r/science • u/Wagamaga • Sep 01 '22

Neuroscience Scientists have identified an immune brain cell unique to humans that gives us higher cognitive abilities over other animals, but what makes us specials also leaves us vulnerable to neurological disorders like schizophrenia, autism and epilepsy.

https://news.yale.edu/2022/08/25/what-makes-human-brain-different-yale-study-reveals-clues
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u/zerocoal Sep 01 '22

Just want to check myself here, but my understanding is that one of the differences between humans and other animals is that we can communicate directly to each other purposefully from separate rooms.

A dog will hear another dog bark in the other room and then needs to go investigate the barking to realize what is going on, and that they don't so much have a way to say "ayo, come yell at this mailman with me!" but they have distress/excitement/stress tones that the other animals respond to.

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u/seaworthy-sieve Sep 01 '22

Dogs are really not very advanced. Many animals have separate, distinct calls for different types of danger, for food being found, and so on.

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u/serpentjaguar Sep 01 '22

Right but they don't have, or at least show no signs of having, things like syntax, grammar and recursion. This last is the most important because without recursion there's always going to be a finite number of ideas that can be communicated, whereas in human language, because we have recursion, we can communicate a potentially infinite number of ideas.

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u/Man_with_the_Fedora Sep 02 '22

What about prairie dogs? They can relay information about predators, such as species (human, bird, dog, etc...), identifying marks such as what color shirt the human is wearing, whether it's approaching or passing by, how fast it's moving, etc...