Discovering a previously elusive fact or soaking up a finely crafted argument can be as pleasurable as eating a fine meal when hungry or dousing a thirst with drink. This isn’t just a fanciful analogy – a new study suggests that the same neurons that process the primitive physical rewards of food and water also signal the more abstract mental rewards of information.
Humans generally don’t like being held in suspense when a big prize is on the horizon. If we get wind of a raise or a new job, we like to get advance information about what’s in store. It turns out that monkeys feel the same way and like us, they find that information about a reward is rewarding in itself.
Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka trained two thirsty rhesus monkeys to choose between two targets on a screen with a flick of their eyes; in return, they randomly received either a large drink or a small one after a few seconds. Their choice of target didn’t affect which drink they received, but it did affect whether they got prior information about the size of their reward. One target brought up another symbol that told them how much water they would get, while the other brought up a random symbol.
Full report over at: Not exactly rocket science
wouldnt it be funny if the monkeys are just bored and like to play and sense intuitively what their testers expect of them after a given time…pfffhehee
In this case they are under control of human beings and that makes a difference .. it’s not all free choice of those monkeys. And do they live in a normal population. That might screw up their responses as well. They are quite good in scrambling those so called normal responsed in their brain, the pre programmed stuff, as well. Just as we humans do once we know we are being manipulated.
They are being babied, those monkeys. No adult is interested anymore in this type of manipulation, let alone a few. Lots of people, and monkeys, are already out of this stuff before they are adult.. Selfrespect is in all living creatures.
These researchers dont study the full being of animals (nor humans in other studies), but plainly the body response in its most primitive form. Which is not reality. It’s patronizing.
knowledge is good
so can we lose weight by knowing more???