51. What Separates Humans From Other Animals?
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What kind of jerk does that? The answer was me, apparently. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, what separates people from non-human animals? I mean, my dog has a 401k. Also, why do we pace when we're stressed? or anxious, like in the Bugs Bunny cartoons that somebody's waiting outside the delivery for a baby to come. So Angela, I recently came across a paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, which I was so charmed by that I asked you to read it so we could talk about it.
It's called Acquisition of a Joystick Operated Video Task by Pigs. How could I forget? For for the listener, I'll just explain. These experiments were carried out at Penn State University. There were four pigs, a pair of Yorkshire pigs named Hamlet and Omelette, and a pair of Panapinto micro pigs named Ebony and Ivory, I guess after Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney or the song of that name.
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