12/1/2023 0 Comments Chimpanzee documentary![]() "He actually signed 'stone smoke time now' to us first," Ingersoll says. While taking long walks around the grounds of the primate facility, Ingersoll occasionally smoked pot with Nim, who had been introduced to marijuana in New York City and even appeared in the magazine High Times in 1975. The Human Edge Signing, Singing, Speaking: How Language Evolved Nim left the family's house and moved in with a series of caretakers before going to a primate facility on the grounds of the University of Oklahoma. And that was not something that Nim was able to learn to really control." "It was really the biting that became the big problem after maybe he was a year old, because it's painful and it can draw blood," Lee says, "and with human babies, you can teach them not to do that. But as he aged, he became more aggressive - and no one knew what to do. When he came home each night, Nim would play with the Lee children and mimic their behavior. The goal was to open up a window into Nim's thoughts and to see if he could develop real language skills. While Jenny and her siblings went to school, Nim learned sign language with researchers at Columbia University. But at the same time, there was kind of a normalcy about it in that he was just included in the family right away." "He needed diapers, he needed bottles, he needed feedings," Lee recalls. ![]() She says her mother grew quite attached to the chimp, even breastfeeding him throughout his stay at their house. Jenny Lee, who was 13 years old at the time, remembers her mom, Stephanie LaFarge, raising Nim alongside her and her siblings. The first family to take Nim in lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a giant brownstone. Jenny Lee: 'He Was Just Included In The Family' And the wild animal comes out in him very quickly, and was prepared for that." "And it was quite striking that there wasn't an investigation into what chimpanzees actually were or what they're like. "The premise of the experiment was to treat him as much like a human child as possible and to give him the nurturing of a human child in order he would behave like one," Marsh says. Marsh and two of the people who worked with Nim join Fresh Air's Terry Gross for a discussion about the film and about the controversial experiment. Nim and the many people who raised him over the years are the subjects of James Marsh's new documentary Project Nim. He was sent to a medical research facility, where he lived in a cage with other chimps for the first time in his life, before being rescued and sent to an animal sanctuary. At that point, researchers said he knew more than 125 ASL signs - but no one knew quite what to do with Nim. In 1977, Nim attacked one of the people taking care of him, and the experiment ended.
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