If you want to rank animals according to their intelligence and IQ, elephants tend to be at the top of the list. Aristotle once described the elephant as an "animal that surpasses all other animals in wisdom and thought"; modern animal behaviorists also generally believe that elephants are one of the most intelligent animals.

Elephants are indeed smart animals, but it is difficult to know how smart they are. Dividing by human age stages, the statement on the Internet is just a reference for everyone to better understand. Human age is rarely used to measure in scientific research.

The "mirror experiment" is a commonly used method in scientific research to verify animal IQ. Place a mirror in front of an animal. If the animal can determine that the animal in the mirror is itself and not someone else, it proves to have a higher IQ. So how do you tell whether an animal knows that it is you in the mirror? For example, researchers will draw a mark on an elephant's forehead and give the elephant a mirror. If the elephant touches the mark on its head with its trunk, it means that the elephant knows that it is itself in the mirror. On the contrary, if the elephant stretches its trunk towards the elephant in the mirror, it means that it thinks that the person in the mirror is someone else.

This method can determine whether an animal has the ability to recognize itself. The elephant passed this "test" and is indeed a smart animal.

The most amazing thing about elephants is their memory: they can remember something for a long time, even for decades. So much so that in English, when someone praises someone for their good memory, one would say "You have the memory of an elephant!"

Elephants make full use of their long-term memory capabilities to adapt to difficult environments. As a group animal in a matrilineal society, elephant herds are usually led by older female elephants to lead other females and calves to live together. This "matriarch" can always find a suitable habitat for the group by relying on her decades of accumulated memories. land.

In addition, long-term memory is also reflected in the social relationships of the elephant herd. Male elephants need to live independently after adulthood, but they will identify individuals through urine and firmly remember the taste of their mothers for decades to avoid inbreeding and produce unhealthy offspring.

Not just smells, elephants are also very sensitive to sounds. Elephants that communicate with each other through infrasound waves can accurately identify the differences among hundreds of elephants within a radius of one kilometer among different and mixed sound wave frequencies, and find familiar sounds. To use an analogy, this is as difficult as finding your classmates in a crowded playground at school.

In order to test how smart elephants are, researchers have designed various experiments for them, such as "cooperation experiments", "counting experiments" and so on. The final results are no less than human problem-solving abilities, which shows how smart elephants are.