Summary
Lemurs and parrots accompany maths writer Alex Bellos as he explores the foundations of our ability to understand numbers. What are the fundamental numerical skills we share with other animals? What accounts for our species’ unique abilities to do calculations which other creatures cannot? Alex meets Teres the lemur as the Madagascan primate undergoes a maths test. He also tells the amazing story of Alex, the African grey parrot, and meets professor Irene Pepperberg who guided her feathered pupil to extraordinary mathematical achievements.
(Photo: Lemurs. Credit: Andrew Luck-Baker)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism. |
| 0:08.9 | In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero? |
| 0:16.1 | Simply doing your job, being a decent human being. |
| 0:20.0 | A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by |
| 0:23.1 | their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism |
| 0:27.8 | with me, Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:35.3 | For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, |
| 0:39.4 | go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:48.0 | This is Discovery from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:52.5 | What can animals tell us about the origin of numbers? |
| 0:56.0 | On the tray, how many orange wall? |
| 0:59.0 | How many orange wall? |
| 1:01.0 | Very good boy. |
| 1:03.0 | Okay, we'll get you that note. |
| 1:05.0 | So right now, he just chose the array |
| 1:08.0 | that has the smaller number of elements |
| 1:10.0 | and he got a sugar pellet. |
| 1:11.6 | Is this possibly the cutest experiment in numerical cognition? |
| 1:18.5 | Well, there's a lot of cute ones, actually. |
| 1:21.1 | But yeah, lemurs are pretty beautiful creatures, so it's fun watching them. |
| 1:29.0 | Okay, last question. |
| 1:30.5 | How many green block? |
... |
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