He did look, in retrospect, somewhat sickly, disoriented, slow, the rat I saw hold an entire subway platform in its thrall as I waited early one morning last week just after midnight at the Times Square station for a Brooklyn-bound train. It is often entertainment enough for us city-dwellers merely to espy a rat scurrying across the tracks: the very surprise of seeing something wild living down there in the tiled subterranean having the added frisson of watching it pass inches from an oblivion-inducing brush with a thrumming third rail. This particular fellow, however, was milling about on the platform along with the rest of us, scrounging for food scraps like any other starving homeless person, except, of course, for being entirely at home in his homelessness.

We all stood by and watched as he boldly went from one support pillar to the next, and then to the base of a trash bin. Finding nothing to munch on there, he soon repaired to the nearest platform bench, scampering underneath it as those seated above quickly deserted their places, all but one, a young woman who, too frightened to set her feet down, was now standing atop the bench, already talking excitedly on her cell phone about what was transpiring. I thought at first that this may be a deeply enculturated critter, one so accustomed to human company that he’d not only lost his natural wariness of us but had honed his habits to coincide with and capitalize on our own. One sees this sort of thing all the time, especially among our citified creaturely counterparts, everything from scrounging rats and pigeons, and the hawks who regularly dive-bomb upon them from bridge turrets and building eaves, to the food-flocking park swans and ducks, and the squirrels, who’ve even come to recognize the difference between an unleashed and a leashed dog, often brazenly taunting the latter and their owners in full knowledge that they can always scamper to safety up a nearby tree with time to spare.

The phenomenon, however, is hardly peculiar to urban settings. In fact, in what may be a definitive indication of the pervasiveness of human influence on the natural world, I recently witnessed the same sort of creaturely enculturation among the “wild” baboons of Uganda. I was in a Land Rover early one morning with my guide, Nelson Okello, driving through Queen Elizabeth National Park’s post dawn mists in search of elephants. I remember sitting in the passenger seat, perusing with binoculars the parkland’s wide open savanna—the serene beauty of the grazing herds of water buffalo and antelopes, the waving tan grasses and gnarled acacia trees—when Nelson slammed on the breaks. I looked up to see a stop sign at a four-way intersection, something of an anomaly, I thought, in the middle of the wilderness, and yet considering the volume of passenger packed safari vehicles I’d been seeing in the park on previous outings, not all that surprising. And then Nelson pointed to my right.

A pair of baboons stood hunched against a roadside hedgerow, one of them cradling a baby. We held there for a moment watching, and then the male stood and began to stride, bolt upright, across the road, straight toward us. He came directly to my opened passenger side window, then held out his hand, palm up. I had heard of parrots in Japan who, having learned the traffic patterns in one villages streets, carefully arrange the hardest nuts in their diet along the stop lines at intersections to let the cars do their shell cracking for them when the light turns green. The baboon’s scheme, it seemed to me, was one more rendition of this enculturation phenomenon: an animal so acclimated to the growing prevalence of safari traffic in Queen Elizabeth Park, he’d figured he could just as easily feed his family from that source as any other.

Neither Nelson nor I had any food to offer him, and I soon found myself in the ridiculous position of gesturing apologetically to a baboon. I remember his head tilting at my own plaintively upturned palms, then looking back at me with such earnest, pout-lipped entreaty that I began reaching into my pockets for loose change, as though somewhere off beyond those hedges and the surrounding jungle, there was some sort of bustling baboon rendition of our Times Square, with its own bars, arcades and subway platforms for my roadside monkey mendicant and his family to repair to with my filthy lucre.

As for our subway rat, he held his place so long that night beneath the platform bench that even those who’d fled their seats began to sidle back up for closer looks, the young woman all the while standing atop the bench, still talking on her cell, a number of others around her now doing the same. At one point, a portly, balding gentleman with a finely etched goatee approached. He got down on his hands and knees and started taking a video with his phone, laughing and cooing at the rat, exhorting him to come out. He never did, of course. The downtown express finally pulled in and then a local. The platform cleared, even the bench-bound woman, who made a desperate, last-second leap toward the express train’s open doors, the rat still hunkered beneath the bench as we pulled away.

He was, it soon occurred to me, most likely not an overly socialized rat but a very sickly, poison-addled one, tippling away his life’s last moments before us. What stays with me now, though, is the charge of excitement and animated behavior that the sudden proximity of this one wayward rodent caused in a bunch of nature-numbed urbanites. It was as if for a few brief moments even a dying rat, with all the dark associations and freighted history which that species carries, was also bearing away on its tiny back the collective weight of a deep dismissal that we pent-up humans daily feel from our own animal selves.

There is an important new book out that you should read called Elephants On the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity by Gay Bradshaw. A psychologist, ecologist, and animal behaviorist, Bradshaw presents here a devastating portrait of the full-scale collapse of elephant culture and society as a result of human encroachment and depravity. Among the things that make Bradshaw’s work so revelatory and revolutionary is that you emerge from this book without any question whatsoever in your mind about the appropriateness of applying words like “culture” and “society” to animals other than ourselves. Combining exhaustive field research of wild and captive elephants with the latest research in psychology and neuroscience into the behavior of a broad array of species, including elephants, humans and our closest relative, the chimpanzee, Bradshaw not only breaks down the false barriers between us and other species. She goes on to pose some very tough philosophical questions about the moral burden that comes with the newly emerging knowledge of the equivalent sophistication and vulnerability of creatures other than ourselves: our shared capacity for both deep harm—physical and psychological—and for healing. The breadth of Bradshaw’s knowledge and range of references—she started out as a Jungian psychologist—will amaze you. The emotional impact and urgency of her prose will stay with you long afterwards.

You may have read recently about the great swan wars of Prospect Park. It seems that a pair of swan families has been going at each other of late over exclusive rights to the park’s 60-acre lake. Such a large expanse of water would seem to be commodious enough for two sets of swans and, in fact, for a time it was. One couple kept to the southern portion of the lake, the other to the north and never so much as crossed feathers with one another. All of that changed this past year, however, when both couples happened to start families. The northern couple had one cygnet, the southern four, and all at once the feathers started to fly.

The father of the four southern cygnets has been the clear instigator, making sudden headlong charges across the lake—wings flailing, neck shot forward—literally pouncing on his northern swan counterparts, often trying to drive them and their single offspring underwater. Sometime this southern marauder’s entire family, four males and their mother, will participate in these raids, which ornithologists and park workers who’ve been consulted on this matter have described as typical territorial behavior for swans, especially among “mute swans” the species now flourishing and fighting in Prospect Park.

The “Wilding Swans at Pool Prospect” are, in fact, not only a very natural phenomenon but a very positive development for Prospect Park in particular, a direct indication of the success of the park’s rejuvenation or “going natural” program. By encouraging people, with the help of fencing, to keep on the beaten path and allow the park’s inner wooded and watered recesses to grow and flourish untrammeled, more of the park’s “wilds” have become viable habitat for wildlife, and thus the highly successful breeding season of the lake’s to swan families. (The northern pair originally had three cygnets but two died of unknown causes.) The one hitch in the whole dynamic, however, turns out be us, people, the very ones who helped to set the whole thing in motion in the first place.

Good fences, it seems, make good neighbors of neither swans nor humans, especially when the latter are determined to craft their own particular version of the pastoral, a more peaceable if wholly illusory realm that has no place for, among other outrages, overly strident swans. More and more over the past months, park visitors have been interceding on behalf of the besieged northern swan family. One couple from nearby Sunset Park has been traveling to the park nearly every day expressly to tend to the northern swans, setting up bowls of drinking water for them when they get bullied landward and then trying to herd the exiled back to their lake. Names have actually been given to some of the winged protagonists of this swanular passion play. The lone cygnet of the northern family has been dubbed “Honey Bear” because of the bear-like grunting and snorting noises that he makes. As for the southern marauder, he’s known simply as the “monster” or the “murderous male.” One recent weekend, concerned park-goers were even seen trying to bodily lift and transport the northern swan family to an adjacent patch of pond on the far side of a nearby footpath. One of the swans resisted the move, however, flew free, and alighted again on the original lake, and the resettlement effort was soon abandoned.

It is human nature, of course, to try to frame and manage nature. That is our simultaneous calling and curse. What repeatedly occurs uninterrupted on remote swan lakes all over the world—the frequent ferocity of the very naturalness that we court—shocks us when it unfolds within our court, offends our natural sense of empathy and fairness. It is, somehow, not in our nature to let nature truly run its course; to be anything but what we are: the brief and uncertain tenders of a largely untenable flock.

I paid a visit the other day to The Prospect Park Zoo, my local –  spent the better part of a Sunday afternoon there with the wallabies, and the prairie dogs, and the meerkats. The very names of the animals just invoked underscore how much the place has changed from the zoo I knew as a kid growing up in Brooklyn. Gone are the lions and tigers and bears of yore, as well as the great apes, elephants, hippos and the rhinoceros with whom I had developed a particularly close bond.

I remember calling the zoo’s administrative offices years ago when I first learned that the place was closed for renovations into the more child-friendly, petting-zoo-type facility it has now become, a renovation that was, somewhat ironically, hastened by the awful misadventure of a couple of neighborhood kids one hot spring night back in the late 1980’s. Looking for a break from the heat, two boys climbed over the zoo’s outer perimeter fence and decided to take a swim in the polar bear’s moat. Nearby residents heard awful screaming and called the police. By the time they arrived they found the bears pawing at the limp body of one of the boys. Thinking that he might be still alive and that the other boy might be hiding somewhere inside the enclosure, the police got shotguns and blew the bears away.

“And the rhinoceros,” I asked the zoo administrator who informed me that all the old zoo’s large animals had been shipped away.

“Oh, you mean Rudy,” she said. “He’s living a better life now somewhere in the suburbs of Michigan.”

Whether or not Rudy thinks his life is truly any better in the suburbs than it was here in the high-windowed teem and thrum of the city is a question I’ve often pondered in the years since his relocation. All that remains now of his former Brooklyn home is the central shell of the old-style city zoo, the “wild-animal metropolis” of grandly ornamented Beaux Arts ape and lion houses wherein the animals once languished in the stinky equivalent of tiled subway bathrooms fashioned with little more than a token log, a vine swing, or a shallow moat to simulate their true homes. Those edifices remain but inside now they’re all brightly lit and entirely odorless, a series of glass-paned nature dioramas featuring more easily contained creatures like spider monkeys and capuchins and snakes and voles and meerkats.

Still, as I made my way to the side of central seal pool, the only essentially unchanged feature of the old zoo—perhaps because the seamless, body-long presses of seals through water somehow seem to countervail their very confinement—I couldn’t help but question the continued keeping of any of the creatures there. Why, I asked myself, discriminate against them and interrupt their natural days just for being eminently more “keepable” than the old classic inner-city-zoo residents are; for being, well, mere kats?

The larger question, of course, is why keep and look at animals at all anymore. The essential premise of the old zoo was that the inhabitants were the unwitting representatives of an extant wilderness, unwilling emissaries, in a sense, of an otherness for which these few co-opted and confined beings teach us a deeper regard and respect. That notion was always a specious one, but ever more so today when the very wildernesses that the old zoo inhabitants were to represent have now essentially become fenced-off nature dioramas; outsized versions of the sorts of suburban corporate wilderness theme parks to which the likes of Rudy were long ago dispatched.

It is truly a topsy-turvy juncture in the long tumultuous history of our relations with the wild. Whereas once we brought its inhabitants into our civil environs as proximate, palpable reminders of a vast realm that we left behind and walled ourselves against, our dominion over that realm has now extended to the point where we need to fence it and its remaining inhabitants off from us and then, either via nature documentaries or wilderness safaris, go visit them there.

One of my favorite parts of Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland is the one in which Alice enters “the woods with no names.” Once there she is unable to recall the name of anything around her. She doesn’t know to call a tree a “tree”, or a bird by that name, or the baby deer that suddenly approaches and instantly befriends her, a fawn. Unable to identify even herself, she and her new companion proceed together, side by side, through the woods in a state of blissful anonymity, Alice’s arm gently cradling the fawn’s neck. Then, all at once, the two emerge from the woods into an open field whereupon name recognition suddenly returns, the fawn breaks from Alice’s embrace in fear and darts away, leaving Alice all alone and feeling deeply bereft.

Carroll’s little parable about the isolating, distancing effects of the human mind’s capacity for language and naming came to mind recently upon hearing of recent neurological studies which revealed that there seems to be a distinct region of the human brain responsible for naming the things that surround us, and that those who suffer severe damage to this part of the brain suffer, in turn, from a crippling sense of isolation and confusion, unable to go about the business of their day to day lives.

Most all of the creation mythology written by humans across cultures pivots around the same sense of loss and isolation that Alice felt upon leaving the woods with no names: the sense of exile and excerption from the very nature we know ourselves to still be an integral part of. Early language, in other words, was first employed to describe language’s distancing effect: the simultaneous gift and curse of our brain’s additional, more recently evolved neurons and the capacity they confer on us to name the world around us. Early mythology and much of humanity’s subsequent storytelling has been devoted to this same sense of separation from a purer, pre-linguistic, “pre-lapsarian” condition, and the desire to somehow get back to “the woods with no names.”.

“The path of things is silent,” as Emerson wrote. “Will they suffer a speaker to go with them. A spy they will not suffer. The condition of true naming is to abandon yourself to the divine aura which breathes through forms and then accompanying that.”

And yet as recent science is now showing us, the impulse toward naming is so engrained in our brain’s workings, the very transcendence through abandonment and anonymity that Alice felt and that Emerson yearned for, is allowed us only in the briefest of glimpses, lest an even deeper and more untenable sense of isolation and confusion overtake us. We are, clearly, wired to abide by and abandon ourselves to the simultaneous curse and gift of naming.

Considering that spindle neurons, the so called “cells that makes us human,” are being found in a number of other animals aside from ourselves, it should come as no surprise that among primates, chimpanzees have been found to have the highest proportions of these cells after us. But unlike us, they possess their full allotment of spindle cells at birth. This is probably because young chimpanzees become independent far sooner than human children do and have to be ready to perform tasks on their own much earlier than our offspring do.

Still, scientists were surprised to discover that chimps can’t develop brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, or late onset dementia, and neither can they die in the manner that my mother described to me after her cancer had gone to her brain and begun its slow cognitive dismantling. They can’t, it seems, for the simple reason that the chimp brain doesn’t have the sheer abundance of those highly specialized, more recently evolved neurons, such as spindle cells, that our brains have: a far more elaborately detailed and yet invariably more delicate neuronal tapestry, one given at once to greater flourishes and easier fraying.

What is most recently and highly evolved in us, in other words, is what is most apt to devolve; and even our most bold and lasting creations—from towering cities to soaring symphonies—are, in the end, the inspired simulacra of our own brain’s exquisitely fleeting superstructure. A brain with such an expansive cognitive reach it is able to regard—much in the same way that it does the bristling fabric of a clear night sky—both its own nearly timeless beginnings and, with each suddenly dislodged star, its own inevitable unraveling over time.

I asked Dr. Hof in his cooler of brains that day why our brains got this greater and more delicate measure of overmind. He spoke about a kind of craniological Big Bang, a great neuronal explosion that occurred in the human brain some six million years ago as a direct consequence of our own particular ape ancestor’s—there having been many kindred lineages that didn’t survive—emergent ability to walk upright along the earth and thus literally introduce their brains to new places and challenges. To seek out different, more habitable environments and form the kinds of elaborate social groupings that at once greatly improved the survival rate of our offspring and required the expansion and refinement of our social awareness and communication skills, the capacity for cooperation, compassion, and the expression of ever more complex thoughts and emotions: all new imperatives to which our brain responded by weaving ever more threads around its own original spindle.

Increased socialization, it turns out, spawns ever more synapses. Culture crafts cranium, not the other way around, a dynamic now being recognized in varying measures in different brains across species, from crows and parrots, to dolphins and whales and elephants and, of course, to our fellow primates.

Often as I sat opposite Roger in the woods of Wauchula, I found myself wishing that he would venture a hand through his bars and across the space between us. That he would reach over and take hold of that imaginary thread that my mother described unraveling from her brain and pull it slowly out of my own. Pull it just long and far enough for me to arrive back at that not so distant point in evolutionary time before our human ancestors began the walk that Roger’s never took with them. That point when Roger and I were, in fact, still one and the same, so that I might finally see, however briefly, what Roger was seeing as he looked out at me.

All that distinguishes us, I often wanted to tell my disturbed and sleepless primate confidant, is the elaborateness of that illusion evinced by our brains more recently added neuronal threads. It’s an illusion at once so convincing and yet inherently frail that we still feel compelled to kidnap and place chimpanzees like Roger behind bars in order to bolster it.

Dr. Hoff was examining chimpanzee brain tissue in his Mt. Sinai lab one day when he came upon a particularly dense concentration of oddly shaped, highly specialized neurons known as spindle cells. Often referred to as “the cells that make us human,” spindle cells are rooted in our brain’s more recently evolved right frontal cortex, in what might be called the source of our “overmind,” the region that, I a sense, allows the brain to regard its own functions and that engenders or self-awareness—that sense of ourselves as distinct individuals moving through the world, responding physically and emotionally to all that is around us.

In recent imaging tests, spindle cells have been shown to light up in our skulls like summer evening fireflies in response to a variety of different emotional and social stimuli: the picture of a loved one; scenes of others suffering; feelings of personal embarrassment, or guilt, or self-consciousness.

And yet as integral as these specialized neuronal cells seem to be to our very identity as human beings, they aren’t even present in our brains at birth. They only begin to emerge at about the fourth month of life and, over the course of the next four years or so, continue to grow and migrate toward their permanent home in the right frontal cortex, weaving themselves into place there in direct concert with our newly emerging sense of self—our feelings of devotion, compassion, and remorse; our sense of right and wrong: the early fabric, in effect, from which we go on to weave our own individuality and personal life story.

The very name “spindle cells,” Dr. Hof told me, derives from their resemblance to the elongated, bulbous rods, tapered at each end, upon which thread is spun, and the moment he said this I was reminded of an evening some years ago up at the old log cabin that my wife retreat to each summer in the woods of Canada, just over the Vermont border in Quebec.

I was walking along the half-mile field path that leads from the cabin to the small work shed that I’ve built on a far corner of the land. It was early September 2001. My mother was on the phone from New York. She was trying to describe to me what it felt like to be dying. To be dying in the particular manner that she was, her lung cancer having gone to her brain now, and how she first sensed this.

She told me she’d been standing in the shower one recent morning when she almost fell over. “It was like,” she said, “someone had suddenly taken hold of a tightly wound thread in my brain and started pulling it out, unraveling it.”

Dr Hof told me he has since found spindle cells in a number of the other mammal brains in his cooler. Along with chimps, he’s found them in varying measures in the frontal cortex of all our fellow primates. He has found them in the dolphin’s brain, and in the whale’s, both of whom evolved theirs million of years before primates did. Hof told me he was soon expecting to find spindle cells in the elephant’s brain as well, suggesting, among other things, that all the other animal societies and cultures that we’re now dismantling both on this earth and under sea are far more storied than we ever imagined them to be.

There were not, as far as I could tell, any cockroach brains in Dr. Hof’s cooler of animal brains at Mt Sinai that afternoon, and yet much of what we’ve come to know about the primordial origins and makeup of our and of all brains can be traced to the tiny speck of fatty white tissue that I once watched a neuroscientist in his lab in Old Westbury, Long Island, scoop from the head cavity of a South American cockroach. The brain belonged to one of hundreds of South American roaches being kept there, all of them distant descendants of one original group of stowaway roaches that first arrived to the United States back in 1939 in a crate of Amazonian monkeys delivered to the biology department of Rockefeller University in New York City.

The monkeys were intended for the lab of Dr. Ernst Scharrer, a young German biologist who, a fe years earlier as a graduate student at the University of Munich, had discovered something startling in the brains of fish, something no one had ever thought possible before about any brain: that their neurons secreted bloodborne chemicals, like all other bodily organs or glands.

Ernst would soon set about trying to confirm this same function, known as “neurosecretion” in other vertebrates. Berta, his wife, a fellow biology student at the University of Munich ad an expert on honeybee brains, decided to turn the focus of her search for neurosecretion on the backboneless world of insects, a decision prompted I large part by necessity: women scientists rarely got research positions in those days, to say nothing of the funding to afford lab monkeys.

Thus, when Berta saw the South American roaches come scurrying out of her husband’s monkey crates, one of science’s most unlikely and fruitful lab tandems was born. By the time Berta had retired at the age of eighty-eight and bequeathed her roach collection to the lab at Old Westbury, Scharrer had divined within the cockroach brain the very foundations of our own sympathetic nervous system: the ways in which our brains literally body us forth, shaping everything from our early growth and development in the womb; to the ways in which our shifting emotions and psychological states affect the vigor of our immune systems; to the manner in which our bodies shut down when we die.

It would, appropriately enough, take the brain of the reviled cockroach to wholly undermine that long-standing pillar of Western thinking, the so-called mind-body schism: the illusion that our brain is a thing apart from flesh and all the billions of years of biology that it took to even arrive at that tiny white speck of tissue in a cockroach’s head to say nothing of the densely coiled reticulum within the skull of a chimpanzee like Roger or within our own.

It is an illusion that—the longer and deeper I stared into the charged light behind Roger’s eyes during our days together in Wauchula, Florida—I came to think is not only the reason why he was over there on his side of the bars and me on mine, but also why we humans are, in many ways, by far the more imprisoned species.

VIDEO: Chimps Born to Appreciate Music from the BBC

Of course, they like good music, the consonant over the dissonant, the melodic notes over the misaligned, Schubert over Schonberg. They’re no dummies our nearest kin, and as the following makes evident, they know from infancy to be lulled by the lullaby. Note the pensive look when the music goes off key.