(June 26, 2020 at 8:37 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Most animals are pretty good at being whatever they are. Humans are different in this regard. In addition to being good at being humans, we're also good at being what any other animal is, as well.
I recently watched an episode of "mind field" (Vsauce) that gave me a new perspective on this topic. In short, researchers show that chimps outperform humans by a significant margin in a short-term memory test. The test briefly flashes numerals on the screen and the subject must touch the area of the screen in numerical order after the numerals are masked.
The chimps could memorize the positions of the numerals and succeed after seeing the numerals for less than a second. The human subject, Michael, took much longer to memorize. At the same timing as the chimp, he could only identify 3 or so of the 9 numerals before just guessing.
My point, and the subject of the research, is that some animals have abilities beyond ours in some contexts, and it is theorized that we lost these abilities in an evolutionary trade-off for something else like language.
