Published on 27 Apr 2022 by FACTSWOW Team
According to new research, rhesus monkeys can sense when their hearts are beating. The ability to sense one’s physiological states like breathing, blushing or heartbeat, is known as interoception. Animals are absolutely adorable when they do things that only humans do. The internet is full of such videos that many people think are interesting. According to research done before, it has been stated that animals can be trained to perform tasks that exhibit this ability. Now, that’s something really wonderful!
Decades from now, scientists conducted research where it was concluded that rhesus monkeys could be trained to change their heart rates. They can be trained to increase and decrease it. But can they really do it with the help of training? There is a question that remains unanswered. The question is if monkeys have an innate ability to sense the signals of their body without having taught them to do so. It is possible that they may just know how to do it without any training to help them sense their bodily signals.
Have you noticed how babies look at something new for longer? They just stare and observe that thing for a long time. Human infants tend to look at things that are unusual to them and are unexpected to them. They look at them for longer when compared to things they are used to seeing and are familiar with. The same is the case with monkeys.Scientists used a task that depends on the aforementioned behavior of human babies and monkeys. This task was originally developed to check whether human babies can sense their heartbeats. Now, this task will be used to learn if monkeys have the same ability.
The monkeys were made to sit in chairs with a computer screen in front of them. They were hooked to electrocardiograms that monitored their heartbeats. A video with a yellow or green cloud that bounced up and down with beeping sounds was played for them. At times, the bouncing and beeping were synced so that it would match the heartbeat of the monkey. Other times, it was out of sync.Eye trackers were used to check the duration of the monkeys looking at the images. They would find the in-sync boring if they had a sense of their heartbeats. They would then find the out of sync bouncing more interesting and spend more time observing that image.
Almost three quarters of a second was spent watching the out of sync bouncing image. Four monkeys were tested and they exhibited similar results as a human baby. They found the bouncing and the sounds that were not in sync with their heartbeat, to be more interesting. The way the monkeys paid more attention to the out of sync images was similar to the way human babies looked at them. There were less differences between them when it came to this particular aspect. So, this might strongly suggest that it is indeed innate for monkeys to be able to sense their heartbeats.
People’s awareness of the signals of their bodies is evaluated by heartbeat detection tests. This is crucial to emotional experiences in humans. Knowing how their body functions is important and essential. Through this ability, humans are aware of their consciousness. By this, they have a sense of memory, of self and also knowledge of their cognition and consciousness. Disorders like depression and anxiety are linked to abnormally high or low interoception.
Interoception is important for human emotional experiences. So, it is natural that if one has low or high interoception, there is an emotional imbalance, thus resulting in these disorders. The work of the scientists has established that humans and monkeys have a similar awareness of their heartbeats. They have established a method to test this particular ability among species.
Many people know and are aware of the subtle physiological functions, apart from just their own heartbeats. They have an extremely sharp interoceptive ability. But some people do struggle with it. They are just really bad at sensing these functions. The same team of scientists are also planning to test whether certain monkeys are better at sensing their heartbeats when compared to other monkeys. This is similar to how some people are good at that ability, while some are not.
Ultimately, researchers can track animals, like with monkeys, for carrying out some detailed evaluations relating to their anatomy. They can have experimental control over them. Studying this will help researchers become aware of how interoceptive capability is developed. They will be able to know what influences it, what social and physical features of the environment shape this capability. It will also allow them to uncover the underlying neural systems.
This study is important not just because it will allow us to know the animal kingdom better and check the similarities with humans, but this will also help reveal the causes behind health conditions that occur due to awry interoception. This means, we might be able to unearth the reasons behind some mental health challenges that are otherwise not known to us.
