I always admired Elephants for their beauty, strength and wisdom. They are widely known their memory, but is it true that elephants never forget?
A study was conducted to examine the hippocampus of the African elephant and compare its size and “neuroanatomical description” to the hippocampus of other mammals and even humans. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that is the center of emotion, memory, and the nervous system. To do this they took three wild male elephants betw
An observational study, published in 2008, observed the survival rate of calves in a drought with older mothers and younger mothers. The results showed a correlations between the mother’s age and number of calf causalities; younger mother’s had a lower calf survival
rate than older mothers. The reason for this could be that the older mothers remember what they did in the last droughts and where to find the resources. This supports that elephants have good memories.
Some anecdotal evidence that supports that elephants never forget is that they can grieve for years. According to and article on PBS, ” When an elephant walks past a place that a loved one died he or she will stop and take a silent pause that can last several minutes. While standing over the remains, the elephant may touch the bones of the dead elephant (not the bones of any other species), smelling them, turning them over and caressing the bones with their trunk” (PBS 1). It is possible that they could be reliving memories in their mind with the deceased.
The take away: There is no way to scientifically prove that memories last forever, whether it is an elephant or a human. However, these studies strongly support the notion that elephants have the ability to remember events that occurred decades go. This also explains why they feel grieve and stress so deeply. Check out this really cute video of two elephants being reunited after 20 years!
I think that this is one of those topics that can be hard to test or experiment with. I personally would love to know if elephants do in fact possess a better memory than I do! And if so maybe there is a mechanism inside elephant’s brains that make them more effective in remembering certain things. If we found that mechanism it is possible that we could also use that information and data to treat some of the disease that we find that have to do with memory loss like Alzheimer’s and amnesia. One experiment I thought of is one where scientists may use MRI scans to see if certain areas of the elephants brains are activated when they see, smell, or hear several other elephants they have come into contact with. If the memory area of the brain is activated maybe then we could rule that in fact elephant’s memories are successful. However, to measure the memory of elephants against ours would be much more difficult. Here are some pictures of MRI scans performed in humans to see whether looking at certain things could active specific parts of the brain. MRI scan
I presume if there is no real way to test the memory of an elephant than the observational studies and the mourning shows it greatly. Although, if there were a way to actually test the memory of an elephant, how would it be done? Could we present something to the elephant in abundance and the bring the elephant back to what we presented and see if it would recognize it? Perhaps do the same with other mammals and compare?
Elephants are incredibly smart, social, and amazing animals. This blog does a great job of showing just how intelligent they are. Another fact that shows how incredible elephants are is that just like humans they possess the rare cognitive ability to see themselves in the mirror. This ability is only really found in some primates, dolphins, and magpies. It tends to be a trait that if found in animals with highly capable and large brains that are also extremely social animals. This article by national geographic (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/02/150214-animals-behavior-mirrors-dolphins-dogs-self-awareness-science/) does a great job of explaining how elephants and other species are able to see themselves in the mirror and what this means about them. Elephants truly are one of the smartest creatures on this planet.
I found this post very interesting because I too wrote a blog about the memory of animals, and in particular sheep. My blog was about how sheep can recognize faces similar to how us humans can recognize each others faces. The study showed that the sheep could identify the same faces for up to 700 days which to me was a very long time. It was mind blowing to me that their minds and cells work so similarly to how ours work.
It is difficult to study human emotions in animals, a major problem when studying and comparing the two but this blog showed interesting proof that elephants are very sensitive and show a more complex brain than other mammals. One of the big differences is something that this article calls “survival circuits.” it is the brain regions that tell the animal to run away or attack. A question that I propose that would have been beneficial to look into for this blog is how do elephants compare to other intelligent animals like dogs or monkeys. Here is a website about animal brains, take a look! http://www.livescience.com/18750-animal-human-emotions-fears.html
I have always found it interesting that animals have memories just like humans, and I would give anything to know what they are thinking. It would be interesting for you to go into other animals memories, and see how they compare with elephants. An experiment that could be done is a game of memory cards, and see how well the elephant is able to perform. Another animal that also has an incredible memory are dolphins, here check out this article! http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/130806-dolphins-memories-animals-science-longest/
Elephants happen to be my favorite animal, being one of the main reasons why I really enjoyed reading your post. It is definitely true that there is no way to determine that “elephants never forget”, one being that as humans, I’m sure that we all have forgotten something at one point in our lives, and two, even though it has been seen that elephants have a larger region of the hippocampus than humans, how do we ask an elephant if they remember something? It’s not like we could test elephants’ memory like we can with humans, ie. showing images and asking them to say which images they’ve seen, or simply asking questions; elephants can’t obviously give that response. I recently wrote a blog about memory, discussing how caffeine can possibly improve your memory, you should go check it out!