Story Time, Debunked
By
ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ and AMMON SHEA
AS parents of a young child, we are in the enviable
position of reading a lot of beautifully drawn and smartly written short
stories that fall under the moniker “children’s books.” And in doing so we
have discovered one of the immutable truths of childhood: a book worth reading
once is worth reading 17 times in a row.
Sometime after the 10th reading of a particular
book in a day we find ourselves examining the deeper and unspoken questions
brought up by the text: Why is George so curious? Are Frog and Toad really
friends? And most perplexing of all, what does Brown Bear actually see?
Happily, science provides answers to such
questions.
“Brown Bear, Brown
Bear, What Do You See?”
The bright
images of Eric Carle’s books dot many a parent’s living-room floor, but
researchers might demur at his answer to “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do
You See?” In the story, the titular bear sees a red bird looking
at me. According to research on mammalian vision, the brown bear is a
dichromat, meaning that it has two types of cells in its eyes to determine
color. (Humans have three.) A short-wave cone cell sends violet shades to his
brain; a long-wave cone sends something in the yellow or green range. So
although the bear would be able to view the colors of some of the later animals
in the books, like the white dog and the yellow duck, his perception of a
bird’s redness is likely to be very weak. Brightness, more than color, would
dominate the experience. What do you see, brown bear? A bird-shaped
figure with some feathers brightly standing out from a generally drab body.
“Frog and Toad Are Friends”
The central theme of Arnold Lobel’s 1970 classic of
the anthropomorphic oeuvre is that these tailless amphibians are fast friends.
But what about in the real world — are toads and frogs capable of such
friendship?
A 2009 paper in the research journal Oecologia
examined what happened when cane toads were introduced into the environment of
native frogs in Australia. Far from being an ecological disaster, there were
some unexpected benefits for the frogs, although it came at a cost that might
be better suited to a grisly Greek myth than a children’s book. When frogs
consumed toad eggs, which were toxic, both populations suffered; however, the
frog tadpoles that survived grew bigger and healthier.
In other words, the reason that Lobel did not
create a scientifically accurate portrayal of frogs and toads is that the title
would have been something on the order of “Frog Eats Toad’s Poisonous Unborn
Children, Gets Sick and Dies (but Frog’s Younger Cousin Thrives!).”
“Curious
George”
Careful readers
of the Curious George canon may have found themselves bedeviled by a wide range
of George-related questions: What kind of monkey is he? Who is this fellow in
the yellow hat? And why is that monkey so curious, anyway?
At least one of these queries may be answered by a
paper published in 2010 in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, which examined
the curiosity levels of spider monkeys and stumptail macaques. The macaques,
which like George are tailless, scored high on a “curiosity index” when faced
with oddities like organic paint and mealworms. Males were especially curious,
but all macaques were less curious than the spider monkeys. The researchers
speculate that this is because spider monkeys live in a society with lax social
rules; without a rigid hierarchy and dominant individuals to control others’
activities, animals are presumably more free to investigate, seek novelty and
explore.
Imagine if George had been a spider monkey! Instead
of snatching hats, as he is wont to do, George would simply gaze at the man
with the yellow hat and incessantly inquire, “Why is it yellow? Why do you wear
it on your head? Why?”
“Don’t Let the
Pigeon Drive the Bus!”
Throughout Mo
Willems’s 2003 book, the reader is sternly instructed not to let one determined
pigeon take the wheel of the bus when the driver takes a break. But the authors
of a paper published online this year in Animal Cognition (and titled, in a
refreshingly contrarian fashion, “Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus”) disagreed with
Mr. Willems’s exhortation. The authors examined captive pigeons’ ability to
navigate the traveling-salesman problem, a classic computational puzzle that
asks you to devise the shortest round-trip route that stops at each city once.
Pigeons were tasked with finding the most efficient
route between a handful of feeders holding yummy peas. While the results did
not speak to the ability to keep up with a bus timetable, pigeons turn out to
be highly skilled in planning efficient travel routes, an ability that is
wanting in some human bus drivers.
Lest clarity mar the magic of childhood, we will
stop there, and be sure not to tell you where the sidewalk ends, where the wild
things are and how the Grinch actually stole Christmas.
Alexandra Horowitz is the author of “Inside of a
Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know.” Ammon Shea is the author of “The Phone
Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads.”
Nyt img 001
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário