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Obviously for the purpose of this thread the term animal is being used to refer to higher animals, mostly mammals and birds, which exhibit learning/long term memory.
I suggest Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence to see how memory matters. Higher animals can do pretty much whatever we can do without words. See what you can and cannot do while singing a song in your head. By singing a song you are 'using up your inner vocal track' and hence can't simultaneously do things like multiplication or writing a sentence, which would require you to talk to yourself in your head, which the singing precludes.. But you can use a bottle opener and get beer from the fridge. Of course you couldn't invent a fridge without words. Much of your learning was based on the use of words, until it became automated. But if you could imagine living your whole life without words... I suggest Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation for that.
(Edited by Ted Keer on 1/10, 12:16pm)
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