Many say it's time to think again, with new evidence emerging that they say represents a radical change in thinking in animal consciousness. There are now researchers from different fields who are beginning to dare to ask questions about animal consciousness and clearly think about the relevance of their research to these questions. It is true that what has been discovered so far may not amount to conclusive evidence of animal consciousness, but taken together, it is enough to suggest that there is a "realistic possibility" that animals are capable of consciousness. This applies not only to so-called higher animals such as monkeys and dolphins that have reached a more advanced stage than other animals. It also applies to simpler organisms, such as snakes, octopuses, crabs, bees, and perhaps even fruit flies.

Many say it's time to think again, with new evidence emerging that they say represents a radical change in thinking in animal consciousness. There are now researchers from different fields who are beginning to dare to ask questions about animal consciousness and clearly think about the relevance of their research to these questions. It is true that what has been discovered so far may not amount to conclusive evidence of animal consciousness, but taken together, it is enough to suggest that there is a "realistic possibility" that animals are capable of consciousness. This applies not only to so-called higher animals such as monkeys and dolphins that have reached a more advanced stage than other animals. It also applies to simpler organisms, such as snakes, octopuses, crabs, bees, and perhaps even fruit flies.

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But if you're wondering what we mean by awareness, you're not alone. It's something that not even scientists can agree on. The early efforts came in the seventeenth century at the hands of the French philosopher René Descartes, who said, "I think, therefore I exist," and added that "language is the only sure sign of thought hidden in the body." But these statements have troubled things for so long, that some researchers have been upset about acknowledging this approach, and have gone so far as to consider it an "unholy trinity" (language, intelligence and consciousness). This trinity is the core of a movement called behaviorism, which emerged in the early twentieth century. She says thoughts and feelings cannot be measured by scientific methods and should therefore be ignored when analyzing behavior. Many animal behavior experts have been trained in this view, but it is beginning to lend itself to a less human-centered approach: because we see things through a human lens, we tend to associate awareness with language and intelligence. But just because they go together in humans, it doesn't mean they generally go together.

Some people strongly criticize some of the uses of the word consciousness, because it is a word that many people use with confidence, but they all mean something different. And they prefer to use the less complex word "feeling," and this new, broader explanation of what it means to be conscious makes a difference, because if we look at distinct behaviors, for example, what species can recognize themselves in the mirror, how many species can plan for the future or are able to remember things that happened in the past, we are able to test these questions by experimenting and observing and extracting more. To say that animals that have been successful in these specific tasks have something we choose to call consciousness.

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Some say there is a need to study far more animals to see if they are aware than is currently the case. Right now, most research is done on humans and apes, and we're making the task much harder than it should be because we're not learning about consciousness in its basic form, because research on humans and apes is the study of a higher level of consciousness – manifested in the ability to communicate and feel complex emotions – while an octopus or snake may also have a basic level of consciousness that we ignore. There's also a lot we don't know, including about decapods such as crabs, lobsters, lobsters and shrimp. We don't know much about her life experience, or even basic things like how she dies. This is important because we need to establish rules to protect them both in the laboratory and in the wild.

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Around the same time that René Descartes was saying, "I think, therefore I exist," the Catholic Church found that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei "highly suspected heresy" for suggesting that the Earth was not the center of the universe. It was the shift in thinking that opened our eyes to a truer and richer picture of the universe and our place in it. Moving ourselves from the center of the universe again may do the same for our understanding of ourselves as well as of other living beings with whom we share the planet.