Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson with Chaser the Border Collie

If you haven’t heard about Chaser the Border Collie, you’ll be amazed. The link is to a short segment on ABC or you can find the complete video on NOVA’s website.

And if you have heard about him, I’d like you to contemplate how amazing Chaser is.  Here’s a dog who is able to associate arbitrary names, at least from Chaser’s POV since he doesn’t speak English, with stuffed toys, which are equally arbitrary from his POV.

Could you do this? Not knowing the context of the object you’re seeing, would you then be able to associate an equally arbitrary name with this object, and do this a thousand times over?

Sure you could, and probably in less time than Chaser — but maybe not.

Since a metaphor is a substitution that replaces one thing for another, Chaser is clearly a champion metaphor machine. It’ll be interesting to see how this research helps us understand and model the nature of animal thought.