Hanging Out With Nim Chimpsky - Interview with Bob Ingersoll
- Posted: 5th Aug 2011
- Category: Articles
Project Nim, James Marsh's film about the life of chimp and primate guinea pig Nim Chimpsky is released in UK cinemas on 12th August.
Bob Ingersoll, Nim's best friend and a self-confessed Grateful Deadhead with graceful silver hair hails from Boston. After a short-lived career in the military, following Vietnam, Bob became an undergraduate at Oklahoma University, majoring in psychology. During this time, he became familiar with the Institute of Primate Studies, run by Lemmon (Nim's original master), and found his gift for bonding with chimpanzees. Now Bob is the president of a monkey sanctuary - Mindy's Memory. DFG finds out more about the film, Nim and the experiment from him.
by Meghna Gupta
Meghna Gupta: What do you think it is about human behaviour that made all the people in the film so remarkably candid in talking about their experiences with Nim?
Bob Ingersoll: I think within us, we all wanted to tell our stories. Everyone wants to tell their story and when they feel comfortable in telling their story, it's a sheer thing…I don't know. You’d have to ask them. I think they wanted to kind of cleanse themselves of what they think is their responsibility, and now want to do the right thing. But I can't really answer for anyone else. James [Marsh] is very disarming, and he's very good at asking the kind of questions that make you want to open up. But I don't know why all of us decided. It took me a long while to really lay down my anxieties. This is a personal thing. These are my home movies, this is my life and I don't necessarily want to share Nim with everybody. But I know it's really important and now I'm real good with it. Nim was a beautiful being and that's what makes all of us sit down and talk because we want to express for Nim.
MG: Why do you think people get so attached to animals, and in this case to Nim?
BI: It's easy to fall in love with Nim in the sense that his personality was really accessible and very close to ours. At the time it didn’t occur to us that they have personalities as rich as ours. Of course we're talking about 1977, and attaching any kind of human personality traits to an animal was just not done! Science said, “Whoa Dude, don't do that!” Descartes actually started that - “We think therefore we are” - nobody but humans think. But that's all steeped in religion and all the things that make us want to be the pinnacle. It makes a lot of sense to me that the reality is that animal life is a continuum and not a hierarchy. We're not better than an elephant, we're not smarter than a dolphin. We're different but we're all connected in this way or that way.
MG: What are your thoughts about human language being transferred to a chimpanzee?
BI: First of all you have to understand that language isn't something you can define. It makes sense that at least the basic fundamental needs for the development of language must have been in our [primates and humans] common ancestor. Naming objects consistently [which Nim is recorded and analysed doing through the experiment] seems to me to be the first step and then to be able to pass it along in your group. Obviously, language didn't develop amongst people because they wanted to write a dictionary. Proto-humans I'm sure didn't think, “Oh, one of these days there's going be a guy named Shakespeare. We're going to have to get this all figured out so that he can have this flowery language.” They weren't thinking about that. They were thinking about the best way to make survival easier to deal with. And language is one of those things that makes survival significantly easier. Because if you communicate with one another then you can form coalitions with one another in a way that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do.
MG: What do you make of Nim’s communication?
BI: Chimpanzees don’t have language, but a rich repertoire of behaviours that are non-verbal, which is very important to animals. It is to us too but we've got to the point that we don't think about that because first of all, it’s not taught. We don't understand how it fits in. I've been hanging out with Simon Chinn [the film’s producer] and his wife for the last couple of days at their home and they have a two and a half year old son. He's verbal and he's non-verbal. He already has a rich vocabulary and is a really well spoken young boy and he's only two and a half years old but he also does other things that are not verbal in the context of their family unit. Unfortunately Herb [the lead research scientist] came along at a time where evolutionary biology wasn't really talked about. He might have actually thought about some of these things. I'm not blaming him necessarily but the reality is that it is possible that we’d missed it.
MG: What are your feelings about the design of the experiment?
BI: Hanging out with Nim and videoing him was done to analyse that film with Herb's techniques and demonstrate to Herb the reality. To blame the chimp for not learning sign language or at least of the kind of things that we saw regularly was kind of unfair. I mean he didn't design the experiment. He was just the subject, and if you have flawed methodology, it's not the subject's fault. It's the designer’s fault. If a building falls down, you don't blame the people living in it. You blame the person that designed it, right?
MG: What prompted you to get involved with the film?
BI: For me, I want people to know because Nim represents all chimps. I want Nim's legacy to be that he stands up even from the grave for all the chimps now that need help. I didn’t just want to do this because I was interested in people. I didn't know I'd be on screen. I like my anonymity, and I'm no movie star! If there's any movie star in this film, it's Nim. For me to be able to represent for him is great because he was a movie star. You can see it - he loved the camera.
MG: Can you recall a favourite memory with Nim?
BI: It kind of all blends together but my favourite memories with Nim were out on walks and hanging out, just being fun and being with all the guys…
Read Meghna Gupta's review of Project Nim here.