Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 29, 1993 TAG: 9309070181
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: Outside the dormitory wing of the Why bunker the birds start performing around 5 in the morning. We stumble from bed, open a window and scream SHADDUP ALREADY, but they won't listen. What possesses them? Are they discussing something interesting, or is this twittering and twerping, as we suspect, total and complete gibberish?
The first thing to understand is that birds do not have a language. Language involves symbolic representation. Birds are just making sounds that convey the most rudimentary information imaginable, basically ``I am here'' and ``I am ready to get funky.'' The singing achieves two functions: It stakes out a territory, and it attracts a mate.
But you sorta knew that, probably. What you didn't know was that, in temperate zones like the United States, the male birds do all the singing, and for the most part they are being irresponsible. They should be foraging. Feeding themselves. A bird does all that flying around, all that hopping from branch to branch, and yet it's so tiny, no meat on them bones, and so obviously it has little storage capacity and has to constantly refuel itself. You can't eat and sing at the same time (try it!).
By singing instead of foraging, the male birds are bragging. They're strutting their stuff.
``To be able to sing like crazy first thing in the morning and not look for food means you're a pretty good bird. I'd even say they handicap themselves,'' says Gene Morton, a research biologist and leading bird expert at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
Birds form pair-bonds, just like humans. But the birds don't really get to know each other. (You can add another ``just like humans'' if you want.) In the tropics, birds mate for life (and females also sing), but even so, says Morton, they have shockingly little attachment to one another. A female may suddenly abandon her mate and join another male who has a better territory. The spurned male will immediately start advertising for a new mate. There's no grace period, no sense of decency. They never pause to ask, ``What about the children?''
Seriously, the fact is that not only do birds not love each other, they don't really recognize each other. Males have killed their mates when confined in cages, not because of the terror of the confinement but simply because the male didn't recognize the female, says Morton. Birds would have a hard time picking their mate out of a lineup.
But let's remember, they have a good excuse. They're birdbrained.
\ Q: Why can't we remember anything that happened to us prior to the age of 3?
A: Your basic 2-year-old is no longer just a blubbering mass of protoplasm, but has become a talking, thinking, reasonably coherent and often non-drooling creature. The child knows the names of people, can memorize songs, and may even remember what happened yesterday or last week. But the child will eventually forget all this. The memories will get purged, save for an image or two. Why?
Although this falls into the no-one-really-knows category, we heard an interesting theory from Robyn Fivush, psychologist at Emory University. She says that our memories of past experiences are organized in our brain as narratives. Kids younger than about 3 don't yet know narrative conventions. They can't tell a story. They don't know how to set the scene. They don't understand time, place, character, plot.
So even though they have plenty of language, and perception, and even memory, they can't shape all this stuff into a story that has a point. (The Why staff is still struggling with this.)
``There has to be a notion of a rising action, a climax, a resolution. There has to be some kind of emotional meaning to the event,'' says Fivush.
In other words, our memories start at the age when we realize that what we're all trying to do in life is find the moral of the story.
\ The Mailbag:
Julian O. of Palo Alto, Calif., objects to our omission of ``balance'' in counting up the number of senses people have. He writes, ``Why does the sense of balance get no respect? One can't even walk down the street properly without it. It's high time that people, especially teachers and school children, are taught that we have six distinct sense, not five.''
Dear Julian: A sense should convey information. The sense of balance doesn't, or at least not much. Equilibrium is more of an internal monitoring mechanism, a gyroscope of the self, and thus directed inward and not outward. You never walk into a bakery, take a deep breath, and say, ``Hmmmm! Doesn't this floor feel level!''
Michael P. of Seven Hills, Ohio, asks, ``How cold is twice as cold as zero degrees?''
Dear Michael: A degree is not like a number on a number line. Twice as few as 10 is 5, but 5 degrees isn't twice as cold as 10 degrees. The theoretical baseline for temperature is Absolute Zero, which is what the temperature would be if atoms somehow stopped moving entirely. Absolute Zero is minus 273.15 degrees Celsius or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit. So you could argue that minus 229.835 degrees Fahrenheit is twice as cold as zero.
But frankly, you should forget the numbers. Conduction of heat from your body is what counts. Twice as cold as zero is when you go outside in zero degree weather with wet hair.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB