Book Review: "COMPLEX WORLDS FROM SIMPLER NERVOUS SYSTEMS", BY FREDERICK R. PRETE (Editor)

Abstract

Does the world look simpler to the eyes of smaller brains? This is the main question which Frederick R. Prete and other contributing authors try to answer in an edited book, “Complex Worlds from Simpler Nervous Systems,” and as the title implies the message is clear throughout the book: smaller brains could surprisingly perceive a much more complex world than what they initially thought to do. And with small brains, Prete and the other authors in the book refer to a range of animals, such as insects (honeybees, butterflies, spiders, and praying mantids), amphibians (frogs and toads), crayfish, shrimps, and octopuses, having tiny brains compared to the size of central nervous systems of vertebrates and primates. For rather a long time, it was a well-established fact between animal behaviorists to describe the responses of these small animals to the environmental stimuli through a fixed set of repeated action patterns, resembling the robot-like rigid behaviors and leaving these creatures far from being considered as intelligent animals. Flexibility, learning, planning, and problem solving seen in vertebrates were just considered to be not affordable by those small brains which some fit easily to the head of a pin. However, new facts started to emerge when scientists began to relax and challenge those long-held assumptions and change their perspectives during the experiments with these animals. Soon there was enough evidence to show that these animals indeed are not just simple reflex machines, and depending on the situation and context, they can demonstrate qualitative behaviors comparable to the observations studied in vertebrates, for example. Plotting these new facts and novel