Snapshot · Huberman Lab
In a Max Planck Institute study, 2-year-old toddlers, adult chimps, and orangutans scored equally on physical IQ tasks but toddlers vastly outperformed on social IQ tasks.
Where this was said
At 12:00 · chapter starts 9:03
Huberman's interest in the visual system leads to a rich discussion about the eyes as a uniquely direct window into another mind. Epley confirms that eye gaze is saturated with social information — we can detect from 50 feet whether someone is looking at us or 10 degrees away — and extends this to the voice as a parallel signal of an active mind. He then anchors the point with the cultural intelligence hypothesis: a Max Planck study pitting over 100 human toddlers against adult chimps and orangutans. On physical tasks — shell games, tool use — all three groups scored equally. On social tasks — tracking gaze, inferring intentions from failed reaches — the toddlers were dominant. What makes us human is not our ability to reason about physics; it is our almost eerie ability to read the minds of others.
On physical reasoning tasks, 2-year-old toddlers, chimps, and orangutans score equally. But on social tasks — tracking gaze, inferring intentions — human toddlers dominate completely. Our brains are not built for physics; they are built for reading other minds.
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