The Collective Mind: How Early Humans Shared Experiences and Shaped Our World
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In an ingenious experiment performed by Juliane Kaminski (2008), two balls were placed in front of two barriers—one translucent and the other opaque—such that a dog could see both balls but the human subject, sitting behind the barriers, could see only one. When the human—looking at a predetermined spot so as not to indicate which ball could be seen—said “fetch,” the dog preferentially retrieved the one in front of the translucent barrier with the clear understanding that it was the one the human could see. In contrast, when the human turned his back on the balls, the dog retrieved them randomly on command, because it knew the human could now see neither one. Similarly, when the human was placed behind the dog with both balls in view, they were randomly retrieved. It is truly as if dogs live inside our mind. In this same way, our human ancestors lived within the mind of the groups that domesticated them.
