Bored monkeys make for stupid monkeys

BORED monkeys make stupid monkeys. That's the possibility raised by a study in which Charles Gross of Princeton University showed that the richness of a primate's environment affects its brain structure.

He housed pairs of adult marmosets in one of three types of cage for one month. The first was a bare cage with a food bowl, which met the minimum standards of the US National Institutes of Health. The second was a slightly larger cage with toys and structures that encouraged the monkeys to forage, such as branches that hid live worms. The third was twice as big with many more toys.

An examination of the monkeys' brains showed that those housed in the second two types of cage developed denser neuron growth and almost double the amount of certain synaptic proteins that the brain uses to relay messages between neurons (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: ...

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