AND IF YOU won’t listen to me . . .
My sister’s life, as performed by Madame Defarge:
Once upon a time, there was a happy family—a mother, a father, a son, and two daughters. The older daughter was smart and agile, covered in hair and very beautiful. The younger was ordinary. Still, their parents and their brother loved them both.
Mon Dieu! One day, the older daughter fell into the power of a wicked king. He threw her into a prison where no one would see her. He cast a spell to keep her there. Every day he told her how ugly she was. The wicked king died, but this did not break the spell.
The spell can only be broken by the people. They must come to see how beautiful she is. They must storm the prison and demand her release. The spell will be broken only when the people rise up.
So rise up already.
• • •
ON DECEMBER 15, 2011, The New York Times carried the news that the National Institutes of Health had suspended all new grants for biomedical and behavioral studies on chimpanzees. In the future, chimp studies will be funded only if the research is necessary for human health and there is absolutely no other way to accomplish it. Two possible exceptions to the ban were noted—the ongoing research involving immunology and also that on hepatitis C. But the report’s basic conclusion was that most research on chimps is completely unnecessary.
Small victories. Fern and I celebrated the news with champagne. Our father used to give us one sip each on New Year’s Eve. It always made Fern sneeze.
I wonder if she remembers that. I know she won’t have confused our little celebration with New Year’s. The holidays are observed at the center, and Fern has always been very clear about their order—first Mask Day, then Bird-Eating Day. First Sweet-Tree Day, and, only after that, No-Bedtime Day.
I wonder about Fern’s memory a lot. Lowell said: She recognized me instantly. Mom: She doesn’t know me.
Research at Kyoto University has demonstrated the superiority of chimps to humans at certain short-term memory tasks. A vast superiority. As in, We can’t even play on the same field.
Long-term memory is more difficult to study. In 1972, Endel Tulving coined the phrase episodic memory to refer to the ability to remember incidents in one’s individual life with detailed temporal and spatial information (the what, when, where) and then access them later as episodes through a conscious reexperiencing of them, a sort of mental time travel.
In 1983, he wrote: “Other members of the animal kingdom can learn, benefit from experience, acquire the ability to adjust and adapt, to solve problems and make decisions, but they cannot travel back into the past in their own minds.” Episodic memory, he said, is a uniquely human gift.
How he knows this isn’t clear. It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique—our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language—some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we’d have learned to be more cautious over the years.
Episodic memory has certain subjective features. It comes with something called “a feeling of pastness,” and also a feeling of confidence, however misplaced, in the accuracy of recollection. These interiorities can never be observed in another species. Doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Doesn’t mean they are.
Other species do show evidence of functional episodic memory—the retention of the what, where, and when of individual experiences. The data has been particularly persuasive with regard to scrub jays.
Humans are actually not so good at remembering the when. Extremely good at remembering the who, though. I would guess chimps, social as they are, might be the same.
Does Fern remember us? Does she remember but not recognize us as the people she remembers? We certainly don’t look the way we used to, and I don’t know if Fern understands that children grow up, that humans grow old, same as chimps. I can find no studies that suggest what a chimp might remember over a period of twenty-two years.
Still, I believe Fern knows who we are. The evidence is compelling, if not conclusive. Only the exacting ghost of my father keeps me from insisting on it.