Friday, January 11, 2008

The smartest cookies in the tin?

I find it amusing how even though humans have defined ourselves as far more intelligent than other species and constructed the parameters of the trait to reinforce this view, (un)-surprisingly scientists studying animal behaviour keep finding evidence for higher cognitive abilities and tool-use in other animals.
Some cool examples:

Weirdly though, we may be using the kind of olfactory intelligence we usually ascribe to dogs and pigs to decide whether we like a new person or not.

Finally, only tenuously relatedly, and obviously still a long way from reality, this research suggests it might be possible to build a machine that can read your mind (at least if you let some dodgy scientist type close enough to implant electrodes in your brain).

1 comment:

RUTH said...

Damon explained the rules of Sudoku to our nearly five year-old human test subjects and K was very, very quick at the easy numbers. I expect five year-old chimps would be good at it too.