Short Wave - Tea time... with an ape?

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

Picture this: You’re at a pretend tea party, but instead of sitting across from toddlers in tiaras, you’re clinking cups with Kanzi—an ape with the incredible ability to communicate with humans. NPR science correspondent Nate Rott talked to some scientists who did exactly that. But these scientists weren’t just having pretend tea parties with Kanzi for fun, they were trying to test the limits of his imagination – because humans’ ability to play out “pretend” scenarios in our heads and guess at the potential consequences of our actions is key to how we live our lives. And we might not be the only animals to do it!For more of Nate’s reporting, plus videos of Kanzi, check out the full story on NPR here. Chris Krupenye’s study can be found here.If you liked this episode, you might also like our episode on bonobos and the evolution of niceness, and what insights monkeys offer us for the evolution of human speech. Interested in more science about our brains and their abilities? Email us your question at [e-mail] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, science correspondent Nate Rot here, filling in for Emily and Regina. I want to start today by introducing you to a pretty remarkable and unique ape, who has been on NPR before. Kanzi is a bonobo, a smaller cousin of the chimpanzee. He's the world's most famous bonobo and a bit of a show-off. Kanzi was born in captivity and he lived in research environments his entire life. died last year at 44. R.A. P. Kanzi. And what made him so famous, what got him full-page pictures and Time Magazine and National Geographic, was his ability to communicate with humans

using symbols and his comprehension of the English language. Here's a video National Geographic did of it. Look right at the camera. Good boy. You're doing so good. Just a couple more. I realize as they talk to Kanzi, he understands almost everything they say. A study published in 1993 found that when Kanzi was eight years old, he could outperform a two-year-old human when given more than 600 spoken instructions. We don't know exactly what he grasped, but you could ask him a question and often he would respond in the way that he should. Chris Krupenya is a cognitive scientist who focuses on animal minds at Johns Hopkins University. He worked with Kanzi before he died. And one of the ways he could respond is through pointing. And that's not a commoner.

common behavior for apes. They don't typically point in the way that humans do. Kanzi's ability to point, to answer questions and communicate, made him the ideal candidate for an experiment that Chris wanted to run, testing for something that had never been studied in a controlled setting before, the ability for an ape, or really any non-human animal, to imagine. We think of imagination as being really fundamentally human. In our minds, we can sort of depart from the here and now. We can think about other worlds. other times, the past, the future, and even entertain, pretend, or imaginary scenario. So this feels like something that is sort of so fundamental to our mental experience as a species.

But is the ability to imagine as unique to us as we think, or can our closest living relatives do it too? Today on the show, how scientists used a series of pretend tea parties to help answer that question and what their findings potentially say about the evolutionary roots of imagination. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, so we have an ape with a pretty good grasp of English. He can answer questions and ask for objects by pointing, much in the way my 14-month-old points at the book, Goodnight, Gorilla, every night, even though we've read it a thousand times, and I'm so over it.

I asked Chris Crupena, the cognitive scientist we heard from earlier, how the heck do you turn pointing and language comprehension into an experiment that tests for something as intangible as imagination? That allows us to, in many ways, like ask him what he thinks or knows in more or less the same way that you might ask a human child. And it turns out, Chris says, scientists have been asking human children questions to better understand the imagination for a really long time. Kids will have tea parties with their dolls. They might have an imaginary friend. They might play a house with their friends. So they're showing these roots of imagination within the first years of life. and the way that we study that capacity in them is to engage them in the kinds of pretend scenarios that are familiar to them.

Chris and his co-author Amalia Bostos, a cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews in the UK, found a series of studies from the 1980s that did just that, by having a group of kids participate in pretend tea parties. Where an experimenter will set up a tea set, and then they'll sort of pretend to pour, you know, fake juice into various locations. or pour it out, and they'll ask the kid where the imaginary juice. And kids will often, in those tasks, point to indicate their comprehension and to indicate where they think this imaginary object remains. And so with Kanzi, we were able to do more or less the exact same thing.

By setting up a series of very sterile-looking tea parties and recording videos of the sessions. Let's make it. Let's find the juice, okay? Now, before we start pouring any imaginary juice, let's hold on to our teacups for a second, I think it's worth taking a minute to explain the significance of being able to imagine things that aren't real. In other words, to play pretend. It's a super helpful cognitive ability. Take a kid playing house. We think of play sometimes as not very functional. Oh, they're just playing. Like, okay, thank goodness, I don't have to take care of my kids because they're just playing over there. But we know from child development that play is really important practice for doing things in the adult world.

Kristen Andrews is a philosophy professor at the City University of New York and at York University in Toronto. She focuses on animal minds too. I actually hold a chair called the Research Chair in Animal Minds. As a philosopher with a wicked cool title, Kristen spends a lot of time thinking about the abilities of the mind. And she says imagination is something that we grownups use all the time too. So for example, it is really useful to be able to imagine what would happen. in next when you make a decision. So, you know, I might say like, I'm very annoyed at this person over here and maybe I want to go punch them in the face. And instead of just punching them in the face and

seeing what happens, I may take a second, imagine punching them in the face, imagine what happens next, realize that's not very good and not punch the person, right? So I make my decisions based on rolling out scenarios in my head. Prudent, right? It's the same thing we do when we plan a summer vacation. When we decide what kind of gift to buy a loved one, when we stop and put ourselves in another person's shoes. So it's really important socially, but it's also really important scientifically. When we do science, we form hypotheses about what might happen. That's like the exact definition of imagination, right? You're imagining what might happen. That's right. What scientists do before they run the experiments is they run them in their

imagination. And if they don't work in their imagination, you say, all the time of running it in the real world. Making them and really all of us because we all do this more efficient with our time. Yeah, that's right. Daydreaming can save you time. But don't zone out yet. Since we're already back on the topic of scientists and experiments, let's rejoin that imaginary tea party.

In the first video of Chris's experiment, Kanzi is sitting in an enclosure. The researcher or partner, as Chris calls him, sits just on the other side with a wooden table in between. And on the table, the partner would put two empty transparent cups. That they'd then pretend to fill with juice from an empty transparent pitcher. Kanzi's watching the whole thing. So we have two transparent cups full of imaginary juice. And then the partner would take one of the cups and, you know, dump it back out into the picture.

and at that point, there's only one bit of imaginary juice left in the remaining cup, and the partner pushed the table forward and ask Conzi. Where's the juice? And about 70% of the time, Chris says, Kanzi picked the right one. Our findings suggest that Kanzi was able to, in his mind, sort of entertain two versions of reality. On the one hand, he sees two empty cups in front of him.

He knows that they're empty. But he's also able to imagine, to pretend that one of them is not. This ability to sort of go beyond the present, go beyond reality in your mind, is a sort of remarkable cognitive feat. And it tells us, for one, that very likely that capacity, those roots of our imagination were present millions of years ago in the common ancestors that we shared with bonobos.

And I think it also tells us that there's just much more interesting mental life out there in the world than we previously thought. Can I ask, obviously, this was a study of one animal, right, an individual, and scientists typically want a broader sample size, many examples to be able to draw kind of a broad conclusion. Does the scale of this study limit its findings in any way, do you think? Yeah, so it is true that this study only had one individual. And what we can say from it depends a little bit on what your questions are. So one question you might have is, is this form of a matter? imagination unique to humans. And I think for that question, all you need is one clear demonstration

to say, no, it's not unique to humans. To Chris, this new study is that one clear demonstration. Now, the broader question might be, is it the case that all other apes share this capacity to, or at least all other members of his species, bonobos? And here, I think that is an empirical question where we do need more research. But he notes, there's reason to suspect that they can. For decades, researchers and people who have worked with apes have observed various species doing things that very much look like pretend play. Young female chimpanzees have been observed carrying around sticks or logs in ways that look like they're treating them like a doll or a baby. But he notes, there's reason to suspect that they

can. For decades, researchers and people who work with apes have observed various species doing things that very much look like pretend play. So there's reason to think that. There's reason to think that this could be abundant, but we needed these kind of experiments to really show for sure that it's within the capacity of these animals. Which is why he very much intends to keep studying this with other apes in the future. Well, Chris, thanks so much for doing this research, man. It's super interesting. Thanks for having me. It's super fun to talk to you about it. If you like this episode, follow us on the NPR app or wherever else you may be listening

from. It helps us out and means that you won't miss out on any new episodes. Also, I a whole digital story complete with videos of Kanzi. We'll link to it and Chris's study in our show notes. I'll go check them out. Plus, some other interesting episodes on bonobos and the evolution of niceness and what insights monkeys have for the evolution of human speech. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and Arunner and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts.

Jimmy Keely was the audio engineer. I'm Nate Rott. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.