Studio 360 : "Hominid" reenacts violence of chimpanzee colony

SOURCE: www.topnews.in

Homo-Thespian: A new play, "Hominid," reenacts a violent incident that took place in a chimpanzee colony. Primate expert Frans de Waal and the play's actors describe what it took to stage a chimpanzee drama with a very human story.

Substituting for murderous, hairy apes is a chorus of bright and shiny affluent cultural elites in sparkling tennis whites.

The story, however, ends the same, with suicide, murder and the overthrown of a beloved leader!

Click to read more ...

Primates on Facebook

IMAGE: http://carrollina.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/

What is the cost of emotion, time and energy do you spend in your social networks “grooming”?

From Feb 26th 2009 | SAN FRANCISCO | The Economist print edition

Even online, the neocortex is the limit That Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other titbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?

In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation.

See original article:

Primates on Facebook

While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks

We often refer to graphic recording as a magic trick: We watch a human pull images from thin air, grabbing pictures and ideas from the vapor of conversation and giving them physical form. This NY Times article gives insight on why the physical performance of illusion is so captivating and how the brain uses neural tricks to do this: approximating, cutting corners, instantaneously and subconsciously choosing what to “see” and what to let pass.

Click to read more ...