Delusion and Arrogance

The defining characteristic that separates humans from animals is that humans tend to be very self-congratulatory. We humans think of ourselves as being the 'bees knees' in the grand scheme of things. We are at the top of the food chain, we have no natural predators, we control our environment, and basically we are the masters who are calling the shots.

This is precisely what I'd call the height of self-delusion. Being the self-proclaimed and self-appointed masters of the universe, we are indeed the most arrogant living beings, period.

So what is it exactly that we humans are so incredibly proud of? What is our crowning achievement that sets us so high above any other living beings?

Is it perchance our ability to think in abstract terms? Let's watch the video clip below depicting a human being engaged in an exercise of abstract thinking and reasoning. The subject is given a brief glimpse of five randomly distributed single digit numbers (each number unique, in this case the numbers are 1, 3, 4, 6 and 9). The numbers then get masked by opaque squares, and the subject is challenged to touch the masked numbers, from the lowest to the highest. The exercise then gets repeated, each time with different numbers distributed differently around the touch screen:




Ouch! That was quite bad. Let's now watch the video depicting a chimpanzee attempting to pass the same test:



Yowza! Monkey business indeed!

There's plenty of more similarly revealing videos coming from the Japanese research lab, underlying the chimps' superiority over highly educated humans.

Suddenly, I don't feel so self-congratulatory anymore. Nor do I feel so self-important anymore.

In our next installment, we'll probe a bit deeper into what appears to be the obvious difference between humans and chimps. The results are quite revealing.

You can now go and tap yourself on the shoulder for being so superior to other living beings.