Self-Recognition in Fish Exploring the Mind in Animals

About this book

This book describes the process of making major breakthroughs in the study of animal self-awareness using fish. The discovery led by the author's team, proving the mirror self-recognition ability of fish, is vividly documented as they share the process of making, testing and verifying hypotheses and developing further hypotheses. The experimental results demonstrate the remarkable self-awareness in animals, overturning the conventional view and providing a key to understanding the origin of human self-awareness.

Starting from the current understanding of fish brains, individual recognition by their faces, the chapters introduce a series of research projects designed by the authors to understand mirror self-recognition (MSR) in animals. The sequence of tests into fish's MSR is documented, including how it started, the failures and successes, and the struggles. Additional tests carried out in response to various criticisms of the work have led to a re-examination of the research methods used prior to the author's work. The book then addresses the question of exactly when and how some fish recognize themselves in a mirror, exploring self-awareness and the "mind", in other words, the "Eureka moment" in fish. This book points out and overturns the contradictions in conventional wisdom based on anthropocentrism and hypotheses about the evolution of self-awareness, proposing a new hypothesis that the self-awareness of humans and fish will be homologous. The book takes readers on an engaging exploration of the scientific experiments and the remarkable discovery of animal intelligence.

Contents

Chapter 1. Fish Brains aren't Primitive, After All
Chapter 2. Fish, Too, Recognize Others by Face
Chapter 3. History of Research into Animals' Mirror Self-Recognition
Chapter 4. First Successful Experiment on Fish MSR
Chapter 5. How the World Received Our Published Paper
Chapter 6. Do Fish Recognize Their Mirror Images as Itself via Face-Recognition Like Humans?
Chapter 7. Fishes' Meta Self-awareness and Issues Related to MSR
Chapter 8. When Exactly Do Cleaner Wrasse Recognize The Mirror Image As The Self?
Chapter 9. Study of Eureka-Moments in Fish
Chapter 10. Epilogue and future perspectives

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Biography

Masanori Kohda is a Professor at the Graduate School of Science, Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan. His research interests include evolution and comparative cognitive science of animals, especially the mind and self-awareness.

Shumpei Sogawa is a Post-doctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Science, Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan. His research interests include animal behavior and comparative cognitive science, especially reciprocal altruism and self-awareness.