X-Nico

5 unusual facts about Silver Spring monkeys


Silver Spring monkeys

Edward Taub (born 1931) is a behavioral neuroscientist currently based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The Silver Spring monkeys were 17 wild-born macaque monkeys from the Philippines who lived inside the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland.

He worked on the anti-whaling ship, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, joined the Hunt Saboteurs Association in England, and when he returned to the United States to study political science at George Washington, he teamed up with Ingrid Newkirk, a local poundmaster, to form People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in March 1980.

The monkeys had been used as research subjects by Edward Taub, a psychologist, who had cut afferent ganglia that supplied sensation to the brain from their arms, then used arm slings to restrain either the good or deafferented arm to train them to use the limbs they could not feel.

Norman Doidge writes that Taub wondered whether the reason the monkeys abandoned use of the deafferented limbs was simply that they were still able to use their good ones.



see also