There are times when the crows seem surprised. They are pecking at the ground and will suddenly jump up or back or sideways and inspect the grass. I have no idea what they are reacting to. Something crawling up their leg? Nibbling their feet? The earth moving?
I figured that I was anthropomorphising by labeling this as 'surprise'. It was, perhaps, just a stimulus response to pain or discomfort or movement.
But listening to an interview with Dr. Michael Roussell made me reconsider. He explained that in moments of surprise there is a rush of dopamine which enhances learning. The surprised person (or crow) is motivated to find out what has shocked her out of her complacency. She wants to make sense of it. Surprise is when the brain's predictions do not align with reality. We want to make sense of the contradiction in order to have an accurate prediction next time. Surprises may be opportunities or dangers - but in either case attending to them (and being able to predict a similar event in the future) is adaptive.
In the case of the crows, perhaps it is young ones who are more often surprised - and these ‘learning bursts’ enable them more accurately to find bugs and worms in the future.
That sudden burst of activity - the shattering of complacency - also reminded me of something else... not so much a mood as a variability in vitality. You can tell from posture and tone of voice, from movement and eyes, what the level of a human or another animal's vitality is. We can so easily sink into the treadmill of modern life. This follows that ad infinitum. Yawn. And energy ebbs and declines. Surprise is a gift - even a not-too-bad bad one - a shot in the arm that lifts us out of automaticity
There are ways of courting surprise. Consider the crows. For years, I saw crows as just part of the landscape. Black blots and blurs that I paid no heed to. But when I began to seek out the crows and to watch them, they became interesting. I was driven to read more and learn more. But what piqued my interest, I now believe, was the moments of surprise. Tiny surprises, perhaps, but surprises nonetheless. When I started expecting them to do this and, instead, they did that, it was the surprise of the unfulfilled expectation that led me to want to find out why they did that rather than this. The more I knew, the more interested I became because as soon as I knew something, there was a belief ready to be countered by further crow-watching.
A little bit of learning seems to prepare the soil for possible surprises; surprises fuel curiosity; that spurs further learning and so on - ad infinitum. And it seems that one can hitch a ride on this virtuous cycle by opting to be interested in something as ordinary as a black blot on the landscape.
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