快猫短视频

LOOKING for the cleverest, nonhuman ape in the world was, in fact, hard work.
I鈥檇 only recently swapped investigating the paranormal for consciousness
studies, so I knew little about ape minds. But it was my credentials as a
serious sceptic that made the TV company choose me to present their
programme.

Then, suddenly, there I was with two infant chimpanzees wrapped around my
neck at Sally Boysen鈥檚 Chimp Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. This
would certainly make good TV, but I wanted to know what kind of intelligence was
looking back at me. It was certainly not human: the little chimps did not watch
my face and imitate me as a human toddler would. But surely I shouldn鈥檛 be
judging them by human standards, should I?

This question was playing around in my mind as I watched the lab鈥檚 star
subject, 29-year-old Sheba, jump enthusiastically onto a table ready for her
tests. Cards marked with the numbers 0 to 6 lay in front of her while Boysen
held up, say, three bananas, or five pens. Sheba reliably pointed to the correct
numeral. Boysen took a box, hid three bananas inside and then, after a pause,
added two more. Sheba pointed, with a little more hesitation, to the number
five.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world at the Primate Research Institute
of Kyoto University, Tetsuro Matsuzawa was testing a mother chimpanzee called
Ai. At the age of five, Ai started learning both Japanese characters and Arabic
numerals, using a touch-sensitive computer screen. Later, she was shown a random
selection of numbers dotted about on the screen, and her task was to touch them
in ascending order: say, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9 . . .

She did this so fast and accurately that Matsuzawa wondered whether she was
committing the display to memory before responding. To find out, he devised a
new experiment in which, as soon as she touches the first number on the screen,
all the rest are covered up with little white squares. She has to remember where
each number was.

She can still touch them in order accurately even when all the numbers are
hidden.

I can鈥檛. I spent ages in the testing room, pressing away on the screen and
shouting at myself when I got it wrong. The upshot seemed to be that I could
manage the memory test with four numbers but not with five. And Sheba was
faster, too.

How come? Short-term memory for numbers seems an odd skill for wild
chimpanzees. Matsuzawa asked me to imagine a confrontation between rival chimp
groups in the forest. How many enemies are you facing? Behind you, how many
allies? With a long history of such battles, natural selection would favour
chimps who could count quickly. Numbers count.

So does spatial awareness, but I was surprised to see Sheba using a scale
model of the room where they conduct the experiments. When Sally placed a tiny
bottle of juice in a doll鈥檚 house version of the room, Sheba leapt off her
table, went straight to the corresponding spot in the real room and got the
juice. This computationally difficult task, which entails mental rotation and a
big transformation in size, appeared trivial to her.

Again, why? No African forest contains scale models and no chimpanzees make
them. But perhaps leaping from tree to tree requires a flexible mental model of
the world around you. If so, does Sheba consciously experience a mental image as
we do? And is she aware of herself?

There is a classic test. In 1872, Darwin gave a mirror to two young
orang-utans and described how they first reacted as though to another
orang-utan, then looked around the back of the mirror, and finally got upset.
Nowadays psychologists test whether an animal recognises itself in a mirror by
surreptitiously marking its forehead. From the age of 18 months, humans touch
the spot to get it off. Would Sheba?

Sally slipped a yellow sticker onto Sheba鈥檚 forehead while grooming her.
Sheba took one look in the mirror, grabbed the spot and stuck it firmly onto the
window in front of me, as if to say: 鈥淵ou can have this silly spot.鈥�

But such anthropomorphism won鈥檛 do. Shouldn鈥檛 I stick to the facts? Well, no.
Because this fact business was unravelling in my hands. When I arrived at Zoo
Atlanta in Georgia, anthropologist Lyn Miles was on one side of a deep moat and
on the other, a few yards away, lay a vast heap of orange dreadlocks. 鈥淕et up,
Chantek,鈥� signed Lyn, who had taught him American Sign Language as a baby.

In response to requests from Lyn, Chantek tied knots, threw objects back over
the moat, and placed a stick on his blanket or his blanket on the stick. Most of
his signs were requests for food, and it was his obvious desire for our mugs of
hot chocolate that provided the stimulus for what happened next.

Chantek demanded some of the hot chocolate. Lyn signed that she needed his
bottle and its cap. After failing to find the cap, he sat there, slowly
unwinding the label from the bottle. I thought he was sulking, until he crumpled
the paper up, tucked it into the neck of the bottle and threw it across. Had he
really worked out the problem and found a novel solution?

How can we know? As I watched these apes apparently solving problems and
interacting in intimate and touching ways with the humans, I found myself forced
to abandon reverence for the objectivity that science demands and concluded that
the best experiments must be inspired by guesswork and empathy.

When Chantek looked me straight in the eye and signed 鈥渇riend, hug鈥�, I felt I
was communicating with a conscious being just as I would with you, and for the
same reasons.

It is what you do and say that lets me into your mind.