Monkey Pay Per View

As humans, we know how important social interactions are. Aside from the importance of immediate family members, we also like to socialize with new people, unrelated people, and generally just people. There are several other species which are also known to be very social, and I’m not talking about bees. In mammals, the size of the frontal cortex, which is very important for higher informational processing, actually varies according to how high the group size of the species generally is. For example, macaques, a very social species, have large frontal cortices,while less social species of primates do not.
Social information is extremely important to primates, including humans. For example, in a job environment, it’s very important to know who your boss is, who’s under you, and who your direct peers are. In a social group, there are usually undeclared leaders and followers. And in any social situation, you NEED to know who the hot member of the species is over there.
Of course, most things that are necessary for survival become things that are worth doing for other reasons. Thus, social interaction is not only good for us, it FEELS good (for most of us, anyway). We like hanging out with other people, and we especially like (and work hard to) hanging out with those who we perceive to be more powerful or sexually available. And of course it’s the same for other primate species such as monkeys, who want to obtain information about other animals in their environment.
But the question is, how worth it is it to hang out with, or obtain information about, other individuals in your social environment? And what would a monkey pay to look at this hotness?

Oh yeah, you know you’d pay good money to see that.
Deaner et al. “Monkeys Pay Per View: Adaptive Valuation of Social Images by Rhesus Macaques” Current Biology, 2005.

Stand up Straight, Size Counts Around Here

As I’m sure you’re all aware, around these digs at Neurotopia, size counts. Especially on Fridays. But size counts today in a DIFFERENT way. Honest. No penises until tomorrow. I swear.
I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while. For at least a week, in fact. But things like “life” always try to get in the way of more important things like “blogging”. Silly life. Like I care about it.

But anyway, let’s talk about status. Status and height. Because it is, after all, the size that counts.
Marsh, et al. “Larger than life; humans’ nonverbal status cues alter perceived size” PLoS ONE, 2009.