Free Elephants on Acid by Alex Boese Page B

in the animal kingdom. This led him to conduct a series of tests on a five-year-old Indian elephant at the Münster Zoological Institute, of which he was the director. His results suggested that while it’s not literally true that elephants never forget, they do have excellent memories.
    Rensch started with a simple test. He presented the elephant (never identified by name) with two boxes, each marked by a different pattern, a cross or a circle. Would she remember that the box with the cross on its lid always contained food? It took her a while, over 330 tries, but eventually she figured it out. Rensch helped her by screaming “nein!” every time she chose the wrong box. Once she got the idea, she really got the idea. From then on she consistently chose the cross over the circle.
    Rensch next introduced her to new pairs of positive (food) and negative (no food) patterns: stripes, curvy lines, dots, etc. Now that she understood the game, she was on a roll. She quickly mastered twenty pairs, a total of forty symbols. In a test using all the symbols, given in random order, she chose the correct pattern almost six hundred times in a row. Many humans would be hard-pressed to do as well.
    The elephant could also pick out the correct box from a choice of three negative patterns and a positive one. However, when Rensch presented her with a negative-patterned box and a box with a blank lid (neither of which contained food), she got mad, tore the lids off the boxes, and trampled them. Apparently, elephants don’t like trick questions.
    The hardest test was yet to come. Rensch waited a full year and showed the elephant thirteen of the symbol pairs she had previously learned. She immediately recognized them. In 520 successive trials, she scored between 73 and 100 percent on all the pairs except one, a double circle versus a double half circle. And even on that pair she scored 67 percent. Rensch declared it to be “a truly impressive scientific demonstration of the adage that ‘elephants never forget.’ ”
    Science can’t generalize about an entire species based on a sample of one. Perhaps Rensch’s subject happened to be a genius. However, similar tests have confirmed the remarkable recall of elephants.
    In 1964 Leslie Squier trained three elephants at the Portland Zoo to distinguish between lights of different color. They received a sugar cube as a reward for a correct response. Eight years later Hal Markowitz salvaged Squier’s equipment from a scrap heap and retested the elephants. One of them, Tuy Hoa, walked right up and gave the correct answers. She clearly remembered the test. The other two elephants didn’t 21 perform as well. But when Markowitz examined them he realized there was a reason for this. They were almost blind and couldn’t see the lights.
    Given all this, how does our bartender respond to the challenge? Simple. He throws the elephant out on its trunk.

The elephant: “Why did you do that?”
The bartender: “Because you never paid your bill last time you were in here.”
The elephant: “That was three years ago. I didn’t think you would remember.”
The moral: Bartenders never forget, either.

The Memory Skills of Cocktail Waitresses

    Barmaids, it turns out, have pretty good memories, too. Anecdotal accounts have them remembering up to fifty drink orders at once on busy nights. Suspecting cocktail waitresses might be a previously unrecognized population of master mnemonists, Professor Henry Bennett of the University of California, Davis, set out to test just how good their memory skills were.
    During the early 1980s he and a coinvestigator canvassed bars in San Francisco and Sacramento searching for waitresses willing to participate in their experiment. Whenever they found one who was agreeable, they whipped out a portable testing kit—a Ken-and-Barbie-style cocktail lounge housed in a suitcase. It had two miniature tables (covered with green felt), chairs, and male and female dolls, aka customers.