Just Why Was a Chimp Scrolling Through Instagram? Science Explains

This video of a chimpanzee scrolling through Instagram, just like the rest of us, has become viral.

This video of a chimpanzee scrolling through Instagram, just like the rest of us, has garnered much interest on social media.

(Photo: Instagram/Mike Holston)

This video of a chimpanzee scrolling through Instagram, just like the rest of us, has garnered much interest on social media. It was posted by animal conservationist, Mike Holston who works at the Zoological Wildlife Foundation in Miami, US.

Holston regularly posts videos of himself hanging out with the chimps, but this one went viral with over 290k likes now, and fetched some hilarious reactions from netizens.

But Do You Know Why and How?

While the video may be cute or hilarious to some, the chimpanzee’s behaviour does not mirror human boredom; instead, it points to a larger phenomenon called the Cognitive Trade-off Hypothesis. It can be used to explain the chimpanzee’s skills in visual memory.

The hypothesis was developed by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, one of the world’s leading primatologist at the Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University in Japan.

In Michael Steven’s YouTube series, Mind Field, Matsuzawa explains that over the course of evolution, some of our ancestors decided to stay in the forests to protect themselves from predators on higher grounds. Others, being weaker, were forced to move to the plains. In order to protect themselves from carnivores, they developed language to collaborate with each other as a group.

Since the brains of those who developed language and those who did not, aren’t that different, it is safe to assume that certain trade-offs in cognitive abilities were made. So while chimpanzees use detailed short-term memory to make quick decisions, humans don’t have the same strength.

“In the course of human evolution, we may have had this kind of capability, but we lost it to gain the new function: language.”

Matsuzawa for the series, Mind Field.

The researcher suggests that humans are capable of abstract thought and imagination that allows them to think of the past and future. The chimps lack this ability and focuses, instead, on the immediate present. Language was developed to allow the humans to have these thoughts and share them with other human beings.