posted by
janrinok
on Friday April 18 2014, @12:52AM
from the did-I-forget-to-mention-the-chimp? dept.
from the did-I-forget-to-mention-the-chimp? dept.
Robert Krulwich at NPR writes, "Many have tried to outperform Ayumu (that's the chimp's name), but when you see how easy it is for him, how matter-of-factly he gets things right, it's clear he's got a talent that's built in. It's not a talent you'd expect a chimp to have, but, hey, this isn't a trick. Nature isn't pro-human or pro-chimp. It's just nature." [Contains link to YouTube video]
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Friday April 18 2014, @01:04AM
Every once in a while you meet a person with a super human memory. Why would it not also happen in other animals.
I met this guy that the railroad hired to record the number of every boxcar going from Minnesota to Ontario before the day of cheap camera and bar coding technology. (Late 1950's).
He would sit by the tracks and watch the boxcars go by, wave and say hello to those he had seen before. Then he would go inside, and write down every car number, in the order he saw them.
His mom still had to cook his meals when he was 50+ years, and lay his clothes out for him every morning, and the guy was, for all intents and purposes, retarded, and a social misfit. But he could remember a 5 mile train's worth of box cars, and would remember those cars he had seen years before.
How the railroad found him I don't know. But they paid him well.
Why couldn't there be such a monkey?
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(Score: 3, Funny) by edIII on Friday April 18 2014, @01:15AM
I've been insisting for years that I was being forced to work with barely trained apes. A monkey is not such a stretch for me. I believe.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by urza9814 on Friday April 18 2014, @01:26AM
I feel like that's just how it always works.
For example, there's the stereotype of great coders (and really great technical minds of all sorts) having zero social skills. And also of the idiots who seem to coast by on social skills alone. I've never met anyone at all who seemed a complete genius at *everything*.
Kinda like a game of D&D -- you can get a better or worse overall roll for skill points, but you still have to allocate those points and may sacrifice one ability for gains in another. Except in real life we don't get to make that as a conscious choice.
And as with any random distribution, you're going to have some outliers. Those are the savants -- a huge boost in one area, but likely with big losses elsewhere. After all, the human brain still has limited resources...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 18 2014, @04:19AM
The article seems to imply that this type of memory is common amongst chimps but provides no evidence that it is so.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by drussell on Friday April 18 2014, @01:51AM
When I was in grade 2 the school suggested to my parents that I be tested because while I was an excellent student, I always seemed bored and would often talk too much and disturb those around me. One of the things the testers did was a memory test using cards with patterns that were placed in a sequence that would be shown for a few seconds (starting with longer and less cards, then reducing the time and increasing the complexity) then they'd cover it up and I had to replicate it. I still vividly remember the tester (Mr. Jones) being flabbergasted and remarking that I was able to do even the fastest, most advanced test correctly, far faster than he'd ever seen before.
One of the results of those tests was that I do, indeed, have an eidetic memory. They suggested that I could easily skip ahead to grade 3 or even 4 in school if I wanted to but it was up to me. Since I was already physically the smallest kid in the class and I really didn't want to leave my sister (who was in the same class) behind I decided not to jump ahead, was really just too scared, but I seriously considered it.
It sure helped me in school through the years, though! By high school my sister really found it annoying that everything seemed to come so easily to me while she studied intently to remain a top student. I never studied. If I'd at least looked at the textbook, for example, in a test I could just think of the page and read it from my mind or refer to a graph or a table... Once I see something I can generally recall it in detail, even years later. My mom always wonders how I remember so much, even from early childhood. It's just burned in there like an EPROM programmer! :)
HOWEVER, there's NO WAY I could do that test with as quick of a flash as that chimp! (At least not without a WHOLE LOT of practice!) Very impressive. Until now I had never even considered that kind of ability might exist in chimps and certainly not to this degree, but I fully understand how it can be done.
Very, very interesting research!
(Score: 2) by hankwang on Friday April 18 2014, @06:47AM
You claim an eidetic memory. Could you comment on what Wikipedia writes? In particular: "...of the people rigorously scientifically tested, no one claiming to have long-term eidetic memory has proven this ability."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday April 18 2014, @08:02AM
I certainly do NOT have the "total recall" type of totally instant photographic memory, (I doubt that anyone does) however I know my memory has ways of functioning outside what most people experience. I am not a scientist or scholar in this field and I make no claims that this is true on any kind of really scientific level.
I should have qualified that better in my previous comment.
Thanks for pointing that out.
hankwang++
(Score: 1) by kbahey on Sunday April 20 2014, @02:53AM
I had this photographic memory in high school and university. I could remember the professor narrating the topic and I could remember how the page looked like, layout, what is written, ...etc. And yes, I did not need to study anything that I remember with this photographic memory. It was all there.
The catch is that all this worked only for subjects that I was interested in, but not for the ones that were "hard" (i.e. I had an aversion to, or lacked interest in).
Over time, this faculty did not hold. Whether it is age, or computers/browsing, I don't know ...
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(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday April 18 2014, @12:44PM
Is it? What about the fact that he's probably been playing this game - possibly for reward - daily, for years, and was observing his mother playing it before that?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Informative) by song-of-the-pogo on Friday April 18 2014, @09:48PM
They (Quarks & Co) did an episode, "Wie viel Mensch steckt im Affen", exploring the similarities between apes and humans. Part of the show covered Ayumu. Quarks & Co wondered if, with training [www1.wdr.de] (German, English trans [google.com]), a human could match Ayumu's performance, and set up a "Beat the Ape" online contest which ran for five weeks. At the end of that period, the 55 fastest participants were invited to the studio to compete against each other. The winner of that contest would go up against Ayumu in an attempt to match his performance metric of 80% correct recall at 0.21 seconds. The whole episode is on YouTube, but you can just skip ahead to the final round [youtube.com] to see the outcome (it's in German). The human contestant managed 84% correct recall, which was considered a win, but I've gotta say Ayumu made it look a lot easier.
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