Link Banana

More stories on which I am behind the crowd:

• Monkey’s with robotic arms. What more is there to know?
• Age is Wisdom. Really. Well, maybe really. The conditions: “If older people are taking in more information from a situation,” as the article suggests, “and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge,” which the article doesn’t suggest, “they’re going to have a nice advantage.”
• We have two parallel but separate kinds of memory: “verbatim” and “gist.” This can explain how people so often believe things happened differently than they actually did. (via Marco)

Virginia Morrell’s article about how animals can learn and create was much more interesting than I expected. But then the last time I read National Geographic was when I was forced to in the sixth grade.

But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained? Without Darwin’s evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.

(via brijit)