Self-Recognition in Fish

This book describes the process of making the major breakthrough in the study of animal self-awareness using fish. The discovery led by the author s team, proving the mirror self-recognition ability of fish, is vividly documented as they share the process of making, testing and verifying hypotheses and developing further hypotheses. The clear experimental results demonstrate the remarkable self-awareness in animals, overturning the conventional view and providing a key to understanding the origin of human self-awareness.

Starting from the current understanding of fish brains, individual recognition by its face, the following chapters introduce the series of the authors research projects designed to understand mirror self-recognition (MSR) in animals. The sequence of the research into fish s MSR is documented, including how it started, the failures and successes, and the struggles. Additional tests carried out in response to various criticisms of the work have led to a re-examination of the research methods used prior to the author s work. The book then addresses the question of exactly when and how some fish recognize themselves in a mirror, exploring the self-awareness and the mind , in other word Eureka moment in fish. This book points out and overturns the contradictions in conventional wisdom based on anthropocentrism and hypotheses about the evolution of self-awareness, proposing a new hypothesis that the self-awareness of humans and fish will be homologous. The book takes readers on an engaging exploration of the scientific experiments and the remarkable discovery of animal intelligence.