Some years ago, a 53-year-old man walked into a Mumbai hospital complaining that a cockroach had entered his right ear and taken up residence in his head. The insect had laid eggs, he told the doctors, and its offspring were crawling around his brain. After six weeks of worry and little sleep, he had come to the hospital hoping to see an ear, nose and throat specialist. But he was referred instead to a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist diagnosed “delusional parasitosis”, the false belief that parasites have infested the body. The roughly 1-in-100,000 people who suffer from this condition imagine that ants, worms, ticks, mites or other bugs are moving around under their skin. It is, as the label suggests, a delusion, often brought on by schizophrenia or dementia. When the insects strike, nothing can persuade patients that the critters aren’t real.
Delusional parasitosis is a relatively rare condition, but it is indicative of a phenomenon that is surprisingly widespread: the presence of animals in psychological disorders. The medical literature contains tens of thousands of cases in which animals or thoughts of animals played a significant role in the expression of mental distress.
For the examples above, we could substitute the childhood victim of sexual assault who grew up obsessed with rats; the pet-loving psychotic whose facial tics made him look like a snarling dog; the mother in West Africa who woke from a dream convinced she had been impregnated by a baboon; the young woman who believed she was being controlled by her cat; or, closer to home, the child of a friend who took to howling like a wolf during the Covid lockdown.
Or we could consider the long history of sociogenic illness or “conversion disorder”, in which seemingly benign behaviors, often in imitation of animals, spread rapidly and without apparent cause within schools, religious orders and other close-knit institutions. Medieval records from France and Spain describe groups of nuns barking like dogs while running through the fields, or mewing like cats for hours each day, or bleating like sheep, tearing off their veils and convulsing in church.
Of course, wild animals have been almost completely absent from most people’s lives for centuries. We have long considered them inferior: less conscious, less intelligent, less self-aware, less rational. An animal is everything humans are not, the quintessential “other”. Yet they feature in our psycho-pathologies, hallucinations and dreams, in art and story-telling, and in the mental lives of children. They creep into our psyche in spectacular and sometimes alarming ways.
That’s especially true of people who suffer from medical disorders: whether blindness, or dementia, or schizophrenia. Their visions can be exceptionally strange. In 2019, a group of psychosis patients taking part in a medical study reported seeing snakes crawling out of their arms, a rhino crossing the street, a cow in the corridor of a school.
Fantastical creatures of this ilk can just as easily be summoned by swallowing psychedelic drugs like LSD or psilocybin — the chemical that gives certain mushrooms their magic. On trips of this kind, animals are almost always part of the landscape. During my first and probably last experience with psilocybin, I found myself in a world of reptilian and parasitic freakery, in which snakes, lizards, worms and other legless lifeforms crawled and slithered about a garden trellis, taunting me with grotesque faces that resembled the carved gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals. It sounds terrifying, though my feeling was more of benign interest.
Nor am I alone: the psychologist Benny Shanon, who drank ayahuasca several hundred times while researching a book about its effects, encountered animals in his visions more frequently than anything else, mingling with lizards and crocodiles, fish and bees, butterflies and jaguars. All the while, many of us cross paths with animals, both magical and mundane, in our sleep. And if it’s tempting to seek meaning in such visions, they may tell us more about the animals than about ourselves.
Alison Hawthorne Deming, a poet frequently visited by dream animals, describes them as barging into her brain, self-willed and unconstrained. After dreaming of a horse that had turned up for treatment at Sigmund Freud’s consulting rooms, she concluded that it was “a messenger from the animals’ homeland telling me that we’re driving them crazy and they have no science with which to treat themselves”.
“A poet frequently visited by dream animals describes them as barging into her brain, self-willed and unconstrained.”
The truth is that what causes highly realistic animistic images to surface in the non-conscious mind remains a mystery. Yet one compelling possibility is that the brain, when deprived of its usual stimuli, tries to make sense of the information it receives by providing a hypothesis or story of its own, or by over-activating the default mode network, a set of brain regions that supports daydreaming and introspection. Its tendency to conjure up an abundance of animals, rather than, say, inanimate objects, may relate to the fact that the human visual system evolved to be acutely sensitive to living things.
Over the hundreds of thousands of years that Homo sapiens and our antecedents lived as hunter-gatherers, individuals with the ability to detect animals quickly in the landscape were more likely to survive and reproduce, and this trait was gradually selected for until it became a universal inherited characteristic of the human brain. To coin a phrase, we became “animal-minded”, preoccupied with the circumstances of our fellow creatures and highly attuned to their anatomical forms and ways of moving.
Derek Hodgson, an archaeologist whose expertise also includes neuroscience and psychology, suggests this mechanism likely evolved in our ancestors over successive generations in response to both the persistent threat they faced from carnivores and the intense competition for food. An intuitive emotional reaction to the slightest possibility of an animal would have considerably increased their chances of survival. “They were competing with predators who were predating both on them and on the animals they were hunting for food,” Hodgson explains. “If they made a mistake and they didn’t react, they were in trouble. They had to be keenly aware of animals that used camouflage to remain concealed, otherwise they would have lost out in the long game of hide and seek.”
Modern brains still possess this attribute. Neuroscientists have discovered a dedicated neural pathway linking the visual part of the brain (the visual cortex) to the emotion-processing part (the amygdala). Known as the ventral stream, this pathway generates a fast visceral response at the sight of an animal, alerting us to its possible presence before we are consciously aware of it. We remain hypersensitive to living things, just like our Ice Age ancestors.
While we rarely get a chance to test our animal-mindedness in everyday life, it becomes fully activated when our psyche is disrupted: in conditions of psychosis, neurosis, delusional thinking, phobia and obsession, or when we’re dreaming or hallucinating. The creatures that visit us during such times are, perhaps, indicative of the conflicted ways we think about animals, and our fraught deliberations over whether we are, in fact, one of them.
The mid-20th century American anthropologist Ernest Becker believed that our attitudes towards animals — indeed much of our behavior and thinking — are driven by the realization that we will one day die. The terror of ending up as compost drives us to raise families, cultivate values, subscribe to religions, and generally build things that will outlast us. Animals, which we are used to seeing as roadkill or meat on a plate, remind us of our own flesh-and-blood reality. Distinguishing ourselves from them is a step towards the symbolic immortality we crave.
Becker’s ideas help explain why we so resolutely cling to the notion of humans as a species apart, despite growing evidence that we have seriously underestimated the worlds and abilities of our fellow creatures. Most biologists now agree that all vertebrates and many non-vertebrates have some form of consciousness, and that animal emotions can be as complex as human ones. Our deliberate separation — the belief, which dates back to ancient Greece, that we are a superior species — has been a disaster for animals themselves. It has allowed us to kill them with impunity, and to keep their suffering at arm’s length. And it has enabled us to avoid the cognitive dissonance of having to face up to the truth that we are what we eat: meat on the bone.
The conceit that humans are exceptional is easy enough to maintain with full awareness. But when we are asleep, cognitively compromised, high on stimulants or otherwise distracted, our fellow other animals become our equals. What are they doing there? It is hard to know for sure. At the very least, they should remind us that our relationship has been longer, and more intimate, than most of us are prepared to acknowledge.
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Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind is published by Picador on 19 March.
