focus likes this story...Monkeys could be smarter than humans. Hope you do as well.
Chimp flogs champ in memory testArticle from: The Daily Telegraph
<div class="caption">Not the same ape ... but here's an obviously cluey chimp playing, er,poker. While wearing a T-shirt. As you do </div>
January 26, 2008 12:00am
WHENscientists found out that chimps had better memories than students,there were unkind comments about the calibre of the human competitionthey faced.
But now an ape has gone one better, trouncing British memory champion Ben Pridmore.
Ayumu,a seven-year-old male brought up in captivity in Japan, did three timesas well as Mr Pridmore at a computer game which involved rememberingthe position of numbers on a screen.
Andthat's no mean feat - the 30-year-old accountant from Derby is capableof memorising the order of a shuffled pack of cards in under 30 seconds.
This amazing ape inspired us to put together a stunning picture gallery of primates doing human stuff. Check it our here.
Britain'sDaily Mail newspaper revealed both chimp and man watched a computerscreen on which five numbers flashed up at various positions beforebeing obscured by white squares.
They then had to touch thesquares in order of the numbers they concealed, from lowest to highest.When the numbers were shown for just a fifth of a second - the blink ofan eye - Ayumu got it right almost 90 per cent of the time.
His human opponent scored a rather less impressive 33 per cent.
Mr Pridmore, who spends his evenings memorising 400-digit numbers, ruefully acknowledged that he had met his match.
"I'll never live it down," he admitted.
Thetests follow scientific experiments which pitted Ayumu, along withseveral other young chimps, against a group of university students.
Ayumu was the clear champion, doing twice as well as the humans.
Itis thought that young chimps are blessed with photographic memories,allowing them to remember patterns and sequences with amazing accuracy.
ProfessorTetsuro Matsuzawa, the Kyoto University researcher behind both sets ofexperiments, said: "People still believe that humans are superior tochimpanzees in any domain of intelligence.
"That is the prejudice of the people.
"Chimpanzees can be clever in a specific task in comparison to humans."
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