Britain's New Memory Champion

smh/Creative Commons

As of last week, according to The Daily Mail, Britain’s memory champion is no longer Ben Pridmore—who is capable of memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards in less than 30 seconds—but a 7-year-old chimpanzee named Ayumu, who soundly defeated Mr. Pridmore in a computer game which involved remembering the position of numbers on a screen.

Now I’m sure there are a bunch of things that Ayumu would prefer to be doing than playing a computer game with an accountant from Derby (such as, like, being a normal chimpanzee), but the widely reported story does show, yet again, just how intelligent primates are, and just how overwhelmingly hideous it is that it’s still legal to throw them in cages, pump them full of drugs, and dispose of them once we’ve gotten what we wanted out of them. I’m thinking specifically of you guys right now, Covance.

Not to be a total downer or anything, but here’s hoping that this story at least helps a few more people to make that connection.