![]() And so, unlike our distant cousins, we’re fated to be of two minds when it comes to technology, at once embracing it and keeping it at arm’s length. A macaque monkey may not know its hand from a pair of pliers, but we do. Whatever our neurons might be doing, our conscious minds have no trouble distinguishing our bodies from the tools we use. ![]() The brain acts, write the researchers, “as if the tool were the hand of the monkey and its tips were the monkey’s fingers.” An archeologist at University College London says the study “fairly clearly show that monkey tool use involves the incorporation of tools into the body schema, literally as extensions of the body.”Īnd yet it’s not quite so simple when you take a step up the evolutionary ladder. ![]() Remarkably, the same neurons also fired, in the same order, when the monkeys used “reverse pliers” that required them to close their fingers first and then open them to take the food … The same neurons fired in the same order. The experiment was then repeated while the monkeys used normal pliers that required first opening the hand and then closing it to grasp the food. The researchers first established the brain’s firing sequence when the monkeys grasped only with their hands. The researchers studied the brain activity of a pair of macaque monkeys as they learned to use pliers to hold food. A new study by a team of Italian researchers suggests that the minds of primates conceive of tools as body parts. When you hold a pair of pliers, where do you end and the pliers begin? As far as your brain is concerned, it may be a meaningless question.
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