Chimps Have Better Memories Than People
So much for those who think chimps are dumb animals:
Spend even a little time around chimpanzees, and you begin to realize how intelligent they are. But can they outshine humans in brain power? Most humans would scoff at that.
Not really. I’ve watched the Democratic and Republican party Presidential debates and that doesn’t surprise me one bit.
But researchers have shown that young chimps outperform adult humans in a memory test, a Concentration-like game using numerals on a computer screen.
“We were very surprised to find this,” Tetsuro Matsuzawa of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University said. “But it’s a very concrete, simple fact. Young chimps are superior to human adults in a memory task.”
I don’t believe it. By the way: what’s this article about again?
Dr. Matsuzawa and a colleague, Sana Inoue, first trained chimps to recognize the numerals 1 through 9 in sequence. Ai, the first chimp trained, an adult female was found with a memory capability equal to that of adult humans.
When the researchers went to see if there was a difference with chimps younger than 6, the animals had a touch screen where scattered numerals appeared for up to two-thirds of a second and were then masked by white squares. With the shortest exposure time, about a fifth of a second, the chimps had an 80 percent accuracy rate, compared with adult humans’ 40 percent. The findings are described in Current Biology.
This isn’t the first research indicating chimps are highly intelligent and related to humans (intelligent design to the contrary). For lots of info go HERE.
opinions powered by SendLove.to
5 Responses to “Chimps Have Better Memories Than People”
The results probably depend on which humans they’re testing (in a larger sense than whether they’re smart or not).
It’s been well-demonstrated that people from primary oral societies perform better than people from primary literate ones. We don’t need to have good memories. We can always look things up.
“We don’t need to have good memories. We can always look things up.”
Of course, a lot of time is wasted as we look up things again and again, forgetting what we looked up last time.
Now, combine a chimp’s memory with the ability to look things up, and then we’re cooking.
When they get fire and the wheel going call me.
(I gave the libs first chance before I proceeded.)
So does this mean we can be more suspicious than ever when Dubya says “I can’t recall” this or that?
Sam,
Your comment made my day.
I suddenly imagined a chimp sitting in front of his laptop, designing a better wheel and a more efficient way to make fire.