Does the video below make you, a homo sapien, feel a little less special than normal? Watch as a chimpanzee at a Japanese university research facility time and again correctly memorizes sequences of random numbers within a few seconds. Then ask yourself (naturally) whether you could do the same.
According to primatologist, Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa, Ai and her son, Ayumu, can memorize several numbers in sequence after viewing them for only half a second. In Ayumu's case he can recall up to 19 numbers in correct order.
So what's going on here? At first I thought the chimps were recalling the numbers by shape rather than by their arithmetic values, but that seems highly unlikely given that random shapes don't convey values of ascending or descending order. So it looks like the chimps can not only sequence numbers correctly, they actually understand what the numbers represent. After each successful test the chimps were given a reward ... a banana perhaps. Maybe that's it?
Professor Matsuzawa said: There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions. 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.
On reflection, perhaps humans are unable to compete in this way because our minds cannot focus on a single task without rationalizing, unlike the chimps, children and in many reported cases autistic people. Emptying one's mind of all thoughts other than the task at hands seems to beyond adult humans ... even if there's a banana at the end of it. Fascinating, and humbling.