This haunts me. Gorillas and chimps are crazy smart and can be taught sign language, so why can’t they speak? They have human-like mouths and they’re obviously vocal, so why don’t they at least have the vocabulary of a toddler?
In:
Their brains have all the hardware for vision and none for speech. So you know that universal human reaction to be afraid of snakes and see them in any patterns of leaves etc? Well that takes a big portion of our brain and all the room in a monkey brain. They’re really good at understanding what they see and incredible eye hand coordination, like that chimp finishing the american ninja course without a bother.
I know this because most of the inovation in computer vision and AI research can be traced back from the findings on rhesus monkeys in the 80s seeing how neuron layers activate and are creating the thought/notion of a fruit. And I was quite surprised how big of a chunk of brain is used for that and how the same form and structure is present in the human brain, how in monkeys that’s the dominant hardware they have, and how in us we have so many other structures like the cortex.
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