Bywords 38~40

38. A person has no right to lament at the lack of progress in himself or in others. We have been out of the primordial soup only since last Tuesday – before morning tea to be exact – and we are just now beginning to walk.

39. The decline in the art of the aphorism is indicative of our current technological age with all its acceleration and progress. An aphorism is best worded slowly, therefore best type-written on a typewriter, not on a computer. But, when did you last see a typewriter anywhere? There are no more typewriters left to write on.

40. I am in my chair, lost in thought. Thoughts in the head. If I now sit up and scribble down some thoughts, are the thoughts now in the hand holding the pen which writes? My head often does not know what my hand writes.

Orangutans share a joke too by Roger Highfield

 

Empathy is also at work in apes, reports Roger Highfield

When an orangutan laughs, his friends laugh along too. The discovery that our relatives have good moods that are contagious suggests that empathy, a key aspect of being human, was born at least 12 million years ago.

When we smile at friends they smile back. The same goes for yawns and this kind of mimicry – what scientists call “emotional contagion” – forms an aspect of empathy that allows us to experience the emotions of others.

Despite evidence that yawns are as infectious to apes and monkeys as they are to humans, there has been no other evidence of this at work to spread other emotions in animals. Now emotional contagion has been shown to be at work in primates for the first time in a study by Dr. Marina Davila-Ross, University of Portsmouth, conducted with Prof. Elke Zimmermann at Institute of Zoology, University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, and Centre for Systems Neuroscience, Hannover, published in the journal Biology Letters.

They studied the way facial expressions were picked up and imitated by 25 orangutans during everyday play at Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre, Apenheul Primate Park, Tierpark Carl Hagenbeck and Leipzig Zoo.

The team focused on an open mouthed expression which is the orangutan’s equivalent of human laughter and found that it was reciprocated so quickly that the apes had no time to think about it. “Results clearly indicated that orangutans mimic open-mouth faces of their playmates within 0.4 second, which confirms rapid involuntary facial mimicry in nonhuman mammals,” they report.

Thus the human phrase “laugh and the whole world laughs with you” goes as much for orangutans as humans. However, not every ape would smile back and this may reflect social factors familiar to humans: they were more clearly returning the smiles of friends than strangers. This suggests that this attribute, a building block of emotional contagion, predates humans by many millions of years, since we share a common ancestor with orangutans some 12-16 million years ago.