26 Scientific Studies about Animals - mental_floss List Show Ep. 444 | Summary and Q&A

TL;DR

Animals display remarkable cognitive abilities, such as parrots communicating, monkeys understanding currency, squirrels managing food storage, and bears demonstrating counting skills.

Key Insights

• 🦜 Parrots, like Alex, can be trained to effectively communicate and comprehend questions about objects.
• 🙈 Capuchin monkeys demonstrate an understanding of currency and make strategic decisions based on price fluctuations.
• 🏦 Gray squirrels exhibit behavior similar to humans managing their savings through various bank accounts.
• 🧔 Bears show counting skills, although researchers hesitate to claim they have fully taught bears to count.
• 👶 Neuroscientists suggest that our attraction to pandas is due to their baby-like features, reminding us of human infants.
• 🐼 Pandas have a slow metabolism, causing them to conserve energy and appear lazy.
• 😋 Elephants, like Kandula, can learn complex tasks involving pulley systems to access food rewards.
• 😋 Chameleons have tongues proportional to their body length, with smaller chameleons having longer tongues than expected.

Transcript

hey there I'm Mike retto welcome to the salon this is Mental Floss video and did you know that a scientist named Irene pepperberg kept a parrot for 30 years and trained it to effectively communicate the parrot Alex was able to answer questions about objects and their size shape color and material Alex even invented his own words like apples were be... Read More

Questions & Answers

Q: How did Irene Pepperberg train her parrot Alex to communicate?

Irene Pepperberg spent 30 years training her parrot Alex to effectively communicate by teaching him a system to answer questions about objects based on size, shape, color, and material.

Q: What did researchers discover in the study with capuchin monkeys and tokens?

The study with capuchin monkeys demonstrated their ability to understand currency as they learned to trade tokens for different snacks and even stocked up on cheaper snacks when prices dropped.

Q: How do gray squirrels manage their food storage?

Gray squirrels bury nuts of varying qualities in different locations, similar to humans with multiple bank accounts, to ensure they can access them throughout the winter.

Q: How did the researchers teach bears to count?

Researchers at the Mobile Zoo in Alabama taught bears to select between two sets of dots on computer screens, with one bear selecting the bigger set and two bears selecting the smaller set, indicating their counting abilities.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• Scientist Irene Pepperberg trained a parrot named Alex to effectively communicate, answering questions about objects and inventing his own words.

• In a study with capuchin monkeys, researchers taught them to use tokens as currency and observed their ability to stock up on snacks when prices dropped.

• Gray squirrels manage their food storage by burying nuts of varying qualities in different locations, similar to humans with multiple bank accounts.