I knew chimpanzees were smart and had been taught to communicate with sign language and the like, but I was amazed by an account I read today about Dr. David Premach and ‘Sarah’, one of his most successful language-using chimps: “Premack and his colleagues taught this chimpanzee not only to read and write the names of objects, but also abstract conceptions [the examples: above, below, the same as, and different from].” After some time, Sarah could also master an if/then statement as well. But the most amazing thing is this next antictode: “Another chipanzee that had been trained in America to communicate using these [i.e. Premach’s] plastic signs, on first seeing a duck, spontaneously brought out the two signs ‘water” and bird’, and put them together to name the duck ‘water-bird'” (Peter Nathan, The Nervous System. Third edition. New York: Oxford, 1988, p.289).
I’m still working on Solomon’s book on depression and I’m liking it even more the further I get into it.
Shouts out to Steve and Ayille on their recent site redesigns (both of you should put up shots of your old ones as well). And a big “you suck” to sanjaisuncity for spamming one of my comment pages with an add-link to some crappy company that I can only assume (s)he works for (surf cautiously, my dear readers, the site boldly declares that it requires a 4.0 or higher browser with a 600×480 [???] screen resolution).
