“They drop to the ground they fall over just as we do,” he says. “I’m sure that these gorillas are experiencing some sort of disruption to their perception because I’ve seen wild mountain gorillas who are doing this intense spinning,” Hobaiter says. “When we are present-oriented, without past and future rumination, we feel much better.”īut Perlman says there’s a big jump from the feeling of humans spinning to projecting that gorillas experience an altered state of consciousness, even if we share physiology with primates that suggests they might experience similar physical effects. “In altered states, we are present-oriented as we lose the sense of self and time,” he says. Humans seek out altered mental states to lose themselves, says Marc Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Germany and author of the book Altered States of Consciousness: Experiences Out of Time and Self. These are speeds that can induce physiological “highs” in humans. The apes spun with an average rotational velocity of 1.43 revolutions per second, and the fastest speed they reached was 3.3 turns per second. The researchers compared the apes’ rope spinning speeds to human pirouettes in professional ballet and the turning of Ukrainian hopak dancers, Sufi whirling dervishes and suspended spinning-rope acts by circus artists. “Spinning is proactively tapped for rapture,” Lameira and Perlman write in their study. ![]() In some orders of Sufism, a branch of Islam, whirling dervishes spin in circles as a form of religious dance in which the movement induces a spiritual and trancelike state. For autistic people, spinning serves as self-stimulation. Human children indulge in spinner bowls at playgrounds and in merry-go-rounds, carousels and carnival rides that spin them through the air. Perhaps for this reason, spinning is a staple of children’s play. We might feel dizzy and light-headed, get a head rush and also feel elated or giggly. The feelings it generates disrupt the vestibular system, which senses changes in motion, orientation, position and the speed of the body. Spinning turns the world into a moving blur for apes-including humans. “YouTube provided a volume of data that we would not have ever been able to collect,” Lameira says. Many great apes in captivity are being retired from medical research, making the hundreds of videos in existence an invaluable resource. In their paper, Lameira and Perlman document the spinning and its speed and speculate about what it means that our closest animal relatives seem to like to spin in a way that humans sometimes do. “It’s one of their favorite kinds of play when they’re young,” she says, noting that in the wild, she’s seen it more often in gorillas, compared with other primates. “They’ll literally spin themselves until they kind of drop and fall over from dizziness, which is not something that I’ve really seen very much of in wild chimpanzees,” Hobaiter adds. Andrews in Scotland, who wasn’t involved in the study, says she has come across plenty of spinning in her work with wild chimpanzees and gorillas. They would let go of the rope and topple over from unsteadiness-and then get up and spin again and again.Ĭat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. The animals seemed to lose themselves in their movements. It wasn’t just a way to pass the hours but rather an enriching and creative activity for the apes. But to Lameira, the playfulness of the spinning in the videos seemed somehow different. In the videos they analyzed, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos hung on with their hands to ropes or vines and turned through the air at dizzying speeds.Īt first blush, such spinning might look like a stereotypy, a repeated movement that some animals make when bored. Together they coauthored a recent paper in Primates that focuses on primate spinning-specifically, on rope twirls. Adriano Lameira, a primatologist and evolutionary psychologist at the nearby University of Warwick in England, shared Perlman’s fascination and watched videos of apes spinning online, too. ![]() ![]() ![]() “They spin pirouettes on their feet they do backflips they roll on their side they do somersaults forward they roll down hills, spin on ropes,” Perlman says. He looked for more YouTube videos of spinning apes, and around 400 turned up. Perlman, a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of Birmingham in England, had done research on communicative gesturing, and the YouTube video sparked his curiosity about this form of great ape behavior display. Zola whirled in a plastic blue kiddie pool as the water splashed up around him. In 2017 he noticed Zola again, this time in a viral video from the Dallas Zoo in Texas. In 2011 Marcus Perlman saw a YouTube video of a gorilla named Zola spinning in circles while playing in a water puddle at the Calgary Zoo in Alberta.
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