Amazing stuff! This is research done on YouTube videos of primates.
"Great apes deliberately spin themselves in order make themselves dizzy ...
"Every culture has found a way of evading reality through dedicated and special rituals, practices, or ceremonies. This human trait of seeking altered states is so universal, historically, and culturally, that it raises the intriguing possibility that this is something that has been potentially inherited from our evolutionary ancestors." ...
Researchers compared great ape spinning speeds and found that they can spin while holding on a rope as fast as professional human dancers and circus artists, as well as Dervish Muslims who take part in whirling ceremonies to achieve a spiritual trance. ...
"Every culture has found a way of evading reality through dedicated and special rituals, practices, or ceremonies. This human trait of seeking altered states is so universal, historically, and culturally, that it raises the intriguing possibility that this is something that has been potentially inherited from our evolutionary ancestors." ...
Researchers compared great ape spinning speeds and found that they can spin while holding on a rope as fast as professional human dancers and circus artists, as well as Dervish Muslims who take part in whirling ceremonies to achieve a spiritual trance. ...
"The apes were doing this purposefully, almost as if they were dancing—a known mechanism in humans that universally facilitates mood regulation, social bonding and heightens the senses and is based on rotation movements. The parallel between what the apes were doing and what humans do was beyond coincidental."
In many of the videos, the primates were using ropes or vines to spin, and it was in these videos where they were spinning the fastest and for the longest amounts of time. ..."
From the abstract:
"Among animals, humans stand out in their consummate propensity to self-induce altered states of mind. Archaeology, history and ethnography show these activities have taken place since the beginnings of civilization, yet their role in the emergence and evolution of the human mind itself remains debatable. The means through which modern humans actively alter their experience of self and reality frequently depend on psychoactive substances, but it is uncertain whether psychedelics or other drugs were part of the ecology or culture of pre-human ancestors. Moreover, (nonhuman) great apes in captivity are currently being retired from medical research, rendering comparative approaches thus far impracticable. Here, we circumvent this limitation by harnessing the breadth of publicly available YouTube data to show that apes engage in rope spinning during solitary play. When spinning, the apes achieved speeds sufficient to alter self-perception and situational awareness that were comparable to those tapped for transcendent experiences in humans (e.g. Sufi whirling), and the number of revolutions spun predicted behavioural evidence for dizziness. Thus, spinning serves as a self-sufficient means of changing body-mind responsiveness in hominids. A proclivity for such experiences is shared between humans and great apes, and provides an entry point for the comparative study of the mechanisms, functions, and adaptive value of altered states of mind in human evolution."
Dizzy apes provide clues on human need for mind altering experiences (primary news source) Great apes deliberately spin themselves in order make themselves dizzy.
Fig. 1A–E Great ape spinning compared. A and B: Exemplar cases of rope spinning by an orangutan and a gorilla
No comments:
Post a Comment