Thursday, July 16th: Monkeys and Magic

Professor Lauri Santos is one of the youngest tenured professors at Yale University. Grant was lucky to have her visit today. In this hot weather, we all appreciated the chance to leave Dwight Hall and visit the air-conditioned building next door.

Professor Santos performs research on primates related to humans. By studying how monkeys think, she hopes to understand how human brains and human thought evolved. But how do you study what monkeys think? Professor Santos has a way: Magic.

By performing short magic experiments in front of different types of primates and tracking where they stare, the Monkey Lab hopes to measure surprise. They hypothesize that if monkeys understand simple ideas like "1 + 1 = 2," then they will be "surprised" by a magic trick where one plus one does not equal two. They have observed that monkeys ARE surprised when one plus one equals one or three, and they conclude that monkeys can understand simple arithmetic!

Professor Santos reinforced the importance of the scientific method in her research. Hopefully, some students realized that the scientific method is more than something you just learn about in school, but is actually used by every good science lab.