In fact, scientists attributing consciousness to any animal is so recent that the internet is older. In 1976 a zoologist named Donald Griffin published The Question of Animal Awareness, a book arguing that animal cognition ought to be taken seriously. He and a colleague had been responsible in 1944 for discovering that bats navigate by echolocation. Now, after a lifetime spent watching those creatures, he became convinced they had inner worlds. They had flexible behavior, he said, or the ability to change their behavior as external circumstances changed, a hallmark of true intelligence. He’d watched bats develop clever techniques for finding food; they could clearly make decisions on the fly, and exhibited many of the same problem-solving abilities as humans did. Animal thought and reason ought to be seriously studied, he argued. After all, despite the flourishing of neuroscience, no one had yet found any part of the brain unique to humans that might be responsible for this hallowed “consciousness.” Wasn’t it time to give up the ghost
* hallow: 신성하게 하다