Chimps Have Better Memory than YOU

Chimps Have Better Memory than YOU

www.nytimes.com

...researchers have shown that young chimps outperform adult humans in a memory test, a Concentration-like game using numerals on a computer screen.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Yes, Virginia, you heard me right. Chimpanzees are smarter than you and me, including every other human being on the planet!
I've always suspected this especially when visiting the zoo and watching those interactions that take place between mother chimps and their young'uns. It's the young chimps who have always been an endless fascination to me because they've always seemed so INTELLIGENT. I never could put a finger on it but when you spend time watching them play for a little while, you can clearly see that they are a lot more intelligent than experts have been giving them credit for.

So now that the cat's out of the bag, yes... young chimps are not only intelligent, they're even MORE intelligent than we are!!

Amazing!

www.nytimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)


[edit on 4-12-2007 by Palasheea]

I just thought I'd add insult to injury: The chimps had better short-term memory than college students.

Now, to be fair, for reasons I won't go into, my short term memory in college was almost non-existent, but still... one has to assume that the average college student has to be at least one notch above the average intelligence of a human being.

So I wonder how long it'll be before our jobs start getting outsourced to chimps?

Doesn't necessarily mean that they're smarter, just that they have better memories. So do elephants, don't they?

Originally posted by malganis
Doesn't necessarily mean that they're smarter, just that they have better memories. So do elephants, don't they?

They are smarter, they don't use their brains to destroy the planet, they just use their brains to get a bit more food. They've got it sussed. I was very impressed at their ability not only to order a chain of objects (numbers) but also to still 'see' and jump along the chain when links were taken out. That is smart, and we're them towards extinction in the wild!!!

[edit on 4-12-2007 by redled]

i always knew it, chimps are way better than us.

now letme ask u this, if they evolved into a more complex species, there will be a planet of the apes kind of thing?

This comes as no great suprise.
When you consider how far out we were with estimating the true age of the pyramids..

Sorry ,what was the question?

Originally posted by AGENT_T

Sorry ,what was the question?

Could Chimps be conscious maybe? Or is that settled now? I'm on the side of conscious and rights.

reply to post by redled


I've always thought that ALL animals were self-aware/feel emotions/feel pain etc.

I think the short-term memory experiment is a little misleading.
I would tend to believe that most animals have a developed memory due to the requirements for sheer survival.

EG Zebra.. "must remember NOT to go chasing lions"

Maybe it should have been more of an experiment to find out how much humans are shrinking in their mental abilities.

Originally posted by Drzava
i always knew it, chimps are way better than us.

now letme ask u this, if they evolved into a more complex species, there will be a planet of the apes kind of thing?

I guess it depends on what you mean by "evolved."

If it's in the literal sense, as in, if a new aberrant strain of chimp found itself better able to survive and score mates and produce offspring than its status quo chimp brothers and sisters, then probably not.

Species do not evolve into a new species very quickly, generationally-speaking. Homo Sapiens have been around for roughly 200k years and are still pretty much the same, evolutionarily speaking, as we have been since then, with only very minor "plumage" variations amongst us. All of known history for mankind has occurred during the reign of homo sapiens. The chimps are much in the same boat, but perhaps more so.

Modern chimpanzee fossils have been found from the middle Pleistocene era, so roughly 1 million years ago. They are thus evolving at a slower rate than humans, which actually makes sense if you consider who eventually rose to the top of the food chain to control the planet. Chimps and humans (not homo sapiens though) themselves probably split off of the same species around 5.4 million years ago, though it could be as late as 8 million years ago. Since then, humans have gone through many evolutionary steps at an increasingly faster pace to become homo sapiens, and the chimps have gone through relatively few.

Thus, assuming humans and chimps originally came from the same base stock roughly 5-8million years ago, and the end result of the chimp-branch is what we have now, and the end result of the human branch is what we have now, then one must assume that humans will continue to evolve at a faster rate than the chimpanzee, which cannot hope to keep pace with humans. Of course, since we are still talking about hundreds of thousands of years between evolutionary strains, and perhaps the eventually acceleration might bring us to tens of thousands of years, that is still many orders of magnitude longer than the entire span of human civilization before one sees a new variant of an existing species.

If you are speaking from an "Educational" evolution, the answer remains the same. Humans have had thousands of years to develop language, writing, infrastructure, agriculture, military tactics, government, religion, etc... all of these things intertwine with branching subskills-a-million, that define and shape human civilization. Chimps have, to date, figured out how to poke bush-babies with a stick, eat termites with a stick, and have demonstrated better short-term memory.

Finally, we humans have numbers on our side. the human population far out measures that of the chimpanzee. At the turn of the 1900's, chimpanzees might have numbered as high as 2 million. They now number less than 200,000. Humans, conversely, are rapidly approaching the 7-billion mark. In a struggle for dominance, numbers are the most important factor, and a 35,000-to-1 lead would be almost impossible to overcome without an almost godlike technological advantage, which chimps most certainly do not have on us humans.

In short, the answer to your question is "no", there almost certainly never be a planet of the apes situation on Earth. I would not say it is impossible, but it is currently improbable to the point of being negligible.

Bogus research. if I spent a whole week memorizing a deck of cards from front to back i'd beat the chimp. Trust me, this research is bogus, of course the monkey is going to memorize everything if he had 6 months to work on it.

reply to post by jedimiller


ur ego cant accept monkeys are better than u

Originally posted by jedimiller
Bogus research. if I spent a whole week memorizing a deck of cards from front to back i'd beat the chimp. Trust me, this research is bogus, of course the monkey is going to memorize everything if he had 6 months to work on it.

Maybe then those college graduates would do well spending six months memorising numbers and repeating the experiment.

Originally posted by Drzava
reply to post by jedimiller

 

ur ego cant accept monkeys are better than u

Not true, get me a monkey and I'll prove this research wrong my friend. Powned!!

reply to post by jedimiller


well bring me any human and i will prove u wrong

even dophins are better than us
remember that some people dont even know where their country is.

[edit on 4-12-2007 by Drzava]

[edit on 4-12-2007 by Drzava]

reply to post by redled


I can only speak for myself, but I don't use my brain to destroy the planet. What you do is your business. Please don't speak for me in your generalizations.

Memorization is not a factor in intelligence. Even dogs, cats and other animals have great memory. I took numerous psychology courses.

Memory does not make one great.

reply to post by BlueRaja

Humans in general have set this planet on a path to destruction, chimpanzees in general have had their habitats destroyed and all semblance of rights taken. By humans. I'm glad you're no party to all of this, and despite what you might think, I try not to be party either.

Originally posted by jedimiller
Memorization is not a factor in intelligence.

With no memory, you are not going to succeed in intelligence tests.

The chimps had better short-term memory than college students.

But can a chimp lie in bed till 1pm...watch Trisha, Jeremy Kyle, and Diagnosis Murder AND remember to return a library book?...

no?...

(neither can a college student...well, not the library bit anyway)

[edit on 4-12-2007 by citizen smith]