mewing, but otherwise she doesn’t start chatting until we’re in the kitchen, with a stream of excited chirps and squawks.
Hattie’s lived experience is first and foremost about staying safe. With that need met, her little brain can entertain other thoughts - like where to find a good sunny spot for a snooze or where her humans are (according to this study, which tested cats by playing them recordings of their owners’ voices in different locations, cats are surprised when they hear our voice in the ‘wrong’ place, suggesting that they keep mental track of where we are in the house).
She does not entertain thoughts of self-actualisation because, as a cat, she has no need for such thoughts. Her brain is the product of evolutionary processes over many generations that equipped her with the necessary skills to live as a cat; reflecting on herself and her potential is not one of them. She does not dream of greater things because she knows nothing of such things, and even if she did, they would have no relevance to her life. Sometimes I look at her and feel a pang of sadness at the richness of life that she’ll never know. But I’m looking at it in the wrong way, muddying the waters by projecting my human-specific thoughts, beliefs and motivations onto her. She may be a simple soul but she does not dwell on past failures and decisions, nor does she worry about what lies ahead. She has not mapped out 2024 and she is not fretting about whether people (or other cats) will like her new projects. All that matters is what is going on now, in the moment, and how that’s making her feel. This non-judgemental being in the present is akin to mindfulness (although she’s likely not intentionally observing her thoughts and feelings) and that is something that many people will have resolved to try more of this year. Our brains are fantastically, phenomenally complex, and they equipped our ancestors with the skills to solve almost every challenge that was thrown in our path, as well as to create breathtaking art, music, and literature. But sometimes they need quietening, too. And at these times we can perhaps benefit by looking to our animal companions, who have no need for resolutions, and taking inspiration from their wonderful ability to just be.
Facts of the fortnight
Over my last two weeks of research, these facts have stuck in my mind:
Every year, during the great migration, the mass drowning of ~6000 wildebeest trying to cross the Mara River in Kenya contribute the equivalent biomass of ten blue whale carcasses to the river! Source: Subalusky 2017.
The most lethal substance known to science is botulinum toxin [yes, that botulinum toxin that people pay to have injected into their faces], with just 0.8–0.9 μg (1 μg being 1 millionth of a gram) needed to kill a 70 kg human if inhaled. Sources: CDC 2021.
Matabele ants use antibiotics to tend to the wounds of injured colony members - something seen in no other non-human animal. By recognising which wounds are infected and treating them with antimicrobial compounds, they reduce mortality by a whopping 90%! Source: Frank 2023 (but seen on the excellent Netflix series, ‘Life on Our Planet’)
#NaturePhotoADay
If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll see that late on New Year’s Day I decided to set myself the challenge of starting a nature related Project365 (this year, #Project366), meaning I have committed to sharing one nature/outdoorsy photo every day for the whole of 2024. It’s not something that I was planning or even actually thinking about; rather, the idea popped into my head just as I was about to turn off my bedside light and rather than do the sensible thing and go to sleep, I went ‘Oh what the hell!’ and put it on Instagram.
This is no bad thing, I told myself, because:
I already take an unreasonable number of photos of bees, bugs, flowers, fungi and more, so it shouldn’t be difficult.
Making sure that I get some outdoors time every day can only be a good thing this year, especially as my book deadline approaches and I become increasingly reluctant to leave my desk.
Nobody wants to see fifty photos of Iffley Lock, so this will force me to get a bit more creative in terms of where I go and what I pay attention to, which can also only be a good thing for my sanity.
New Year’s Day was a doddle - we were with friends in Derbyshire and enjoyed a clear, sunny morning walk around the woods. Everything was beautiful and so, as I sat in bed that night, looking back over the numerous possibilities for that first photo, it’s possible I was lured into thinking this would be easy. Two days later, as leaden skies gave way to Storm Henk’s chaos of water and wind, the reality of what I’d signed up for started to sink in. On December 7th, I posted a photo of an earthworm. Things could only get better.
You can follow along on Instagram if you like, but I’ll share my favourite from the previous fortnight here anyway. And for this first newsletter it seems fitting to choose the photo I took on January 1st - for its symbolism with the newness of the year, because it was a beautiful scene and because, somehow, I hold it responsible for kicking this whole thing off.
Happy New Year to you all and thank you for reading my first foray into the world of Substack! I hope that you found something of interest. I’m excited about developing this and telling more scientific stories about all kinds of animals.
Please do feel free to share this with anybody that you think might be interested and get in touch if you have any comments.