Cameron’s Brain: The Spider Monkey Trap
Great story related by my friend Cameron Reilly, CEO of The Podcast Network.
Cameron’s Brain: The Spider Monkey Trap.
The story I heard went something like this:
In order to catch spider monkeys, hunters in South America simply walk through the jungle and drop heavy containers on the ground. These containers have very a narrow top and a wider bottom. Inside the containers the hunters drop a special kind of nut which is particularly attractive to the monkeys. Sometime later, the spider monkeys come down from the tops of the trees, smell the nut, but the tops of the containers are so narrow they have a tight squeeze to get their hands inside. Once they grab the nut at the bottom, their fist is too large to remove if through the opening. And the containter is too heavy for them to carry.
So instead of letting go of the nut, the monkeys just sit there until the hunters come back, pick them up, and throw them in a bag.
The spider monkeys are not prepared to let go of a small nut in order to gain their freedom.
I don’t know if the story is true, but you get the analogy.
July 2nd, 2006 at 5:46 am
This is true, I’ve seen videos of this happening. The moral is that this particular situation is outside of the primate’s natural instinct making it impossible to allow the monkey to reason why his hand will go in, but not come out. What we can take away from this lesson is if you’re fighting mulitple enemies, do not knife-edge one of their chest’s and then try to pull out their heart because you will not be able to get your hand out before the other enemies close in.