She is also subjected to MRIs and CT scans to determine how well her brain is sending signals to her new face. She was working as a dispatcher for a towing company at the time of the attack.Ībout every six weeks, Nash undergoes lab tests for the military at Brigham and Women’s. Over the years, she also did some horse-jumping, worked on a farm and manned a computer help desk. Her life today is a stark contrast to her younger years, when she was a barrel racer on the rodeo circuit from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. A GoFundMe account is being set up to help raise money for prosthetic hands, which would not be covered by the Department of Defense. She also exercises a couple of days a week with a trainer at a gym to build her strength and stay healthy. Now blind, Nash spends most of her days listening to AM radio and books on tape - lately, “War and Peace” - in her modest, second-story apartment. She also underwent a double hand transplant, but it failed when her body rejected the tissue. She later received new facial features taken from a dead woman. Doctors also had to remove her eyes because of a disease transmitted by the chimp.
However, we do quote the results of these experiments when they help make the case that the animals have a level of sentience, self-awareness, and, in some cases, a theory of mind that demonstrates that we should not keep them in captivity in the first place.Nash lost her nose, lips, eyelids and hands when she was mauled by her employer’s 200-pound pet chimpanzee in Stamford, Connecticut. Note: The Nonhuman Rights Project does not endorse experimentation on captive animals. “From an evolutionary perspective, emotion, or affective processing, is thought to be an effective system for generating a rapid, adaptive response to various environmental inputs.” “Brain science has revealed homologous structures and circuits in human and other mammalian central nerve systems thus it is reasonable to assume that emotional or affective processes are also shared on some level,” wrote the authors in Scientific Reports. This similarity in brainwave activity and physiology may help lead to a better understanding of the evolutionary success of both chimpanzees and humans. However, the new experiment shows an electrophysiological response in the brain of a chimpanzee that mimics that of humans. The pattern of the brainwaves was very similar to humans, suggesting to the researchers, “that at least a part of the affective process is similar between humans and chimpanzees.”Īnyone who has ever lived with a dog recognizes that they are also capable of reading the emotional facial expressions of other dogs and, indeed, other species, and then having an emotional response of their own.
The results revealed a wide swing of activity when researchers showed Mizuki pictures of chimpanzees displaying aggressive facial expressions (the affective pictures above). Researchers monitored Mizuki’s brainwaves with an electroencephalogram (EEG), apparently the first time we have measured a chimpanzee’s brainwaves without the use of an anesthetic. The scientists showed pictures of chimpanzees displaying a variety of facial expressions to Mizuki, an 11-year-old female chimpanzee living at the Hayashibara Great Ape Research Institute in Okayama, Japan. However, this is the first time that scientists have been able to create an experiment showing an empathetic response in a nonhuman animal’s brainwaves.Īccording to researchers at the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, “the results have implications for the evolutionary foundations of emotional phenomena, such as emotional contagion and empathy.” In a study that seems to replicate common sense, Japanese scientists have shown that chimpanzees can read the facial expressions of other chimpanzees.
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