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Centre for Rheumatology and Bloomsbury Rheumatology

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Why The Birds?

If we look into a person's eyes we seem to be looking into a space where experience and emotion take place. If we come face to face with an owl we sense something similar but the contents of the space are rather more mysterious and uncertain. If we look at a picture of a person, or an owl, the sense is still there but less insistent. It we look at a picture of a pair of gulls preening each other, there is still something of the same sense, even if it is remote, and in this case vicarious. We sense the sense in other creatures. There is little doubt that in all this our minds are playing clever tricks on us. At the same time, there are good Darwinian reasons for thinking that those tricks are there because of something about what goes on behind eyes that we call experience.