Monkey See! Monkeys Can Be Taught To Recognize Themselves in a Mirror
A human being knows that the image in the mirror is she. That’s why we spend so much time staring into them. Great apes have a similar capacity for narcissism. Monkeys, however, don’t make the connection between the monkey in the mirror and themselves. But that doesn’t mean they can’t. Chinese scientists have shown they can train rhesus monkeys to recognize themselves in the mirror, by the simple expedient of annoying the crap out of them. Although monkeys in previous experiments never managed that spark of recognition no matter how many mirrors they were given, they didn’t have scientists sitting them in front of a mirror and shining a “mildly irritating” laser on their faces until they got a clue. The scientists shined the laser on the monkey’s faces for two to five weeks until they realized that the marks they were seeing on the mirror corresponded to the irritation on their own faces. After training with the laser the scientists were able to replace it with colored dye marks