Posted on 05/14/2009 2:13:46 PM PDT by ConservativeStatement
It's a good thing monkeys can't gamble. New research shows these primates are capable of "woulda-coulda-shoulda" thoughts, like those that keep gamblers at the tables.
Monkeys' brains respond to rewards that they observe but do not experience - so-called fictive outcomes - and monkeys change their behavior when they are shown the prizes that they could have had, researchers from Duke University Medical Center say.
"Monkeys appear to be able to use fictive information to guide their behavior, so they're not purely guided by their direct experience of reward and punishment," said Michael Platt, the study's senior author.
This is one of the first studies to look at fictive thinking in animals, he said. The results are detailed in the May 15 issue of the journal Science.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
We coulda been bigger than the Beatles! If only we had talent!!!
The Monkey's didn't have George Martin either.
so at least one species of lower animal is not merely a complex automaton - a machine devoid of immaterial mind and volition.
Somehow I thought this thread was about Democrats’ buyers remorse of Obama. Wonder what gave me that idea? :)
> The Monkey's didn't have George Martin either.
Actually, the Monkees were quite talented musicians, who had the misfortune of getting tied into a stupid, puerile, fake, teenybopper TV show.
When they realized their error, and demanded that they be allowed to actually PLAY their instruments instead of fake it (gasp!), and actually SING instead of lip-sync (horrors!), they proved they were really quite good. No, not the Beatles by any stretch (full disclosure: I was a Beatles fan, and hated the Monkees at the time).
However, by the time they reclaimed their right to play and sing honestly, was far too late, no one took them seriously.
And the idiots who conceived the TV show and forced the charade, would not be fit to shine the shoes of George Martin.
Maybe... but the music scene had moved on to new territory by then; the Beatles went with it and the Monkees didn't.
That's certainly true enough.
In fact I wonder sometimes (and remember the Beatles have always been my favorite band) whether if they hadn't broken up, the Fab Four would have remained relevant through the 70's and into the 80's.
Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, et al died before they could become irrelevant (not clear they would have, but who knows). The Beatles broke up. Their legacies were intact, unfaded.
Not many lasted into the 90's and later.... Grateful Dead (and then Jerry kicked off in '95), Stones, Clapton, a few others.
I'd like to think the Beatles would have morphed to match the times, and continued to innovate and create. But it's hard to imagine where they would have gone as a band, given how divergent they became as individual artists later.
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