Chimps have crazy good working memory. Research by a group in Kyoto, Japan published in Current Biology shows that our closest primate ancestors are braniacs when it comes to temporary information storing and manipulation. If you are a computer scientist, you might call it RAM.
This should be a link to the paper.
Not sure how this works with posting journals etc. So here is a BBC article about it.
The paper itself is pretty easy to get through, but if you just want to see the chimpanzees at work, scroll down to the supplemental data. They have several videos of them doing their thing. Amazing! I dare you to try to keep up.
Questions I want answered: What part of the brain? How does this compare to things like human autistic savants? Or what about the guy in the movie Momento? Could these be chimp savants or is this average? Did they gain or did we lose in the last 5 million years of evolution? Whichever it is, how did this get selected for by nature?
Thanks Los.
