Do animals have imagination? [View all]
An eight-year-old juvenile chimpanzee named Kakama trudged along a path among the forest trees, following his pregnant mother. A scientist sat silently at a distance, watching Kakama pick up a log and carry it with him for hours. At one point, Kakama made a nest and placed the log in it, as if it were a small chimpanzee. Months later, two field assistants observed the same thing: Kakama was playing with a similar log, which they labelled "Kakama's toy baby."
Was Kakama simply confused? Did he really think that the log was a smaller version of himself? Or did Kakama know that the log was really a log, and was only pretending that the log was a baby?
Kanzi, the famous bonobo, liked to pretend as well. Primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh described watching Kanzi hide invisible objects under blankets or leaves, later removing them from their hiding spots, and pretending to eat them. "Kanzi also engages the participation of others" in these games, Savage-Rumbaugh notes, "by giving them the pretend object and watching to see what they do with it."
From an early age, human children act out imagined scenes that conflict with reality. Psychologist Robert W Mitchell calls children "proto-typical pretenders", and he writes that pretend play, or make-believe, is "a mental activity involving imagination". Which is, admittedly, useless as a definition.
Dreams could be thought of as being one form of imagination. When researchers measured the brain activity of rats as they were learning to navigate a maze, they saw the same firing pattern while they were asleep as when they were awake. The rats were running through the mazes in their sleep – it was as if someone had pressed the rewind button on a brain activity recorder, and pressed play.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130207-can-animals-imagine
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