Memorize This!

This fascinating video of Ayumu the chimp excelling at memory tasks has been going around the net.  The results of the study in the video were published by Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzaw (Current Biology 17:1004-1005).  Ayumu performed better at this memory task than humans, and younger chimps performed better than older ones.  They concluded that this ability was due to having better eidectic memory, which is ‘the memory capability to retain an accurate, detailed image of a complex scene or pattern’.  Pretty amazing, but I wonder how good you or I would be if this is all we did for years.

You can read more about eidectic memory here.