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The Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis
Learning Stats
CEFR Level
Difficulty
Subtitles (405 segments)
[clangs]
This is Inuyama, Japan,
a historic city
home to Japan's oldest original wooden castle.
It is also home to Kyoto University's
Primate Research Institute.
Here, a group of chimpanzees have been trained
to play a game that exposes something shocking
about their memories.
This is going to blow your mind.
Here is how it works.
Take a look at these numbers.
1, 2, 3.
Remember where they are,
because they're about to disappear.
Can you point to where each number used to be
in numerical order?
Probably. It's pretty easy.
1, 2, 3.
But what if we make it harder?
Get ready to point to where each number was in order...
now.
If you feel like you didn't have enough time
to memorize the screen, that's fine.
It's nothing to be ashamed of.
Or is it?
Here is a chimpanzee taking exactly that long
to memorize the same arrangement.
Nailed it.
Each of these puzzles is completely new
to the chimpanzee,
but just a glance is all it needs
to completely capture all the numbers.
How can a chimpanzee's memory
be so much better than ours?
Well, one theory is that we humans
are worse at this task because we can talk.
What makes humans different from other animals?
Well, one thing is language.
We have the cognitive ability
to communicate not just about what's happening now,
but also about what did happen, and what could happen.
We can tell stories, and it's awesome.
But if language is so good,
why didn't any other animal develop it like we did?
A good approach to this question
is one that looks at how we are different
from those who were almost us.
Around 7 million years ago,
there were no chimpanzees and there were no humans.
But there were CHLCAs,
an acronym which stands for
"Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor."
Like us, CHLCAs didn't have
great natural offenses or defenses,
protective shells or claws, fangs or venom.
So living in the safety of the trees was great.
Those who stayed became the chimps we know today.
But for reasons we're still not quite sure of,
some of the CHLCAs decided to venture down to the savanna.
Without appropriate physical abilities,
things like cooperation, imagining new strategies,
and the assigning of roles were necessary for survival,
all of which are easier if you have
a rich collection of symbols
that can refer to things across time:
language.
Many different types of creatures emerged
with varying adaptations.
But today, only one member of the family remains.
Us.
Language as we know it may have been one of the strategies
that kept us alive in the savanna.
But where did it move in?
The brains of those who developed language
and those who didn't aren't totally different.
A brand-new brain structure didn't just pop into existence.
Instead, anatomy used for other tasks
must have been sacrificed.
And as it turns out, for beautiful reasons,
detailed short-term memory
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