Few things have earned as much as thought and attention in the collective human mind as death.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
So I became kind of obsessed with death in that time in my life.
A possum playing dead.© EyeEm Mobile GmbH via Getty
And at the time, I really didnt link the two things in my head.
I needed to find a way of coping with my own existential fears.
Monso:Comparative cognition in general is really wary of the dangers of anthropomorphism and anthropomorphizing animals.
Many years ago, before the cognitive revolution, psychologists werent even talking about the mental states of animals.
They were just describing their behavior.
And I understand why they are doing it, and I think the reasons are important.
But you venture to expand our understanding of death beyond that.
Why is it important to perhaps disconnect ourselves from that human perspective?
And if they react emotionally to death, its not going to be necessarily like our own reactions.
But they are very different ideas.
it’s possible for you to understand that someone has died without grieving that person.
And in fact, we do that all the time.
But this doesnt mean that they dont understand whats going on.
Another thing is that death is very often a gain for a lot of animals.
For predators, for instance, death is not a loss.
It means that theyre going to have a full stomach that night.
So, I think its very important to separate these two ideas.
She goes into whats called thanatosisthis death feigning where she incorporates all sorts of signals of death.
She adopts the bodily and facial expression of a corpse.
Her body temperature drops.
Her breathing and heart rate are reduced.
She secretes this putrid smelling liquid, and she stops responding to the world.
Now, the opossum doesnt necessarily understand what shes doing.
Were not even aware of this, but it happens automatically.
For the opossum, its probably something like that.
Its probably also an automatic process.
So by looking at the peacocks tail, we can have a window into the mind of the peahen.
The opossums death display is similar in that it provides a window into the minds of her predators.
But for this to work, she needs to put on a convincing death display.
And the opossum is not the only animal who does this.
And so this, too, points to the concept of death being actually pretty widespread in nature.
But what do you hope readers most take away from reading it?
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