Chimpanzees are smarter than people in some cases, you'd be surprised

One of the most fascinating things that'll definitely blow your mind happened at Kyoto University in Japan. A group of scientists tried to study just how well chimpanzees can remember things they see for a short time. The entire research was led by a scientist named Tetsuro Matsuzawa and his team. They performed the experiment at the Primate Research Institute.

They had a chimpanzee called Ayumu which was quite a famous one, a young male Chimpanzee who grew up in the lab with his mother called Ai. (Not Ai as in artificial intelligence but Ai, more of a Japanese name).

Ayumu and some other chimps were trained to use a touchscreen, just like the screens we have on tablets or smart phones. The goal of the researchers was to find out if chimpanzees could remember numbers and locations better than people can.

This is how the experiment usually went. On the screen the researchers used numbers from 1 to 9 which appeared in random spots for a very short time. After a quick flash, the numbers were covered by white squares so the Chimpanzees could no longer see.

The task the Chimpanzees were given was a simple one, they had to tap the squares in an order, from number 1 up to number 9, using memory alone since the numbers were covered.

The researchers gave the exact same test to human beings, so they could compare performance of Chimpanzees to human beings.

The more interesting part was that the numbers would sometimes appear for only 210 milliseconds, that's less than one fourth of a second. That's a speed that most human beings could not even see all the numbers before they disappeared.

But to their amazement, young chimps like Ayumu remembered them almost perfectly, even at this very fast speed.

The outcome of the experiment was such that when the display stayed on the screen for a longer period, both the chimps and the people did well. But when it flashed quickly, the chimps won easily.

I would be embarrassed if I was included in the experiment.

This experiment was a clear evidence that chimpanzees have a very strong short term visual memory, even stronger than ours in some cases.

The scientists call this kind of memory, working memory. It helps us hold and use small amounts of information for a few seconds. That's the memory function we use for reading, talking or remembering a phone number.

The experiment showed that Chimpanzees seem to use the working memory in a more visual way in remembering where things are or what they just saw almost like a photo in their minds.

This adaptational feature if you will, is believed to help the Chimps survive the wild. So many predators and so many unsafe zones in the wild. They would need to remember locations and their path through the dense forests. They would need to remember where the fruits are.

It also turned out that the young chimps showed the best results, which could mean that their working memory works fastest at a young age just like how our human children learn languages faster.

To learn more about the studies and research, it was published in Current Biology in 2007.

This kind of challenges the idea that human beings are always smarter than other animals, the chimp out best the human beings in this experiment and I wonder how many more different tests animals can beat us to.

If it was a one time, we'd call it luck but the researchers repeated the test several times and got the same results and that just proved it was real and not just damn luck for the Chimpanzees.

Ayumu has become a symbol of Chimp intelligence in Japan and parts of the world where this research of animal to human competition goes on.

Some scientists hold the believe that perhaps as we human beings evolved, we might have traded some of this raw visual memory ability to focus more on language, planning and social thinking.

Chimpanzees are clearly more intelligent than they appear.