monkey business

Do read this week's new york times sunday magazine. its about money, economics and monkeys. A group of researchers at yale trained monkeys to use money to buy food. the money was silver colored discs and they could exchange it for jellos and other sweet foods. within some time of getting trained to use money, the monkeys did two things normally associated with humans: a bank heist and prostitution!! stealing is something to be expected from monkeys, but the actual use of an inedible thing to get sex disturbed the researchers. to prevent turning the lab into a brothel, they have modified the experiment (-: another stunning find was that the monkeys are optimists. they are ready to take risks and believe that they can make a good gamble. the actual statistics of the monkeys taking optimisitic gambles matched that of stock market humans.