Bats Sing, Mice Giggle The Surprising Science of Animals' Inner Lives

by Kanwal, Jagmeet; Shanor, Karen

• ISBN13: 9781848311978
• ISBN10: 1848311974
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-03
• Publisher: Icon Books

Summary

Authors Shanor and Kanwal reveal truly incredible, scientific, and intimate portraits of animals' inner worlds.

Author Biography

Karen Shanor, Ph.D is a neuropsychologist, a former White House consultant and an advisory member of Discovery Channel Global Education. At Stanford University she researched how rats learn, and how cats dream. Her work at NASA's Life Sciences department included animal research on memory and information theory, and she has taught with Karl Prilbram at Georgetown university since 1998. As a Peace Corps science teacher in Somalia, she was a consultant for a wildlife conservatory. A frequent lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution, Karen also hosted an NBC radio program for five years and appears frequently on Larry King Live, CBS Nightly News, Dateline, The Today Show and Oprah, and is a regular contributor to CNN.

Jagmeet Kanwal, Ph.D is an associate professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is also an external professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Fairfax, Virginia. Dr Kanwal is an internationally recognized neurothologist who was the first to perform magnetic resonance imaging in awake animals. He is an exert on cortical mechanisms for the perception of complex sounds. Dr Kanwal discovered a left-brain dominance for species-specific calls in bats, as is present for speech in humans, and together with co-workers is engaged in cracking the code for the neural representation of social calls. Dr Kanwal's early contributions on the comparative organization of chemosensory systems include the discovery of taste centres in the forebrain of fish. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to understand the functional organization of the brain from the viewpoint of behaviour. He is also an ardent birdwatcher and keen nature photographer.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. v
Introduction	p. 1
Sensing
A Supercharged World	p. 11
Good Vibrations	p. 29
Sounds for Tracking and Talking	p. 47
Tasting and Touching	p. 67
Surviving
Alarming Behavior and Survival Strategies	p. 91
From Frogcicles to Dreamstates	p. 123
Animal Marathons by Land and Sea	p. 137
Socializing
Wit, Wiles and Good Fund	p. 157
Eavesdropping and Deception	p. 185
Rhythm, Song and Dance	p. 197
Flirting, Courting and Coupling	p. 211
Epilogue: ôHuman Natureö Reconsidered	p. 233
Notes, References and Further Reading	p. 237
Index	p. 257
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.