Isabella Rossellini on how acting connects to animal cognition

[MUSIC PLAYING] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hi, 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.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Well, thank you for having us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes, welcome to Science Friday.

CARL SAFINA: Always fun to be with you, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So, 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?

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: I was always interested in animal behavior. My father gave me a book by Konrad Lorenz, and I’m sure Carl has read,–

CARL SAFINA: I’m sure I have.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: –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 it wasn’t specifically ethology, animal behavior. I was very intimidated by scientific subjects because I was a very bad student.

So 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Your backup was acting and modeling when science didn’t work out.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Well, it didn’t work out–

CARL SAFINA: If your day job falls through.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: –and I never tried because I was intimidated. It’s not the world that I grew up with. But then as you get older, 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, oh, what the hell. I just want to do– I want to know. And so that’s why I went back to university.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You were doing it for yourself.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Yes. Yes, definitely it was. I was in my 50s. Nobody was going to hire me. [LAUGHS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s not true. Carl, was science your world growing up? I mean, were you intimidated by science in any way?

CARL SAFINA: Of course. I’m terrible at math. My field where I have a PhD is ecology. It has become very quantitative. I 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 that’s our main interest, which is what do animals do and why do they do it.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: And 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 like machines. They’re just basic instinct. And you’re doing that because you project some infantile dream. And it’s not infantile dream. Now science proved it, that they are sentient and are able to think. They’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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Isabella, what was one of your biggest takeaways from your degree? Did you have aha moments?

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Well, it was exactly this. I said am I crazy or am I– that my dog is happy to see me. That this dog is waiting for me when I come home. And 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.

CARL SAFINA: Why wouldn’t it?

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Why wouldn’t it?

CARL SAFINA: How couldn’t it?

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: If it is a link, yes.

CARL SAFINA: Fear can’t feel like pleasure in them.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Exactly.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Carl, has the field of animal cognition changed?

CARL SAFINA: 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. 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, so.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, I also know that there’s this concern in science that we don’t want to anthropomorphize. We hear this all the time.

CARL SAFINA: Yes, we do.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Ah, thank you!

FLORA LICHTMAN: All right. Walk me through it.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Thank you for saying it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Walk me through the debate of this, where there’s legitimate debate you think.

CARL SAFINA: Well, so, 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 the question of AI consciousness is the biggest anthropomorphic mistake in the history of humans.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hot take.

CARL SAFINA: OK. 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. All 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. You see them acting fearful if there’s a threat. So that’s not projecting. That’s observing. And so an informed take on the similarities which some people would say, oh you’re anthropomorphizing, that’s actually just insight. It’s an insightful look at what they’re doing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Speaking of animals, you have a farm, Isabella. I want you to introduce us to someone. I’m holding up a picture.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Oh, that’s O’Keeffe, yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Who is this?

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: That’s my sheep. Her name is Georgia O’Keeffe because I gave names of our female artists. And she’s a Lincoln Longwool, which is listed as a threatened breed of sheep.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What’s she like? What’s her personality like?

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Well, 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. What they never discussed is the personalities. So you can also breed, and all domestic process is about, a 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, and some also could ram. They still have it in them, but most of the time they are very tamed. And O’Keeffe 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We have to take a break. But when we come back, I want to talk about creativity in science. Stick around.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: One thing I’ve heard you say, Isabella, is that animals make themselves known without language. They have a body language, and you can understand them from the way that they behave, which anyone with a pet knows this to be true. But I wondered for you, actors do that too, of course. Do you think there’s something there that your attunement to body language may make you more attuned to the animals that you work with?

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: 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 and then– 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. But it is the same. And Darwin wrote a book about the expression of emotion in man and animals. And so I was particularly fascinated by that aspect of Darwin research because it connected so much to acting.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s so fascinating. So you two have known each other for years. Have you learned from each other over the years? Has your work informed each other’s work?

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Well, I read all of Carl’s books, of course. And I’m very jealous of his relationship with Alfie the owl. The fact that you can have a wild animal that can relate to you–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Tell us about Alfie for people who don’t know Alfie.

CARL SAFINA: OK, so 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 were 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 in two or three weeks, the owl will fly and go away. And 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 molted. 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. She’s had two different wild mates. She’s raised 26 wild babies,

FLORA LICHTMAN: 26?

CARL SAFINA: 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 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.

CARL SAFINA: I usually do one of their two calls, one of which let me see if I can do it right now.

[COOING]

Or there’s a whistle that just goes [WHISTLES]. 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. The 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.

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 two inches away. So you were saying 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 near death. You met our raccoon that time.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 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.

CARL SAFINA: Yeah, right. I mean It’s totally fantastic. It opens portals on the real world. And then I went to school and like Isabella 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. [LAUGHS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Carl, I’m going to just– maybe we can leave it with you. I want to talk about this idea of human expression. 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. But I know that you have a more expansive view, and I’d like to hear about that.

CARL SAFINA: 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.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: And also the intuition and 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 a math formula that can be translated to prove it, that you’re absolutely not making it up.

CARL SAFINA: I remember one day I was talking to a guy who was a zoo director, and we were talking about animals and behavior and emotions. And I was a little bit reluctant to come right out and say things like, an elephant can be joyful. I 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. The permission of it was really a barrier-breaking thing for me that he said that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 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–

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Exactly.

FLORA LICHTMAN: –to explore these ideas.

CARL SAFINA: Because the anthropomorphism thing is really– it’s a rule. 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.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: I totally agree. It prevents the openness of observation because it creates a dictum. You can’t do this.

CARL SAFINA: 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?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Permission to ask questions. Permission to observe.

CARL SAFINA: Right.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I think this idea of giving yourself permission to observe feels very powerful. And it feels like it maybe even goes beyond science.

CARL SAFINA: Well, 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love that. I think that is the perfect place to land.

CARL SAFINA: Great.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Carl, Isabella, thank you so much for–

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: –joining me today. This was such an immense delight.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI: Thank you so much.

CARL SAFINA: It was. We should do it every week.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, great. We’ll see you again soon.

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This episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt and Shoshannah Buxbaum. And if you have an idea for a dream science dinner party pairing, please leave us a message at 877-4-SCIFRI and maybe we can make it happen. Thank you for listening. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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