Do monkeys wonder?

[downbeatplumb]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/wondermonkey/...er-1.shtml

Do monkeys, or other primates, think about themselves? Do they reflect, worry, remember, or consider an idea forming in their minds?

In short, do monkeys wonder? Because if they can, our view of monkeys needs to change. Quite profoundly I’d say.

It would mean that we should no longer be surprised that a monkey has found a new way to crack a nut, as we’d acknowledge it had probably been considering the idea for a while.

It would mean that we must accept that these animals too might be concerned for the welfare of their kin, or that they might recall a childhood memory.

When we visit a zoo and look into a monkey’s eyes, wondering what it is thinking, it might even be looking at us right back, wondering exactly the same.

That has some pretty profound implications for the status we give these creatures, and whether we choose to exploit or protect them, care for them and respect them.

So to help answer the question I want to report some results published as part of a scientific review conducted by Dr Masataka Watanabe of the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science in Japan.

Do chimpanzees think about themselves? He tells me that a recent neuroimaging study on anaesthetised monkeys suggested that they too have a default mode of brain activity. A study on awake macaques, published in 2009, shows that monkeys suppress neuronal activity in the posterior cingulate cortex when they are performing a task, while another study on chimpanzees, an ape more closely related to us, suggested that their brains, when resting, retrieve memories and may be involved in some level of mental self-projection.

But no-one had actually performed any neuroimaging to measure whether awake monkeys have the same “default” brain activity that people do.

So Dr Watanabe and colleagues did PET scans of the brains of awake Japanese macaques. They also measured the blood flowing within the key brain areas associated with having internal thought processes.

In all three monkeys tested this way, their brains showed a similar pattern to humans.

“Similar to the human default system, all monkeys showed higher rest-related activity in the medial prefrontal and medial periatal areas,” writes Dr Watanabe in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

In Dr Watanabe’s words: “That suggests that there might be internal thought processes in the monkey.”

Monkeys are intelligent, tool-using animals that live in complex societies. They display deceptive and altruistic behaviours and can even make judgements about fairness.

So it makes sense that they have a degree of social intelligence, Dr Watanabe says, and might process ideas about “self”.

An Assamese macaque looks out onto the world So monkeys do wonder it seems.

[Darwinian]

Yes.

[Minimalist]

No...they go to the library for answers.




When they learn to Google they will take over the world.

[5thHorseman]

Yes they do, Christians, Jews and Muslims could learn a thing or two from them.

For example, instead of going to worship sky surfer/ occasional meteorologist thingy and wondering if it may be a total farse and waste of time, what they could do with that time to help real people, or work to help the economy, or maybe even read a book, non fiction preferably.