A Small Furry Prayer (21 page)

41

If you want to explore the mystical experiences at the heart of shamanic practice, there are four phenomena to focus upon. The first is the fundamental experience of solidarity between all living creatures, or unity, as the sensation is often called. Unity is not just a shamanic notion, it's a ubiquitous proposition showing up in almost every religion that exists or has existed on earth. The idea is so popular that Aldous Huxley dubbed it the “perennial philosophy,” and Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James agreed: “This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land.”

Despite this omnipresence, for most of the twentieth century, the weight of rational materialism kept scientists from treating unity seriously. This began to change in the early 1990s, when an older generation of researchers began vacating posts and the younger ones who took those places were not quite as hostile to metaphysical questions. Simultaneously, George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain” and money flooded into neuroscience. The cash arrived at almost the same time as a new generation of high-powered brain imaging technology—for the first time giving scientists interested in so-called mystical experiences the tools to actually study them.

At the forefront of this work sits Dr. Andrew Newberg, director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania. In the late 1990s, Newberg, alongside the late University of Pennsylvania anthropologist and psychiatrist Eugene D'Aquili, began placing an assortment of Catholic nuns and Tibetan Buddhists inside a single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scanner to take pictures of their brains during moments of
ecstatic meditation
, a slippery-sounding term with a very concrete meaning. For the Buddhists, this state is known as
absolute unitary being
—the state of being one with everything—and for Catholics as
unio mystica
—a state of oneness with God's love. Either way, both are descriptions of the experience of unity.

The SPECT scan showed a number of things, but critical to this discussion is the effects of meditation on the right parietal lobe. Often called the orientation association area (OAA), the right parietal lobe is the part of the brain that helps us orient ourselves in space, allowing us to judge angles, curves, distances, and body position. Specifically, this is the part of the brain that helps define the boundary between self and other. People who suffer a stroke or brain damage to this area have difficulty sitting down on a couch because they are unsure where their leg ends and the couch begins. What Newberg and D'Aquili discovered is that intense concentration temporarily blocks the processing of sensory information from this area. When this happens, because the OAA defines the end of the “me,” as Newberg explained in
Why God Won't Go Away
, “the brain would have no choice but to perceive the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real.” Newberg believes this explains the sense of unity felt by Buddhists and Catholics, but when I called him up to ask him, he also felt it works just as well to explain that mystical solidarity between human and animal.

The next three shamanic phenomena—the sharing of occult powers, shape-shifting, and speaking the same language—have been much tougher nuts to crack. The closest anyone has yet come is British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, the former director of cell biology and biochemistry at Cambridge University and a Royal Society research fellow, who has spent the past two decades examining the possibility that animals—especially dogs—possess occult powers. Sheldrake's work remains deliriously controversial, so much so that a few years ago, when speaking in nearby Santa Fe, Sheldrake was stabbed in the thigh by an audience member who, to quote
USA Today
on the matter, “was disturbed” by the contents of his lecture.

That controversy started in 1996, when Sheldrake delivered a lecture at the Cambridge Veterinary School reporting that dogs seemed capable of predicting the future, specifically detecting when their owners were heading home even when those owners were far beyond the range of canine senses. He had conducted a lengthy study “in which pets had been videotaped in their homes, as their owners, away at their place of work, were preparing to leave work.” Despite the fact that these owners purposely deviated from their normal routines, he discovered that forty-six percent of the dogs in his study group knew their masters were coming home up to an hour before they arrived. This study has been repeatedly duplicated, both in Britain and America, with fifty-one percent being the mean average for prescient dogs. Beyond knowing when their owners are coming home, Sheldrake has also reported canine anticipatory powers extending to other areas. In further experiments, he's found dogs great at predicting everything from illness and death to natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. All of this is still being vigorously debated, but his experiments have been fairly rigorous and his results undeniable. Personally, while I've never seen prescient behavior in my animals, after experiencing the peculiar sense of connectedness that occurred during the Five-Dog Workout—the improbable coordination of movements, the hive mind mentality (me catching Igor midstride being only one example)—Sheldrake's claim that there is an “invisible connection,” like a “stretched elastic band,” linking humans to dogs seems as good an explanation as any I've yet encountered.

I still didn't know what to make of the last two categories—shape-shifting or language sharing—but neither does anyone else. In recent years researchers such as Newberg have made great inroads into understanding the neuroscience of mysticism. Out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, trance states, stigmata, speaking in tongues, and a dozen other similar phenomena are now seen as the product of standard biology. In less than twenty years the paranormal has become the normal, but despite all this progress no one has yet produced a plausible explanation for most shamanic phenomena. Maybe, I thought, it was time to go back to the source.

One of the advantages to living near Santa Fe is being able to find shamans in the phone book. I found half a dozen, called each, left messages. Ken Robinson was the only one who called me back. With an undergraduate degree in philosophy, a graduate degree in liberal arts, and a second in counseling and psychology, Robinson has worked as a teacher and environmental advocate and then the director of a wilderness camp for children before moving into more traditional counseling for adults. Along the way he became friendly with the Lakota tribe, who introduced him to the Hetaka, an ancient Amazonian people, and thus began Robinson's shamanic education. “Just being human, that is the sacred task,” he said, quoting the Hetaka, summing up the whole of that education.

Robinson and I talked for a while. I learned the Hetaka not only believed in a mystical time of human-animal solidarity but agreed with Chief Seattle that unless we discovered it again there will be problems. I also found out the Hetaka do not practice shape-shifting, so Robinson couldn't tell me much about that. I asked about speaking to animals, and he told me not to be dazzled by language.

“Most people hear words like
shaman
and
mystical experience
and expect fireworks. Shape-shifting and speaking with animals are just modes of consciousness and methods of communication. They sound like magic, they may look like magic, but they feel perfectly normal.”

Which is when the puzzle pieces started to slide together. I'm not sure if it was just a wild coincidence, but this was the second time in a month I'd heard those exact words. A few weeks before I spoke to Robinson, a writing assignment had sent me down to Patagonia. Toward the tail end of that trip, I was in a car full of people heading north on the Carretera Austral, when we crested a hill and rounded a bend and screeched to a stop. The Carretera is Augusto Pinochet's madman's highway through the Andes. He built it as a sign of Chilean modernity, so laid it atop ancient animals paths and herding trails. But the gauchos, those fabled Patagonian cowboys, are a proud, stubborn bunch who aren't going to let something as unimportant as progress change their ways. So they continue to drive their cows down the old roads, even if the new ones were specifically designed to end the practice. We screeched to a stop to avoid crashing into a herd of cattle spread out across a quarter mile of highway.

There were easily five hundred head. Our car was quickly surrounded. Cows snuggling up against windows, cows hugging bumpers. Whatever was going to happen next was going to take a while. It didn't take a while. One of the gauchos made a tiny circling motion with his finger, and four dogs went to work. In less than thirty seconds they had closed the ranks and shored up the line. After the animals were bunched, the dogs looked at their gaucho for further instruction. If I hadn't spent the past two years with dogs and wasn't staring right at them at the time, I never would have noticed their motion. It was just the slightest of hesitation, the tiniest of glances. Then the gaucho responded in kind. He darted his eyes to the left and twitched a finger to the right, and the dogs split the herd in half. In less than ten seconds, they had created the perfect driving lane and we were back on our way. A glance and a twitch was all it took, that was the extent of the conversation.

My friend Kristina was in the car at the time.

“What the hell?” she said afterward. “How did that happen?”

“He twitched his finger,” I said.

“He twitched his finger and the dogs parted the Red Sea?”

“Dogs are really good at reading our body language.”

Kristina spun around in her seat, glanced back at the cattle, and shook her head.

“I don't know about that,” she said. “The whole thing looked like magic to me.”

42

What actually constitutes real magic is a difficult question to answer, though the longer I lived with dogs, the more comfortable I became with the undeniable thaumaturgical nature of our nonverbal communication. Then again, considering what we now know about this talent, perhaps that's none too surprising. The most famous investigation into an animal's ability to read human body language took place in Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century. A horse named Hans, owned by a man named Wilhelm von Osten, learned to solve simple math and language problems, tapping out answers with his hoof. He performed in public and became something of a sensation, earning the moniker “Clever Hans” and the consternation of Cartesians everywhere. The whole matter was thoroughly investigated by a University of Berlin psychologist, Oskar Pfungst, who discovered that Hans could only answer questions when the questioner knew the answer and the horse was in the same room as the questioner.

Hans didn't read German or solve arithmetic, but was fully capable of detecting tiny, mostly unconscious changes in body language that revealed those answers. Clever Hans has since become Cautionary Hans, as this story has become apocryphal for those wishing to attribute fantastic attributes to animals. But Hans performed for a whole lot of people intent on stumping him—not co-conspirators, rather intentional confounders. Everybody wanted to Pfungst the horse, so everybody tried to keep their faces blank and body language hidden. Hans still got the message

Horses were domesticated in 4000 BCE. It took them six thousand years to become this attuned to human body language. But horses have nothing on dogs. Man's best friend has been perfecting this skill for more than a hundred thousand years. Dogs are now considered the all-time champions at detecting human emotion and intention. Some researchers say they can read us better than we can read ourselves.

This skill took a little while to perfect. In the beginning, dogs scoured our bodies for nonverbal cues, but after a little while their gaze drifted north to our faces, the real fount of information. Most of what we know about this topic comes from former University of California Medical School in San Francisco psychologist Paul Ekman. In the 1960s, Ekman got curious about face reading, specifically about the messages being read. Psychologists once believed that facial expressions were culturally derived and thus different in different parts of the world. Ekman suspected otherwise. He thought facial expressions might be an evolutionary adaptation with universal commonalities. So he took pictures of people feeling different emotions—anger, sadness, joy, et cetera—and traveled the world showing them around. It didn't matter if he was in the rainforests of Brazil or the cities of Japan, everybody knew exactly what they were looking at. Facial expression appeared universal.

After Ekman returned from his trip, he wanted further confirmation. He got his hands on film of two tribes from Papua New Guinea: the South Fore, a sanguine, happy clan, and the Kukukuku, a nasty, murderous group whose male elders had a habit of turning teenage boys into sexual courtesans. Working with Wallace Friesen, Ekman had been sorting the footage for months, cutting out everything but close-ups of facial expressions. His plan was to compare both tribes. That plan got dashed when his mentor, the psychologist and famed face reader Silvan Tompkins, paid a visit to his lab—a story wonderfully recounted in Malcolm Gladwell's
Blink
:

As Ekman set up the projector, Tompkins waited in the back. He had been told nothing about the tribes involved; all identifying content had been edited out. Tompkins looked on intently, peering through his glasses. At the end of the film, he approached the screen and pointed to the faces of the South Fore. “These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful,” he said. Then he pointed to the faces of the Kukukuku. “This other group is violent, and there is lots of evidence to suggest homosexuality.” Even today, a third of a century later, Ekman cannot get over what Tompkins did. “ ‘My God!' I vividly remember saying, ‘Silvan, how on earth are you doing that?' ” Ekman recalls. “And he went up to the screen, and, while we played the film backward in slow motion, he pointed out the particular bulges and wrinkles in faces that he was using to make his judgment. That's when I realized, ‘I've got to unpack the face.' It was a gold mine of information that everyone had ignored. This guy could see it, and if he could see it, maybe everyone else could, too.”

To unpack the face, Ekman and Friesen decided to catalogue all its possible motions. They did this by researching the underlying muscles and identifying the forty-three movements these muscles can make. They spent months practicing, learning how to move each independently, then spent years learning to layer all these movements atop one another. It took years because two muscles moving in conjunction produce three hundred possible combinations; three muscles took the total up to four thousand. Seven years later, Ekman and Friesen had worked through five muscles and ten thousand variations. They discovered a lot of mishmash, but about three thousand of these movements had meaning. And these three thousand are what Gladwell described as “the essential repertoire of human facial displays of emotion.”

That repertoire is heavily lopsided. The left hemisphere of the brain both governs emotion and controls the right side of the face. Important signals such as fear, joy, and anger are all handled here. For face reading, the right side of the face is far more salient than the left. When we meet a stranger our gaze shifts to the right side of their face because that's how we figure out if the person wants to kiss us or kill us. The whole process is called “left-gaze bias,” and it's a survival instinct that dogs have learned as well.

In 2007, researchers at the University of Lincoln, in the United Kingdom, led by Dr. Kun Guo, showed a series of dogs images of people, other dogs, monkeys, and inanimate objects. When the dogs saw another animal or an inanimate object, their gaze moved evenly across the image. When they saw humans, their gaze moved directly to the right sides of the faces. Guo believes this was the critical evolutionary adaptation that was originally driven by a dog's desire to avoid getting kicked by a pissed-off master. And for a skill that started small, it sure got important quickly.

Over seven years of research, Ekman and Friesen spent a great deal of time labeling and practicing the micromovements of different facial expressions. They had been working their way through anger and disgust for weeks and the whole time had been feeling anger and disgust. “When this first occurred,” Ekman told Gladwell, “we were stunned. We weren't expecting this at all. And it happened to both of us. We felt terrible. … when I lower my brows … and raise the upper eyelid … and narrow the eyelids … and press the lips together … I'm generating anger. My heartbeat will go up ten to twelve beats. My hands will get hot. As I do it, I can't disconnect from the system.”

No one can disconnect from the system. What Ekman and Friesen discovered is that our facial expression are hardwired into our emotions. We cannot feel any other way. “Whenever we experience a basic emotion,” writes Gladwell, “that emotion is automatically expressed by the muscles of the face.” And this is not only how we feel our feelings but also how we feel for another. Mimicking facial expressions is how empathy works.

In 2003, Marco Iacoboni and a team at UCLA used advanced neural imaging techniques to examine people copying other people's facial expressions. The researchers made a groundbreaking discovery, finding far more activity in the emotional centers of those people's brains than showed up in the brains of people merely watching others make facial expressions. “For years, scientists have observed the reflexive mimicking of a wince when someone suffers a painful injury, and the infectious nature of joy or anger,” said Iacoboni. “Our finding show for the first time how these reflexive facial expressions prompt our brain to heighten our empathy for the feelings of others.”

It's not just human faces that are hardwired to emotions; the same holds true for dogs. If those original wolves couldn't read our faces, if their own facial expression didn't share similar emotional hardwiring, then any real level of cross-species communication would have proved extremely difficult. Domestication would have been impossible. Coevolution could not have happened. But it did happen. Along the way, a mutual interdependency was created. This most likely began as an equal partnership, but once we started to control dogs' food supply, the power structure tipped. Then, because supper was at stake, dogs' face-reading skills became even more acute and—because face reading is a subset of pattern recognition—dogs with better pattern-recognition skills were better face readers and had better relationships with people and consequently got more food and safer living conditions, and so had larger litters. Pretty soon it didn't matter that our two species didn't share a common language. Dogs could read our emotions, and empathy became another fundamental tool for their survival.

It's also what University of London researcher Atsushi Senju discovered while studying yawning. Yawning is an involuntary action practiced by almost every species on the planet. The meaning of a yawn is still a matter of debate, but we do know that its primary purpose is to convey information. In social animals, the information is important enough to group dynamics that yawning is deadly contagious, that is it's a mutually shared feeling powerful enough to trigger a mutually shared behavioral response. Humans yawn when we see another human yawn. We yawn when we see the word
yawn
. Contagion also crosses species lines. Chimpanzees yawn when they see a human yawn. Senju wondered if the same thing happened with dogs. He tested this by putting them in a room with strangers. Once eye contact had been established, the stranger yawned. As a control, Senju did a second trial where the stranger's mouth merely opened and closed. Twenty-one out of twenty-nine dogs yawned when the stranger yawned. None responded to the open mouth.

One of the main symptoms of autism is a lack of empathy. Researchers call this
mindblindness
, the inability to know the mind of another. This happens because mirror neurons in the brains of autistic individuals do not respond to the actions of others. This hampers their ability to learn imitative processes like language. Because facial muscles are hardwired into emotions and autistic individuals can't imitate those movements, they can't really empathize with others. For the same reasons, people with autism don't have a left-gaze bias nor are they susceptible to contagious yawning. On the other hand, dogs have left-gaze bias and are incredibly susceptible to contagious yawning because they're incredibly prone to copying our facial expressions. And this led Senju to conclude that dogs are also fully capable of empathizing with people.

Which might explain why older pets tend to look like their owners—a bit of long-standing folklore that was recently validated in two separate studies. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, discovered this tendency between purebreds and their owners, but not in people cohabitating with mutts. Christina Payne, at Simón Bolívar University in Venezuela, got the same results and attributed them to
assortative mating
. Characterized as “self seeking like,” assortative mating is an inborn trait that helps an animal find a genetically similar mate without fomenting inbreeding. Payne believes it also shows up when we choose a dog.

Yet assortative mating only begins the process. We learn to communicate with our dogs by face reading and face mimicking, and vice versa. The skin is elastic, but only to a point. Any action repeated over and over again will eventually leave a mark. Wrinkles, creases, and smile lines are those marks. The reason couples who have been married for a long time start to look like one another is because couples are emotionally resonant. They tend to feel similar things at similar times, so their faces wear in the same way. And the same thing happens between humans and dogs. In the process of trying to understand one another, we're slowly reshaping our faces to resemble one another's.

Even more important is that once dogs began reading our faces and mimicking our expressions, they also begin feeling our feelings. Emotions are behavior triggers; if you feel someone else's emotions for long enough, you'll start acting like them too—which is the reason pets often take on the personalities of their owners in addition to their appearance. And shared emotions are only the entrance to this rabbit hole.

Stress is a killer because the nervous system is hardwired into the immune system. And this holds true in most vertebrates. When Joy and I fight, our dogs start vomiting and shitting. This happens because they get scared and stare at our faces, trying to understand the problem. If the problem doesn't end quickly, in the way that dog problems tend to, they keep staring. Face reading becomes face mimicking becomes emotional contagion, which affects their immune system. Pretty soon Joy and I are not only annoyed, but we're mopping the floors to boot.

Chief Seattle said all things are connected, though failed to mention that it was our mirror neurons doing the connecting. He did say there would be consequences if we didn't honor this fact, and perhaps he was right about this as well. That first winter in Chimayo was cold. We were broke and scared and then Ahab's death sent me spiraling. I spent my days in a rocking chair; my dogs spent their days trying to figure out how to help. In doing so, they were flooding themselves with the stress hormones that matched my mood. We have some very old dogs with some very serious health problems. Under the best of circumstances, it doesn't take much to start a slide into illness. A cold night or a change in pack order is often enough. I stayed depressed for months on end, and that had to have an impact. We lost six dogs in six weeks after Ahab died. So I have to wonder—how many went from natural causes, and how many did my mood kill?