Chimpanzees have better short-term memory than ours!!! No human being can do this!!!!!

[Uncle Joe]

[Major Nikon]

1. But can he shave his balls?

[ErikJ]

2. Maybe we should start outsourcing programming to the Congo.

[ErikJ]

3. Here's an interesting article about it

Chimps are making monkeys out of us
.................................. clip
Given that humans share 98.8% of their DNA with chimpanzees, why do the latter have such vastly superior working memories?

The answer lies in evolution, says Matsuzawa. As humans evolved and acquired new skills – notably the ability to use language to communicate and collaborate – they lost others they once shared with their common simian ancestors. "Our ancestors may have also had photographic memories, but we lost that during evolution so that we could acquire new skills," he says. "To get something, we had to lose something."

For the chimps, the ability to memorise the location of objects is critical to their survival in the wild, where they compete for food with other, often aggressive, ape communities. To thrive, an individual chimp must be able to look up at, say, a sprawling fig tree and quickly note the location of the ripe fruit.

"They have to be able to think quickly because there are other hungry chimps behind them," Matsuzawa says. "They have to grasp the situation as quickly as possible and decide where to go."

The same instincts kick in when confronted with a rival. "They have to see how many opponents are in front of them and decide whether to move forward or stay put. It can be a life-or-death decision."

more > https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/29/chimp-intelligence-aymu-matsuzawa-kyoto

[Uncle Joe]

4. Thanks for the addition, ErikJ.

Peace to you.

[passiveporcupine]

5. That is totally amazing.

How they can see and process the images that fast is beyond me. I didn't know they could count to ten. And then the memory...well, I certainly won't be in any contests with a chimp any time soon. I'm floored!


So, I found this:

People have two counting faculties.

We can "see" instantly a handful of things and without knowing how many there are - this is called subitizing.

The other way of counting is enumerating - counting up individual numbers.

We can subitize up to about four or five, then we resort to enumerating.

Chimpanzees usually start at six.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6577241.stm

there is a count the dots game at the link. Short and fun and embarrassing to me.

But even this doesn't explain how they can see, identify, remember and select the numbers so quickly in that clip.