CONSIDER CAT CULTURE

Cat culture begins with a prowl.  It is topographical.  

Movement through the environment was the second major ability of the primal one-celled animal, to move around at will by any means possible, which necessarily came out of the even more primary ability to take in the edible and throw out the unneeded.  So now the little ur-monster could seek food and leave poop.  Tentacles, tails, spin, contract/expand, wiggle, they're all apparent when one looks at pond water through a microscope.

Back to cats.  A cat's genome exists within a narrow range, much less plastic than a dog's.  In fact, when it comes to cheetahs (very big cats) because of inbreeding all cheetahs have the same genome.  But they are not robots, though people who radically overvalue genetics (always assuming they themselves have the best set) might think so.  With cats it's culture that counts.  Even cheetahs raised in different settings at different times must respond to their own private experience, which means responding to what is outside the skin while recording it inside the skin.  This makes each cheetah unique.  It is the sensory abilities and emotions of every cat, which are more emphatic and vivid than even their senses.

Scientists love to study cats: there are lots of them, they're small, they're expendable and they have active autonomic nerve systems.  This study is about sleep.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11853100  

Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry. 2002 Jan;26(1):113-8.

Chronic stimulation of the cat vagus nerve: effect on sleep and behavior.

The effect of electrical vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) on sleep and behavior was analyzed in freely moving cats. Eight cats were prepared for 23-h sleep recordings. The left vagus nerve of four of them was stimulated during 1 min, five times at 1-h intervals, for 5 days. The VNS induces: ipsilateral myosis, blinking, licking, abdominal contractions, upward gaze, swallowing, and eventually yawning and compulsive eating, as well as an increase of ponto-geniculate-occipital (PGO) wave density and of the number of stages and total amount of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Besides, there was a sudden transition from waking stage to REM sleep. The present results suggest that VNS modifies sleep in the cat. This effect could be explained by an activation of the areas involved in the physiological mechanisms of sleep."

If you think you might have ipsilateral miosis, check  the mirror.  "The signs and symptoms occur on the same side (ipsilateral) as it is a lesion of the sympathetic trunk. It is characterized by miosis (a constricted pupil), partial ptosis (a weak, droopy eyelid), apparent anhydrosis (decreased sweating), with apparent enophthalmos (inset eyeball)."  I suppose the experiment might be justified if it explained sleep and insomnia.  

The experiments that are easier to read about are those that put tiny cameras on cats and record their "turf", then put several cat domains on a computer map to see where the cats went.  They rarely overlapped and were erratic shapes to adapt to structures, risks, and other cats.  They are time-tagged and since cats are diurnal, show very little movement in the middle of the day when the cat sleeps.

The cats now in this household began as one feral cat who discovered the cat flap installed for deceased Real Pets.  She multiplied into a family and by now they are a colony, approaching ten generations.  Lack of money and then other complications abort the intentions to sterilize, but sickness and mystery constantly removes some of them.  The new kittens are just walking and only one has discovered wet cat food.  Kitten kibble is just a nuisance.  Their temperaments definitely seem linked to their coat color and even the patterns, which are all gray on white.  The grayer the coat, the most gentle and friendly the cat, but the sweetest cat is mostly white!

I watch them map the house: first their birth box in the closet, then the small hallway next to the box, then this back bedroom where I write, and excursions to the kitchen when the big cats go by in that direction.  They can't manage the cat flap yet but know to avoid the floor furnace grate.  Yesterday three discovered they could climb my sweatpants to arrive at my chin, but they have no special fondness for me, just suspicious curiosity.  Today enough snow has melted back that the big cats are outside re-mapping the yard.  The street is still bordered by snow walls, for which I am grateful since they don't go there.

I've written earlier about how humans build maps of their immediate worlds and how one layer of brain cortex appears to be dedicated to an in-skin map of one's body with size indicating the number of neurons, so it traces an homunculus with an outsize head and hands.  When a limb is amputated, it takes tricks to make the map in the brain change to show the difference.

Other studies discuss one-celled out-skin awareness.  Some suggest there are a hundred of them, preserved from the earliest one-celled beginnings.  Included, it is suggested, are ability to sense a wall alongside, or approaching a dropoff, or the compass magnetic north, and other subtle features that other animals seem to sense better than human animals.

Until now my blogging has been a matter of noting information and ideas in passing, but now I need to do some synthesizing and am unsure how to do it.  Should I move all the posts about one topic into a new singular blog?  I've been putting them on CD's and some in print in 3-ring notebooks, but without estimating properly how much work and space that will take -- is already taking.  I need to create a kind of "culture", meaning a context for both thought and practice, particularly what is conscious, saved on purpose.  But it is a one-person culture.

Cats have culture shared among them.  So do humans.  But cats never limit themselves to "science" only as some humans do.  Yet it begins to be obvious that awareness is a source of intelligence which is created by experience which is the source of culture which is what gives human life its meaning, even for people who have no sense of the Sacred or concern about it.  In fact, some people have neither attachment nor empathy, while some cats have both.  Which is more scary?