With the Bonobos

I’m blogging from the Great Apes Trust of Iowa. This morning, I got to watch Kanzi, a bonobo, demonstrate really quite incredible language skills, using symbolic touch screens. But for me, far more arresting is eye-to-eye contact with an ape. It’s very hard to put into the written word just what that feeling is like–my sense is that for a brain scientist that contact is qualitatively different: you have two intelligent creatures with different brains reaching out across the species divide. It reminds me of another time, long ago, when I had the experience of meeting up with a wild male orca (killer whale) on a rocky outcropping of San Juan Island near Friday Harbor Labs. Big big intelligent eye, small very vulnerable human not wanting to be dinner.

Jim