This week I got an interesting letter from Aaron Sanders, a reader of mine, about some precognitive ‘messages’ about the sad death of Robin Williams.  It all centers around Robin Williams’s encounter with the famous gorilla Koko, who as you no doubt know, understands and uses American sign language.  If you haven’t seen this video on YouTube, have a look at their magical connection:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOVS9zotSqM

This week I got an interesting letter from Aaron Sanders, a reader of mine, about some precognitive ‘messages’ about the sad death of Robin Williams.  It all centers around Robin Williams’s encounter with the famous gorilla Koko, who as you no doubt know, understands and uses American sign language.  If you haven’t seen this video on YouTube, have a look at their magical connection:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOVS9zotSqM

According to her handlers, this was the first time Koko laughed in six months following the death of her close companion, a fellow ape named Michael.

Aaron is a full-time investor and day-trader, so it’s his job to constantly follow the news feeds on Twitter.

‘Two of the guys I follow - completely unrelated:  one, a trader from London, and one, an author from Missouri - both of them made tweets (only minutes apart) about a Gorilla named Koko who I had NEVER heard-of before in my life,’ wrote Aaron.

‘The trader from London had a picture of Koko being upset due to the Bitcoin price falling, and the author from Missouri made a [joke about Koko]. 

‘Just to repeat my point, these two guys are completely unrelated, and each of them made their Koko comments within minutes of each other, hours before Robin's death).

‘At the time, I thought it was very interesting that these two completely unrelated guys each made tweets involving Koko, and I have NEVER heard of this interesting gorilla in my life.

Five hours later, Aaron began noticing the first tweets of the news Williams had just killed himself. One hour after these news feeds, Aaron then received a retweet of the viral video of Koko and Williams tickling each other. ‘And then the odd Koko tweets I received six hours earlier made perfect sense as a case of mass precognition of the powerful tragic event with Robin Williams.’

And now the papers were filled with stories of Koko being close to tears when her handlers told her of Williams’ death, signing her words for ‘cry woman’ when she returned.

This story isn’t simply a story of human precognition ‘in the Field’. It also revives the entire debate about what exactly animals feel. To the scientific community, an animal is still perceived as nothing much more than a robot with an array of chemical processes, without the ability to register much more than the crudest pain or fear—certainly none of the more complicated human feelings such as excitement, boredom, annoyance, anger or suspicion.

However, these attitudes are now being challenged with the advent of sophisticated brain-imaging technology that can reveal brain function in specific areas of the brain in people with emotional disorders.

A number of scientists, in studying the brains of both animals and humans, have discovered remarkable similarities in emotional biology between species. Increasingly, scientists are coming to believe that animals have sentience—the ability to have a conscious experience, to compare and understand experience, to have an internal representation of what is going on in their lives—in effect, to know that they know.

At the forefront of this underexplored field of research is Jaak Panksepp, professor emeritus of the department of psychology at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio.

According to Panksepp, aside from the core emotions of rage, fear, the drive to chase prey and curiosity, which sit in the more primitive portion of the brain, the ‘higher brain centres’ lie in the newer sections of the brain, the ‘neo-mammalian’ cerebral cortex, or neo-cortex. It is here that animals, like us humans, develop sophisticated secondary ‘social’ emotions: separation distress; sexual attraction and lust; social attachment and bonding; and play.

These secondary emotions are of the more complicated variety as they require reflection and choice—a weighing up of the effects of different actions. Without human speech, animals ordinarily cannot prove to us that they think the same way we do about a certain situation/ Nevertheless, we do know that the brain biochemistry connected with certain sophisticated human feelings is found in a range of other species, and that the same emotions also cause the same measurable chemical changes in their brain, too. Consequently, Panksepp and others have inferred that secondary emotion is not a uniquely human trait. 

As noted animal scientist Temple Grandin says, the difference between animal and human emotions is a matter of degree, rather than of kind. That is why Koko is so extraordinary – her language affords a tiny window into an animal’s soul.

Unconditional love comes naturally to a dog or cat; animals aren’t ambivalent or repressed about their emotions. As Grandin says, there is no such thing as a love–hate relationship in the animal kingdom. “If an animal loves you, he loves you no matter what. He doesn’t care what you look like or how much money you make,” she says. Or, in Koko’s case, how famous you are.