They put monkeys and humans in MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines, and made them watch "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly".
All the study participants watched 30 minutes of the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, listening to the dialogue through headphones. The humans watched it once and the monkeys saw it six times, during which the participants’ eye movements were scanned and their neural activity monitored via functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Shockingly, the monkeys, who didn't understand the dialog or the body language, reacted in somewhat different ways than the human subjects:
The researchers found some similarities in brain activity locations among the species, but several differences, too. Monkey brain areas that fired up during movements on screen were quiescent in the humans, yet both species shared activity in other areas. This is a function of the species‘ separate evolutions — brain regions that may once have been very similar have adapted to focus on different tasks.
Maybe I'm just reacting to how the study is presented by the press (have they ever gotten anything right that you were involved in?), but this strikes me as a largely uncontrolled and monumentally stupid study. But, they got to play with monkeys and expensive machines, so it's all good, right?
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