Different animals look at the world with different eyes, literally. The colors a species can perceive is dictated by the types and number of visual pigments found in the retina. Humans and most primates are trichromats, meaning we have three pigment varieties that absorb light in our eyes and then transmit that information to the brain. Some birds and reptiles have four pigments, allowing them to perceive ultraviolet wavelengths that we can’t. And other mammals have just two pigments.

This article from Scientific American examines how our color vision system may have evolved. And through their experiments, authors Gerald Jacobs and Jeremy Nathans discovered some intriguing brain adaptability when new sensory inputs are added.

Alan Alda recently chatted with Steven Pinker in his office in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. Much of Pinker’s research has focused on language – and not surprisingly language is central to his conception of what makes us human.

Watch this video clip to learn more about three big things Pinker thinks set us apart from other animals.

Over the course of our travels, several experts suggested our ability to mentally time travel to past happenings and future possibilities as one candidate for a uniquely human talent. Now a chimp named Santino at a Swedish zoo seems to be forcing a more nuanced picture of what types of anticipation and planning our closest relatives are capable of.

Santino gets riled up when his enclosure is swamped with human onlookers. So he takes matters into his own hands and hurls stones out at the crowds. But what’s intriguing is that he stockpiles rocks in the morning when he is calm and no visitors are peering in at him. He appears to be anticipating their arrival later in the day and his likely-to-result agitated emotional state. So he serenely builds caches of weapons for use later on.

Of course, our human talents didn’t just jump into existence out of thin air. It’s to be expected that foundations for our abilities can be found in other animals. Santino offers an interesting case study… and a reminder that just because we haven’t spotted a particular ability in other species, or figured out an adequate experiment to address the question, doesn’t mean it’s not there in some form.

LINKS

• Summary of Current Biology article by researcher Mathias Osvath
• BBC Article with link to radio interview with Mathias Osvath
• LA Times: “Stone-throwing chimpanzee displays humanlike planning abilities“
• New York Times: “Zoo Chimp Plans for His Visitors, Stockpiling Rocks“