Isabella Rossellini on how acting connects to animal cognition

A dinner party for science

0:00Hi, I'm Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. Pass the cocktail napkins and refill your glass, because today we're having a dinner party. But don't worry, you will not be seated next to your neighbor who wants to tell you all about his lawnmower. Instead, you'll be between Isabella Rossellini, yes, the Italian model, movie star, and director, and Dr. Carl Safina, ecologist and author of many books, including Beyond Words, What Animals Think and Feel. This may seem like an unusual pairing, but it turns out they have a surprising amount in common. Both have a deep interest in animal cognition and our place in the natural world, but bring distinctly different lenses to their exploration of this corner of science. And that is what we're going to talk about today. So, thank you both for making my dream dinner party happen.

0:57Thank you for having us. Yes, welcome to Science Friday. Always fun to be with you, Flora.

Returning to school for animal behavior

1:02So, Isabella, around the same time that you were guest-starring as Jack Donaghy's ex-wife on 30 Rock, you were also back at school as an adult getting a master's in animal behavior. Why? I was always interested in animal behavior. My father gave me a book by Conrad Lawrence, and I'm sure Carl has read. I'm sure I have. King Solomon's ring. I was 14. And it was literally as if a little lamp all went up into my head, and I said, that's what I want to do. But at the time, I was growing up in Italy. There was zoology. There was biology. But there wasn't specifically ethology, animal behavior. I was very intimidated by scientific subject because I was a very bad student.

1:51So, I looked into doing agricultural studies. But everybody discouraged me. And now I have a farm. Because at the time, when I was the right age to go to university, all the small farm collapsed. And it was this industrial farming that took over also in Italy. So, I remained in the family business of acting and modeling, which was a little bit my own. You know, your backup was acting and modeling. When science didn't work out. Well, it didn't work out. If your day job falls through. I never tried, you know, because I was intimidated. And it's not the world that I grew up with.

2:25But then as you get older, you do – you're ready to fail more. When you're young, you have to prove yourself you could do it. So, when you're intimidated, you don't dare. But when you're older, you just say, well, what the hell? I just want to do – I want to know. And so, that's why I went back to university. You were doing it for yourself. Yeah. Yes, yes, definitely. I was in my 50s. Nobody was going to hire me.

2:51That's not true. Carl, was science your world growing up? I mean, were you intimidated by science in any way? Of course. I'm terrible at math. My field where I have a PhD is ecology. It has become very quantitative.

3:10I would say I was only science-oriented because I like trying to know about the actual world and nature. It wasn't that I loved all of science or was equally good at all of science. It was that that was a way to find out – the best way to find out about nature, animals, ecology, animal behavior especially. That's what Isabella and I – that's why we resonate so well together because we both have the exact interest in science that's our main interest, which is what do animals do and why do they do it?

3:48And, you know, when I was a little girl, I had a dog and my dog seemed to me that he was able to think, to remember, to understand my moods, to anticipate what I wanted to do. And yet, I was always told, oh, no, animals, they're just – they're like machines. They're just basic instinct. And you're doing that because you project some infantile dream. And it's not an infantile dream. I don't know how science proved it, that they are sentient and are able to think.

4:23They're able to feel. And maybe the fact that I didn't understand math or chemistry, that was the only way I understood animal. I could connect to them. And maybe it was helpful to be ignorant. Isabella, what was one of your biggest takeaways from your degree? Did you have aha moments? Well, it was exactly this. I said, am I crazy or am I – that my dog is happy to see me, that his dog is waiting for me when I come home?

4:53And I also would imagine that probably because there is a link and a lot of genes that we share with the animals, I even dare to say, maybe that's a big stretch in science, that fear feels the same in human and in a dog or in a rat. But why wouldn't it? Why wouldn't it? How couldn't it? If it is a link, yes. Fear can't feel like pleasure in them. No, exactly.

5:18Carl, has the field of animal cognition changed? Totally, totally. Because when we were growing up, we were told that humans are the only things that can think. Humans are the only things that are aware or are conscious at all. Everything else is just a little biological machine. And that has just about completely flipped because of what we actually have finally found out through things like neurobiology and all the new technology.

5:48You know, you can image the brain of a rat while it's dreaming, and it's lighting up the same as a human when they're dreaming. You can show dogs in an MRI photographs of strangers and people that they know, and their love part of their brain lights up with the people they know, just as it does with people with the same experiment. I mean, I also know that there's this concern in science that, you know, we don't want to ascribe, we don't want to anthropomorphize, right?

6:19We hear this all the time. Yes, we do. Okay. Thank you. Okay. All right. Walk me through it. Thank you for saying it. Walk me through the sort of debate of this, where there's legitimate debate, you think. Well, so the idea, anthropomorphism is projecting human thoughts and emotions onto a non-human. So if I thought that this coffee cup was thinking, that would be anthropomorphizing the coffee cup. Let's not even get into the fact that AI, what the question of AI consciousness is the biggest anthropomorphic mistake in the history of humans.

6:56Hot take. Okay, so, but the thing is, if you're observing that a dog or a chicken or an elephant is doing something like caring for its young, that the young have a bond, an emotional bond with their parent, that's not projecting, that's observing. And why is that legit? Because the basic principle of biology is that we're all evolved.

7:27All vertebrates have the same nervous system. We have the same chemicals that create mood and motivation. We all have that. So it's not projecting. It's the similarity and the logic of everything we know to say that if they show emotional bonds, if they show things like fear or rage, in context, you don't see an animal acting fearful for no reason.

7:58You see them acting fearful if there's a threat, right? So that's not projecting. That's observing. And so an informed take on the similarities, which some people would say, oh, you're anthropomorphic. That's actually just insight. It's an insightful look at what they're doing.

Personality on the farm

8:16Speaking of animals, you have a farm, Isabella. I want you to introduce us to someone.

8:24I'm holding up a picture. That's O'Keefe, yes. Who is this? That's my sheep. Her name is Georgia O'Keefe because I gave names of our female artist. And she's a Lincoln Longwall, which is listed as a threatened breed of sheep. What's she like? What's her personality like? So, well, you know, they do have personality. This is also something that I didn't know and we didn't discuss much at school. But, of course, we know in the farm you can breed animals to have more weight or less weight or have more eggs or less eggs.

9:00What they never discussed is the personalities. So you can also breed. And all domestic process is about docility and tameness so that mouflon, that is the wild version of the sheep, probably would have rammed me. And I would have been dead or lots of broken bones. But the sheep who have been for 10,000 years selected for docility so they can live with us in a farm, they are incredibly docile. Some are shyer than others.

9:30And some also could ram. They still have it in them. But most of the time they are very tamed. And O'Keefe is one of them that I can really, I mean, when I come to the farm, she comes up and she wants to be caressed. The other might come up, but if I touch them, they go away. We have to take a break. But when we come back, I want to talk about creativity in science. Stick around. You know, one thing I've heard you say, Isabella, is that animals make themselves known without language.

10:09They have sort of a body language. And you can understand them from the way that they behave, which anyone with a pet knows this to be true, right? But I wondered for you, you know, actors do that too, of course. Do you think there's something there that sort of your attunement to body language may make you more attuned to the animals that you work with? Yeah, I mean, you don't have to be an actor to understand your dog. But I do think that we actors, for example, if I'm told to read a scene and I have to be sad, I'm not really putting my lips down and make my eyebrow.

10:45And then, you know, that would be bad acting. So what I do, I try to remind myself of something that really made me sad. And it's almost an exercise. The more you do it, the easier it comes. And then your face becomes sad. But it's from the inside out. It's not from the outside in. And then also when you act with another actor, the best acting is when you listen. It's reacting. It's not only acting. It's reacting because you connect. And that's exactly what we do with our dogs and our cat.

11:17But it is the same. And Darwin wrote a book about the expression of emotion in men and animals. And so I was particularly fascinated by that aspect of Darwin research because it connected so much to acting. That's so fascinating. So you two have known each other for years. Have you learned from each other over the years? Like has your work informed each other's work? Well, I read all Carl's books, of course. And I'm very jealous of his relationship with Alfie, the owl.

11:50The fact that you can have a wild animal that can relate to you.

Living alongside a wild owl

11:56Tell us about Alfie.

Living alongside a wild owl

11:57For people who don't know Alfie. Alfie is a screech owl who eight years ago was found almost dead as a little chick on the ground, dehydrated, covered with fly eggs, which in a few hours we're going to hatch and just eat her alive. And they called a wildlife rehabber. So we wound up raising this little owl. And we thought, you know, in two or three weeks, owl will fly and go away.

12:26And that would be that. But what happened was that probably because of that near-death experience and all the dehydration and malnutrition for a few days, she couldn't fly. So we had to keep her until she molded and then winter and spring passed and then it was a good time to let her go. By then, we were bonded. And when we let her out, she disappeared for a few days and came back and has never left. So she's lived there for eight years.

12:58She's had two different wild mates. She's raised 26 wild babies. 26? 26. And it's completely magical because I go out there or my wife Patricia goes out there and we go out in the dark of night outside our back door and call her and she appears. Wait, call her for us. What would it sound like? I don't want to confuse her, but hopefully she's not listening to this broadcast. I usually do one of their two calls, one of which, let me see if I can do it right now.

13:30Or there's a whistle that just goes, but Patricia, I just do that because I get a kick out of it. But Patricia just goes, where are you? Where are you? And she usually comes flying in. And because of her complete tameness, we've been able to see behaviors and personalities not only of her, but of her two different mates who had very different personalities.

14:02The first mate was a lot more chill with us being nearby. Her most recent mate of the last four years is very, very aggressive when there are chicks in the nest box. He will hit us. He will scream at us. So they just have different personalities. You know, and she, like, I can climb the ladder to the nest box and open the top of it, and she'll still just fly in the hole and feed the babies right there. And I can just watch from literally, you know, two inches away.

14:35So you were saying, you know, contact with wild animals. But we've been lucky enough to have this contact with that particular owl, with a couple of other wild orphans that we raised, that we found, you know, near death. You met a raccoon that time. I was just going to say, it's one of my favorite moments, and I have a lot of pictures of your raccoon holding my video camera. Yeah, right. I mean, it's totally fantastic. It opens portals on the real world.

15:07And the night I went to school, and like Isabella, you know, like I learned, oh, they can't do that. They're just little automaton machines. Oh, they have no personalities. They're all the same. And I thought, well, no, actually, you're wrong, and I know what they're like because I know what they're like. Carl, I'm going to just, maybe we can leave it with you. I want to talk about this idea of human expression. You know, I think science sometimes gets relegated to the world of analytics and logic and isn't always thought of as overlapping with this world of artistic expression.

15:44But I know that you have a more expansive view, and I'd like to hear about that. Well, I think that to be a good scientist, first of all, you need to be very creative. You have to have ideas that other people have not had, and you need to have some insights into the world that are not things that you were told or that you read about, but are things that go maybe just a little beyond what you were told and what you read about but haven't been thought about yet.

16:18And also the intuition and empathy. Empathy, you have, yes, that's the only way you understand that your dog is happy to see you. But the first step is empathy that gives you that information. Then you can maybe try to find the math, a formula that can be translated to prove it that you're absolutely not making it up. I remember one day I was talking to a guy who was a zoo director, and we were talking about, you know, animals and behavior and emotions. And I was a little bit reluctant to come right out and say things like, you know, an elephant can be joyful.

16:57I wasn't sure if that was really right. And the zoo director, he simply said, if a dog seems happy, it's a happy dog. I actually found that shocking at the time. It was, the permission of it was really a barrier-breaking thing for me that he said that. The permission of it. I mean, that seems like a theme of this conversation because when we started, it felt like you didn't have permission to explore these ideas.

17:28Because the anthropomorphism thing is really, it's a rule, right? It says, you may not see human-type thoughts and emotions in other species. And that's a really unscientific thing, to have a rule about what you may not see. And simply allowing yourself to say, I see this, I think it's what this means, that is much more in the actual spirit of science. I totally agree.

17:59It prevents the openness of observation because it creates a dictator. No, this is, you can't do this. That's almost more of a religious-type feeling that you may not do this. And science is supposed to be more of a permissive thing. What is this? What does it mean? Permission to ask questions. Right. Permission to observe. Right. You know, I think this idea of giving yourself permission to observe feels very powerful and it feels like it maybe even goes beyond science.

18:30Well, I think, you know, I was going to say, people who don't really understand science or are intimidated and uncomfortable with it, they think it's because science has the answers. But actually, the thing that's great about science is it has the questions. I love that. I think that's, I think that is the perfect place to land. Great. Carl, Isabella, thank you so much for joining me today. This was such an immense delight. Thank you so much. It was. We should do it every week. Okay, great. We'll see you again soon. This episode was produced by D. Peter Schmidt and Shoshana Buxbaum.

19:12And if you have an idea for a dream science dinner party pairing, please leave us a message at 877-4SciFry. And maybe we can make it happen. Thank you for listening. I'm Flora Lichtman.

19:30I'm Flora Lichtman.