A legal challenge resulted in Nim's return to the sanctuary in Norman, an adventure that "Project Nim" describes in detail. His Oklahoma caretakers covertly sold him to a cancer research facility, but the sale was exposed by the media.
With that, Nim’s participation in science ended - unless you count his stint as a medical test subject. “Language frees us up from the here and now, let you and I talk about Mars without leaving Earth,” Petitto says. Susan KuklinĪnd the ability to take ourselves out of the situations we describe through language is one of the things that make humans unique as communicators. He couldn’t say, 'On Monday could you buy the cookies,'" she explained. While his message was clear, Petitto said, Nim could never take himself out of the picture. When he wanted cookies, Nim's second caretaker Petitto told me, the chimp would take Petitto’s hand and lead her to the kitchen, to the locked cabinet in which the cookies were stored. Nim used the concepts of “I” and “Nim” interchangeably. That means you can’t have any concept in a chimpanzee of a self and other." "With a chimpanzee, I don’t think there’s any awareness of one’s own mind and another mind out there. It had to do with our understanding of ourselves as individuals. "Eventually I concluded that our minds are fundamentally different from a chimp's." "My understanding of Nim signing the grammatical rule was wrong," he said. In a “quarter of a second,” years of observations came crashing down, Terrace told me. “Then I realized the teachers were prompting him,” Terrace told me. Terrace was writing up his findings for the journal Science when one day, as he watched a well-worn tape of Nim signing with his teacher, he began to notice that something was off. For a time, it seemed as though the behaviorists had a resounding victory on their hands. The experimental data made it look as if Nim the "A" student had settled the matter: Human brains weren't that special when it came to language abilities. "How amazing would it be to ask a chimp how he felt about something? Herb Terrace, Columbia University And I felt the same way," Terrace told me. ", this is like getting an SOS from out of space. In all, Nim learned 120 words, and used them to communicate with thousands and thousands of phrases.
Nim learned quickly, and his caretakers - Terrace's small army of students - carefully recorded reams of video and pages of notes describing Nim's signs and behavior. She raised Nim from the time he was 3 months old until he was 4 years old.Īt first, the results were astonishing. LaFarge, who even breast-fed Nim, would be the first of a string of chimp-sitters who tried to teach him American Sign Language. Laura-Ann Petitto, then an undergraduate at Columbia, would be next. So, at the age of 2 weeks, Nim Chimpsky was put in the foster care of Terrace's student, Stephanie LaFarge, who lived with her family in Manhattan. But if the behaviorists were correct, chimps, our nearest genetic relatives, should be able to learn and communicate using the grammatical rules and expressive elements that American Sign Language and spoken languages shared if they were brought up among people. It wasn't speech that Terrace was after: The vocal cords of chimpanzees weren't designed to replicate human speech. "I wanted to have a total record of how Nim signed," Terrace told me. If chimpanzees could in fact master elements of human language, he wanted to be sure how they did it, and how well they picked it up.
Terrace wanted to raise young Nim among people, just as Washoe had been brought up, but scrupulously log his progress and learning abilities. Terrace, who still does research on primate intelligence at Columbia, had heard stories about another precocious chimpanzee named Washoe, who lived with her scientist "parents" at the University of Nevada in Reno and had been taught to communicate through American Sign Language.īut Terrace wasn’t satisfied with the way Washoe’s feats had been documented. The opposing camp, led by Chomsky, insisted that language was a human product and there were parts of it that non-human species could never ape. The behaviorists led one camp, and said that language could be taught and learned by other intelligent, non-human species.
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