Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hey, short wavers, science correspondent Nate Rott here filling in for Emily and Regina. I want to start today by introducing you to a pretty remarkable and unique ape who has been on NPR before. Kanzi is a bonobo, a smaller cousin of the chimpanzee. He's the world's most famous bonobo and a bit of a show off. Kanzi was born in captivity and he lived in research environments his entire life.
He died last year at 44. R.I.P. Kanzi. And what made him so famous, what got him full page pictures in Time Magazine and National Geographic, was his ability to communicate with humans using symbols and his comprehension of the English language. Here's a video National Geographic did of him.
Look right at the camera. Good boy. You're doing so good. Just a couple more.
I realize as they talk to Konzi, he understands almost everything they say. A study published in 1993 found that when Kanzi was eight years old, he could outperform a two-year-old human when given more than 600 spoken instructions.
We don't know exactly what he grasped, but you could ask him a question and often he would respond in the way that he should.
Chris Krupenia is a cognitive scientist who focuses on animal minds at Johns Hopkins University. He worked with Kanzi before he died.
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Chapter 2: Who is Kanzi and why is he significant?
And one of the ways he could respond is through pointing and... That's not a common behavior for apes. They don't typically point in the way that humans do.
Kanzi's ability to point, to answer questions and communicate, made him the ideal candidate for an experiment that Chris wanted to run. Testing for something that had never been studied in a controlled setting before. The ability for an ape, or really any non-human animal, to imagine.
We think of imagination as being really fundamentally human. In our minds, we can sort of depart from the here and now. We can think about other worlds, other times, the past, the future, and even entertain, pretend, or imaginary scenarios. So this feels like something that is sort of so fundamental to our mental experience as a species.
But is the ability to imagine as unique to us as we think? Or can our closest living relatives do it too? Today on the show, how scientists used a series of pretend tea parties to help answer that question and what their findings potentially say about the evolutionary roots of imagination. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Okay, so we have an ape with a pretty good grasp of English. He can answer questions and ask for objects by pointing, much in the way my 14-month-old points at the book Goodnight Gorilla every night, even though we've read it a thousand times and I'm so over it. I asked Chris Krupenia, the cognitive scientist we heard from earlier,
How the heck do you turn pointing and language comprehension into an experiment that tests for something as intangible as imagination?
That allows us to, in many ways, ask him what he thinks or knows in more or less the same way that you might ask a human child.
And it turns out, Chris says, scientists have been asking human children questions to better understand the imagination for a really long time.
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Chapter 3: How does Kanzi communicate with humans?
Andrews in the UK, found a series of studies from the 1980s that did just that, by having a group of kids participate in pretend tea parties.
Where an experimenter will set up a tea set and then they'll sort of pretend to pour, you know, fake juice into various locations or pour it out and they'll ask the kid where's the imaginary juice. And kids will often in those tasks point to indicate their comprehension and to indicate where they think this imaginary object remains.
And so with Konzi, we were able to do more or less the exact same thing.
By setting up a series of very sterile-looking tea parties and recording videos of the sessions.
Let's make it. Let's find the juice, okay?
Now, before we start pouring any imaginary juice, let's hold onto our teacups for a second. I think it's worth taking a minute to explain the significance of being able to imagine things that aren't real. In other words, to play pretend. It's a super helpful cognitive ability. Take a kid playing house.
We think of play sometimes as, you know, not very functional. Oh, they're just playing. Like, okay, thank goodness I don't have to take care of my kids because they're just playing over there. But we know from child development that play is really important practice for doing things in the adult world.
Kristen Andrews is a philosophy professor at the City University of New York and at York University in Toronto. She focuses on animal minds, too.
I actually hold a chair called the Research Chair in Animal Minds.
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Chapter 4: What experiment did researchers conduct with Kanzi?
And I think it also tells us that there's just much more interesting mental life out there in the world than we previously thought.
Can I ask, obviously, this was a study of one animal, right, an individual, and scientists typically want a broader sample size, many examples to be able to draw kind of a broad conclusion. Does the scale of this study limit its findings in any way, do you think?
Yeah, so it is true that this study only had one individual. And what we can say from it depends a little bit on what your questions are. So one question you might have is, is this form of imagination unique to humans? And I think for that question, all you need is one clear demonstration to say, no, it's not unique to humans.
To Chris, this new study is that one clear demonstration.
Now, the broader question might be, is it the case that all other apes share this capacity too, or at least all other members of his species, bonobos? And here, I think that is an empirical question where we do need more research.
But, he notes, there's reason to suspect that they can't. For decades, researchers and people who have worked with apes have observed various species doing things that very much look like pretend play.
Young female chimpanzees have been observed carrying around sticks or logs in ways that look like they're treating them like a doll or a baby.
But, he notes, there's reason to suspect that they can't. For decades, researchers and people who work with apes have observed various species doing things that very much look like pretend play.
So there's reason to think that this could be abundant, but we needed these kind of experiments to really show for sure that it's within the capacity of these animals.
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