Nick Pyenson

They had their own opinions about things.

And certainly Sheba showed that as well.

We had a refrigerator that was inside the lab so I could keep treats and things in there.

And the chimps were not supposed to go to that refrigerator or open it.

And she walked up to the refrigerator and she's looking at me the whole time, looking back at me and taking very deliberate movements towards the handle like, I'm going to open this.

What are you going to do about it?

And it struck me, OK, she's a big chimp now.

I said, it's fine.

Go ahead and open the door.

And she looked at me and paused for a minute, opened the door, reached in and took out a banana.

And that was sort of our confrontation.

That was it.

And I realized I just had to start treating her differently now.

Her superpower, like all of the chimps, was socialized attention.

That is, she could focus on the problem at hand, ignore noise or anything else going on.

Wild chimps pay attention to things that are important for being a wild chimp.

But in a captive setting where we were trying to teach them explicit skills, we needed them to be able to focus on the problem at hand.

It was really the counting work that started us down one path.

Jim managed to get Digger sent to Sally Boyson's facility at Ohio State University.

It was only once he got to Sally Boyson's lab that I learned that he really understood how to be a chimp.