51. What Separates Humans From Other Animals?

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  What kind of jerk does that?

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  The answer was me, apparently.

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  I'm Angela Duckworth.

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  I'm Stephen Dubner.

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  And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

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  Today on the show, what separates people from non-human animals?

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  I mean, my dog has a 401k.

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  Also, why do we pace when we're stressed or anxious?

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  Like in the Bugs Bunny cartoons that somebody's waiting outside the delivery for a baby to come.

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  So, Angela, I recently came across a paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology,

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  which I was so charmed by that I asked you to read it so we could talk about it.

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  It's called Acquisition of a Joystick-Operated Video Task by Pigs.

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  How could I forget?

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  For the listener, I'll just explain these.

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  Experiments were carried out at Penn State University.

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  There were four pigs, a pair of Yorkshire pigs named Hamlet and Omelette,

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  and a pair of Panapinto micro pigs named Ebony and Ivory,

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  I guess after Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney or the song of that name.

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  Or after Piano Keys.

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  And the paper describes what the pigs were and were not able to learn in these experiments,

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