SuperSquirrel

I watched a mastermind at work this morning. After appreciating the thorough and tidy job he made of burying his treasure, I wondered with some concern how he would find it again when his tummy starts to rumble in mid-December… not to mention the other 9,999 treasures that scientific study claims he will bury this autumn.

To some he may just be an arboreal rodent with a brain the size of marshmallow… but what’s the point in having a brain the size of a melon if you only use a small percentage of it? Us humans might do well to take a tutorial from these little critters on the optimal use of our hippocampi. We might then stave off Alzheimer’s, or at least find our car keys.

"These squirrels are not putting any flag there, they are not smelling the nuts, they are really remembering the exact location of their nuts," said neuroscience researcher Pierre Lavenex. "They use information from the environment, such as the relative position of trees and buildings, and they triangulate, relying on the angles and distances between these distant landmarks and their caches."

Such a feat would not be possible for humans, said Lavenex. "People can do this for a few sites, maybe six or seven, but not for nearly as many as squirrels do," he said.