The Best Memory

Who’s got the best memory: Humans or animals? It’s an interesting question. Some animals have an incredible memory. Several years ago, a group of scientists tested the photographic memory of young chimpanzees. They showed chimpanzees and humans a computer screen with numbers on it. When the numbers disappeared, the chimpanzees could remember the position of the numbers. In fact, they were better than the humans.

New experiments show that dolphins can remember whistles of other dolphins they’d lived with after maximum 20 years of separation. Each dolphin has a unique whistle and remembering them is fantastic.

Another experiment showed that a bird called Clark’s nutcracker had a fantastic memory, too. The scientists watched the birds for months. The birds hid thousands of seeds over an area of about twenty square kilometres. Six months later the birds found nearly all of the seeds from memory. Humans were far less successful at this type of activity.

However, humans can do something that animals can’t do. We can decide how we want to memorize objects. Some imagined pictures of the objects, and some said the words to themselves again and again. Humans wrote lists and trained their brains not to forget important information. Animals can’t do that.