[study]Baby Chimps Are Better at Math than You

I thought for a second I had a story I could post in the Hangout, but then I started thinking about all the man vs. nature religious arguments that could result. I figured it was better to be safe. Maybe I've just spent too much time in the D&D. Oh well...


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Are You Smarter Than a Chimpanzee?

If the existential malaise of yet another Monday hasn't already got you down, here's something more: chimpanzees are probably better than you at math.

Well, not all math -- let's see Bonzo do quadratics -- but at basic numerical memory. And while you shouldn't trade your Texas Instruments TI-89 for a chimp just yet, Kyoto University cognitive scientist Tetsuro Matsuzawa thinks you should change your conception of human.

In as study due to be published tomorrow in Current Biology, Matsuzawa showed a computer screen grid of nine numbers to six chimpanzees, all trained to recognize the ascending nature of arabic numberals, and nine college students. When subjects touched one number, the others disappeared. Then they had to touch the squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.

When the original numbers remained on-screen for seven-tenths of a second, the college kids fared as well as Ayumu, the most prodigious of the chimps. Both had a success rate of 80 percent. But when the numbers flashed for just four-tenths of a second or less, Ayumu's success rate stayed the same, while the others plummeted to 40 percent. Even with six months of training, three students still couldn't beat Ayumu.

"It's amazing what this chimpanzee is able to do," chimpanzee researcher Elizabeth Lonsdorf told the Associated Press. "I just watched the video of that and I can tell you right now, there's no way I can do it. It's unbelievable. I can't even get the first two (squares)."

“There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions,” said Matsuzawa in a press release. “No one can imagine that chimpanzees—young chimpanzees at the age of five—have a better performance in a memory task than humans. Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection—better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure.” Matsuzawa likens the phenomenon to eidetic -- photographic -- memory.

Thinking of arguments raised by supporters of the failed personhood bid of an Austrian chimpanzee named Hiasl, I emailed Matsuzawa to ask whether the findings should change how we think about the 'personhood' of chimpanzees. If they have comparable cognitive faculties to a human child, should we give them basic human rights?

"No," he wrote back -- but then, far from insisting on a status-quo division between humans and chimps, he suggested something quite radical. Wrote Matsuzawa,

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I simply say the fact:

Young chimpanzes are better than adult humans in a memory task.

The fact clearly tells that the human-animal dichotomy is wrong.

Human is a member of animal kingdom.

Even more, the dichotomy of human vs nature may be wrong.

Human is a part of nature.

We are connected to all the other creatures.

Please let people know the above site. See the 153 MB video clips. This is truth.

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