Monkeys 'pay' to view simian porn, study finds
Researchers hope to unravel mysteries of human brain
Tom Spears
CanWest News Service
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Story Link
Monkeys will pay to watch monkey pornography, giving up their favourite drinks to ogle the rear ends of female strangers on computer screens.
Scientists hope that finding this new similarity between men and monkeys will help unravel some mysteries of the human brain --real questions that actually have medical value.
The monkeys like "pay-per-view" porn, which makes them just like a lot of human Internet customers, the scientists say.
Duke University showed a batch of male macaques picture after picture of other monkeys -- including pictures of faces and of females' rear ends.
These monkeys all get a regular juice ration. But they were willing to give up some of their juice to watch computer pictures of the female bottoms. They also paid extra to see the faces of dominant monkeys -- in effect, paparazzi shots of monkey celebs.
On the other hand, if the scientists wanted their subjects to watch pictures of low-ranking monkeys, they had to pay bribes of extra juice to attract viewers.
There is a serious point to monkeying around with simian porn, they assure us.
Scientists want to study autism in humans, a condition in which people either don't pay attention to others around them, or fail to understand a lot of basic social interaction.
You can't go drugging people or carving up their brains to study this. But scientists can experiment on monkeys.
Duke neurobiologists Michael Platt, Robert Deaner and Amit Khera use the pictures to measure how lab monkeys notice and value their social surroundings.
They can measure a monkey's interest in others and his understanding of social rank, based on how much juice a monkey was willing to pay for each picture.
No one has yet found a satisfactory way to the study the "social machinery" our brains use to process social information, Mr. Platt said.
"Our approach, in which we ask the monkeys to ... put a number on how much juice they'd be willing to spend to see a particular individual, gives us an invaluable experimental system to explore the neural wiring that underlies social cognition.
"One of the main problems in people with autism is that they don't find it very motivating to look at other individuals," he said. "And even when they do, they can't seem to assess information about that individual's importance, intentions or expressions."
It's all good news for the scientists; not so good for the macaque monkeys.
The next step will be to drug them into a state similar to autism, where the animals lose all interest in exciting pictures.
That sets up a monkey whose brain can be studied as a model of human autism. And brain studies for lab animals often end up on the dissection table.
The Duke team hopes next to establish how people sort out information about their own society.
The work is published in a science journal called Current Biology.
Researchers hope to unravel mysteries of human brain
Tom Spears
CanWest News Service
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Story Link
Monkeys will pay to watch monkey pornography, giving up their favourite drinks to ogle the rear ends of female strangers on computer screens.
Scientists hope that finding this new similarity between men and monkeys will help unravel some mysteries of the human brain --real questions that actually have medical value.
The monkeys like "pay-per-view" porn, which makes them just like a lot of human Internet customers, the scientists say.
Duke University showed a batch of male macaques picture after picture of other monkeys -- including pictures of faces and of females' rear ends.
These monkeys all get a regular juice ration. But they were willing to give up some of their juice to watch computer pictures of the female bottoms. They also paid extra to see the faces of dominant monkeys -- in effect, paparazzi shots of monkey celebs.
On the other hand, if the scientists wanted their subjects to watch pictures of low-ranking monkeys, they had to pay bribes of extra juice to attract viewers.
There is a serious point to monkeying around with simian porn, they assure us.
Scientists want to study autism in humans, a condition in which people either don't pay attention to others around them, or fail to understand a lot of basic social interaction.
You can't go drugging people or carving up their brains to study this. But scientists can experiment on monkeys.
Duke neurobiologists Michael Platt, Robert Deaner and Amit Khera use the pictures to measure how lab monkeys notice and value their social surroundings.
They can measure a monkey's interest in others and his understanding of social rank, based on how much juice a monkey was willing to pay for each picture.
No one has yet found a satisfactory way to the study the "social machinery" our brains use to process social information, Mr. Platt said.
"Our approach, in which we ask the monkeys to ... put a number on how much juice they'd be willing to spend to see a particular individual, gives us an invaluable experimental system to explore the neural wiring that underlies social cognition.
"One of the main problems in people with autism is that they don't find it very motivating to look at other individuals," he said. "And even when they do, they can't seem to assess information about that individual's importance, intentions or expressions."
It's all good news for the scientists; not so good for the macaque monkeys.
The next step will be to drug them into a state similar to autism, where the animals lose all interest in exciting pictures.
That sets up a monkey whose brain can be studied as a model of human autism. And brain studies for lab animals often end up on the dissection table.
The Duke team hopes next to establish how people sort out information about their own society.
The work is published in a science journal called Current Biology.
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