Intelligence has evolved on Earth at least three times - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. All the mammals have roughly the same brain architecture. But the corvids are not on the same evolutionary branch, and have a different neuron design and a different brain architecture. "Such behavioral flexibility might seem unexpected
because a layered cerebral cortex, the highest integration
center in the mammalian brain, is not existant in birds."[1] So there's more than one way to do intelligence. Useful to know for AI purposes.
Octopuses have a much more distributed system than mammals, suggesting a quite different approach is possible.
You left off Parrots, which are just about as intelligent as Corvids. For example, keas have a similar number of pallial neurons to ravens (or maybe slightly more). Parrots and songbirds generally have extremely high neural density but still lower raw neuron counts compared to primates, which makes their competitiveness in many cognitive tasks interesting.
Among parrots, everyone knows African Greys but cockatoos are also highly intelligent, with goffin's cockatoos the standouts in terms of cleverness.
Which just goes to show, imo, how many more tools are necessary to become an advanced civilization. Imagine if we'd just been restricted to water and couldn't make fire, but were otherwise identical? Imagine if we didn't have thumbs, or highly articulate mouths? Imagine if we were solo creatures, or if we were too self-interested to care for the village?
Edit but as an aside, we don't even really know what intelligence is, if you ask me. We have an idea, but trying to quantify it or measure it falls short seemingly every time.
I don't think you can single out corvids from the rest of the avians and at the same time bunch all mammals together. I don't think there's evidence that their smarts or brain architecture are qualitatively different from other birds, some of which are plenty smart. If intelligence - for some definition of intelligence - evolved separately in mammals and birds, it's not implausible to me that the basic architecture developed before avian dinosaurs branched from other theropods, and some theropods might have been quite smart indeed.
Bird brains are interesting because they've dealt with a significant chunk of the energy intensity of mammalian brains. Octopus brains are interesting because brains are traditionally energy intensive and top predators are usually long lived. Octopuses have this energy intensive sunk cost but also have a short lifespan.
I wish I understood enough of the appropriate level of neuroscience to get a bit of an understanding of the similarities and differences between bird and other brains.
I’m a little frustrated with talking about birds as a class in this context. Crows are legendary for figuring things out.
Turkeys are also legendary. Like the farmer brings three of them out, chops the head of the first one off. The other two are still standing there. “Wow! Look what happened to Charley! I wonder what this line is for.”
“Birdbrain” may be wrong for corvids but too complimentary to turkeys.
I view it as more fundamental than that. Size for size, joule for joule and cm3 for cm3 a smart bird seems to get a lot more out of their brain than smart mammals. I big chunk of the determinant of intelligence is diet quality, which is why horses, cows koalas are so dumb and why koalas are so sleepy.
Yes, and the third book, Children of a Memory, which features the corvids, is particularly interesting in the age of AI and questioning what intelligence really is.
Jumping spiders are the geniuses of their size/energy tier. It almost makes no sense that so few neurons should be so capable, but my favorite hypothesis is that nature golf coded a specially tuned, unexpectedly flexible, highly optimized recurrent architecture that sequentially overthinks to simulate a far higher intelligence level than its size profile would suggest.
Can we count mammals and corvids separately if their common ancestor was already set on the path to intelligence? The amazing book Other Minds by Peter Godfrey Smith hinges it's argument on minds evolving twice, on the fact that the common ancestor of humans and octopi was probably a simple worm-like creature that had little or nothing in the way of a brain or consciousness.
I have to imagine that corvids and mammals had a common ancestor with more working brain structure. Though maybe you can make the case that "intelligence" showing up later on isn't the same thing as simply having a brain.
But it's much more impressive to me that there's convergent evolution from brainless to brain-having, than from brains to intelligent brains. Don't get me wrong, it's still awesome but doesn't feel like an out of nowhere path for natural selection to take.
A very important fact to remember is that brains are not a requirement for intelligence (in the very broadest sense, not the more specific one used here), nor even neurons. All cells have some amount of computational power and can meaningfully react to their environment; a common example is white blood cells quickly adapting to pathogens to try to destroy them. Networks of cells are even more powerful, such as slime mould exploring the space around it until it detects nutrients and then channeling all resources in the direction of such nutrients. Plant roots have sophisticated sensory abilities detecting numerous kinds of chemicals in the soil, and actively search for nutrients and avoid contaminants. Even jellyfish, some of the simplest animals, long thought to be essentially passive, in fact detect and actively steer themselves towards prey.
Intelligence actually exists at all levels of life, and brains are just an apex of achievement, just like eyes are an apex achievement of light-sensing mechanisms that similarly exist all around the tree of life.
I understand what you're saying but it sounds like you know what it means to separately ask about animal intelligence in the sense relevant for evaluating, say, crows vs pidgeons, and that question obviously is not just about animals having sophisticated immune responses.
I would venture a guess that nearly all animals will turn out "intelligent" if all we really mean is they things like complex immune responses to disease, or complex coordination needed to grow an embryo. Those matter and raise profound questions about how incredible natural selection can be, but I would wait for an actual sin of commission before treating any commentary on animal intelligence like it neglects to appreciate sophisticated behavior of cells.
Additionally, both plants and slime mold have been shown to be capable of keeping track of time elapsed in experiments, it’s so cool and bewildering (how this is done as it seems quantitatively different from other automaton like behavior that could be programmed so to speak from a layman’s perspective at least).
Superstitious humans never really gave up their believe system that we have souls. Sure, we expanded it to include non-humans, and sure, the age of science compelled people to give it a more secular label ("neurons"), but we're as superstitious as ever. We have entire quasi-religions out there masquerading as lifestyles and "just common sense", and they all rely on the neuron being special.
So it doesn't really matter that technically you are correct.
Agree. Birds still have two eyes, two arms, two legs, heart, liver, kidneys, etc. there's clearly a common ancestor after the basic vertebrate anatomy evolved.
I think you're basically right. I might phrase it differently: the connotation of "birdbrain" to negative intelligence isn't disproven by noting quick read and react capabilities to certain problems, as intelligence is about more than that.
Some birds have impressive specializations, and corvids clearly punch above their brain mass weight due to impressive efficiencies with their brain architecture, but I think the framing of the article is more wrong than right to frame it around speedy information processing of particular problems.
If the decisions are not routine then it is fast problem solving. You have to own a bird to understand that they are in fact capable of problem solving in their own universe.
Though lots of humans' "slow decisions" are really just the conscious mind working hard to justify something that the fast path had already decided long ago. We are exceptional in lying to ourselves.
Chickens will run around with their heads cut off. It's the nerves going haywire after being chopped. Similar observations were made of guillotined corpses twitching after death (and heads trying to speak, but that's just until the blood runs our), human bodies are just too heavy and unbalanced to move effectively without coordination.
The chicken with its head cut off saying extends beyond the south. I grew up hearing it in the Midwest. Since chickens do run around when their heads are cut off, I think anywhere with chickens would end up with this phrase.
The Always Sunny thing is more about her looks. When they call her dumb, they tend to just call her dumb/stupid/etc.
I would imagine the Dodo is a big reason for the birdbrain insult meaning dumb. Since Dodo itself can be used to mean dumb, and since they weren't afraid of humans they were easy targets and hunted to extinction. That may say more about humans than the Dodo.
That's from an anthropomorphized angle though? In their evolutionary niche, their level of expressed intelligence seems to be spot on, otherwise they'd have evolved or been outcompeted long ago.
In fact, some of those species that you might consider "incredibly stupid" may have existed long before humans and might easily outlive us if we follow some not-very-unlikely paths that we have opened up with technology and (lack of) social maturity. Who is "incredibly stupid" then?
> Corvids and parrots and raptors are remarkably smart, yet not every bird species is. Some are incredibly stupid.
Raptors are pretty stupid. They don't _need_ to be smart. They're solitary and they are typically apex predators.
I have a great view out of my window, and I have a family of crows living nearby. They cooperated to drive out owls and eagles that were nesting in a nearby park. Right now it's raining with pretty strong gusty winds and the crows are flying outside, doing pretty crazy aerobatics. They are clearly having a lot of fun!
I think the only reason we can actually do things like dancing and playing of pianos is because our brains are capable of predicting the future. Maybe not very far but far enough to compensate for the end to end latency. I don't think you train your spine when you learn an instrument. I think you learn a predictive model of the world that allows you to anticipate events far enough in advance to execute correctly.
That is going to be part of the answer, simply because birds have much smaller neurons that are more densely packed than in mammals. They are also much more energy efficient, using something like 1/3 of the energy. They also have a different neural architecture, which may also contribute.
I believe that there are fundamental architectural differences. It's possibly related to birds doing continuous breathing rather than tidal breathing like mammals, so the limit of oxygen availability is higher.
The flying lifestyle creates size constraints, and nerve conduciton distances will be shorter and that will make some sort of difference.
But dusting off some very rusty student memories, we're not really working in real time - some latencies bottom out a 5ms, but 30-100ms is more common - if I am recalling correctly.
You dance with your entire body. You do shift weight to parts of your foot and use toes to various extents , but the ankles, knees, thighs and waist are all more important than the feet if we're simply focusing on lower body motion.
Re: the gotcha question, because these are simplified diagrams for teaching beginners or communicating genre-informed choreographies in shorthand. Even then, nobody achieve's any dancing simply by moving their feet as the diagram depicts (and they couldn't possible do so without the rest of their body). Part of the reason for their success is that people are already familiar with dances and combine the diagram's directions with the understanding that they must achieve it with a full body vocabulary.
> For example, learning to play a piano is training the spine, not the brain. Because the feedback loop with the spine is shorter.
It may train the spine too but good luck trying to play the piano without a brain. More concretely, your eyes read the notes you like to play, your ears provide the feedback loop whether you are playing the right thing (and dynamics and interplay with other musicians in an ensemble), and you need things like planning ahead, sense of form, etc. Twiching fingers from some spine impulse is just part of playing the piano. (Besides, the latency between brain and finger muscels is insubstantial w.r.t. the time scales you need for general music playing, beyond certain nuances.)
Birdbrain should mean the opposite of what it does, for this reason, but for many others. Birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation, a process that's about the one bona fide quantum biological paradigm.
Their body clocks are also significantly more sophisticated and decentralized than ours.
And in the end, the physical intelligence of flight itself demands a brain that's gotta be incredibly spatially and temporally aware.
I wish our brains had some of the skills and efficiencies of birds.
> Birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation, a process that's about the one bona fide quantum biological paradigm… I wish our brains had some of the skills and efficiencies of birds.
You can harness your somatic infrastructure to gain some senses, like magnetic field sensitivity. Some people implant small permanent magnets in a fingertip to sense magnetic field, and claim it makes the world more interesting.
Unfortunately such an implant is not itself permanent (you'd want to coat it with something safe that doesn't trigger the immune system like gold or PTFE). Also though you want to be careful around other magnets I imagine!
But you could probably wear a magnetic sensor that used something attached to your skin that you could learn to "read" intuitively. The problems are dermatalogical sensitivity from the adhesive and the inability to wear it 24/7 to make the erading really feel like a new sense. But who knows?
Right, and importantly for this context, impressive as that capability is, it does nothing to debunk or demystify bird intelligence. There are impressive capabilities built into somatic functioning, and other things carved into the structure of our biology by evolution itself but those things don't signal intelligence.
Seeing the earth's magnetic field is amazing, but it's just as built in as a mantis shrimp's ability to see a wider color spectrum. Incredible, but not in and of itself a mark of intelligence.
Why? There aren't very many obstacles at altitude. Humans routinely travel at 40mph+ too (bicycles, motorcycles, cars) and have to contend with much more diverse and surprising conditions on the ground. (Obviously, airplanes go even faster, but similarly benefit from a lack of obstacles.)
> Why? There aren't very many obstacles at altitude.
Most birds don't spend their time flying at high altitudes. Most of the time they're remarkably close to the ground, and there are lots of obstacles when you're close to he ground. Some of those are trying to avoid being eaten, and others are looking for dinner.
> Humans routinely travel at 40mph+ too (bicycles, motorcycles, cars) and have to contend with much more diverse and surprising conditions on the ground.
That's just within the last 150 years, and has no relevance for our evolutionary history.
From an engineering point of view their control loop must be much faster. Things that fly need much tighter loops than we do that lumber about on the ground.
Watch a bird come in fast and then land on a narrow twig.
Bird neurons are roughly half the length of mammal neurons. This means you can pack in around 8x more neurons in a given volume.
I have to agree but not just the crows.. The two parakeets that I owned as a kid were quite smart and would stir their own seeds to move the good seeds above the spent seeds with tooth pick that I had been using to scratch them. They would play with the tooth pick and grab it from each other. And they were affectionate and liked to snuggle.
They had complete trust in my family and not others. So they could tell the difference.
Given the tiny size of avian brains compare to mammals, particulary humans, it's hard to ascribe a lot of intelligence to them. But for what they can do, they seem quite well optimized.
Brain size is not a decisive factor in estimating intelligence and corvid brains pack twice the neurons per volume compared to humans. The factor is: effective "Information Processing Capacity" (IPC), which is high for body size and rivals great apes on specific executive tasks.
Extreme miniaturization eliminates travel distance, giving near-zero latency and high metabolic efficiency despite 1/5th the neurons of a chimp.
I'm not sure why you get downvoted for pointing out that some people have a belief that is not shared by most other people.
Seems that some posters would rather shoot the messenger that delivers information that they don't agree with.
From interacting with domestic and wild animals for most of my life I figured out a long time ago that they understand their own world and their place in it way better than many of us understand the world we have created for ourselves.
Another article I read recently said that Birds use anaerobic metabolism inside their eyes so that there's much less biological clutter in front of the rods and cones.
I wonder if this could also have something to do with it. The bird would presumably be sharper at spotting the pattern partly because our eyes are trying to pick it out from in the midst of other kinds of "floater" patterns that we're (very) used to filtering out
I hate popular science articles like this. Ummmmm listen sweetie, you're just ignorant and Ima police you a bit here... sit down for some really wild SCIENCEism!
Intelligence has evolved on Earth at least three times - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. All the mammals have roughly the same brain architecture. But the corvids are not on the same evolutionary branch, and have a different neuron design and a different brain architecture. "Such behavioral flexibility might seem unexpected because a layered cerebral cortex, the highest integration center in the mammalian brain, is not existant in birds."[1] So there's more than one way to do intelligence. Useful to know for AI purposes.
Octopuses have a much more distributed system than mammals, suggesting a quite different approach is possible.
[1] https://niederlab.org/Nieder%20(2017)%20COBS.pdf
You left off Parrots, which are just about as intelligent as Corvids. For example, keas have a similar number of pallial neurons to ravens (or maybe slightly more). Parrots and songbirds generally have extremely high neural density but still lower raw neuron counts compared to primates, which makes their competitiveness in many cognitive tasks interesting.
Among parrots, everyone knows African Greys but cockatoos are also highly intelligent, with goffin's cockatoos the standouts in terms of cleverness.
Also toothed whales. Like, dolphins have developed culture. Probably many more species are very intelligent. Intelligence doesn’t seem too rare.
Which just goes to show, imo, how many more tools are necessary to become an advanced civilization. Imagine if we'd just been restricted to water and couldn't make fire, but were otherwise identical? Imagine if we didn't have thumbs, or highly articulate mouths? Imagine if we were solo creatures, or if we were too self-interested to care for the village?
Edit but as an aside, we don't even really know what intelligence is, if you ask me. We have an idea, but trying to quantify it or measure it falls short seemingly every time.
didn't they just find a sulfide mineral under the sea that catches fire under water?
i guess i misremembered,
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-collected-deep-sea-r...
they oxidized in the lab, maybe they're not shiny or curious enough of an object to be collected?
what animals perform collection?
> ...or if we were too self-interested to care for the village?
Don't worry. We're getting there.
With more intelligence arrives the tendency for neurotic and compulsive behaviors, frontal cortex or not.
I don't think you can single out corvids from the rest of the avians and at the same time bunch all mammals together. I don't think there's evidence that their smarts or brain architecture are qualitatively different from other birds, some of which are plenty smart. If intelligence - for some definition of intelligence - evolved separately in mammals and birds, it's not implausible to me that the basic architecture developed before avian dinosaurs branched from other theropods, and some theropods might have been quite smart indeed.
Bird brains are interesting because they've dealt with a significant chunk of the energy intensity of mammalian brains. Octopus brains are interesting because brains are traditionally energy intensive and top predators are usually long lived. Octopuses have this energy intensive sunk cost but also have a short lifespan.
I wish I understood enough of the appropriate level of neuroscience to get a bit of an understanding of the similarities and differences between bird and other brains.
I’m a little frustrated with talking about birds as a class in this context. Crows are legendary for figuring things out.
Turkeys are also legendary. Like the farmer brings three of them out, chops the head of the first one off. The other two are still standing there. “Wow! Look what happened to Charley! I wonder what this line is for.”
“Birdbrain” may be wrong for corvids but too complimentary to turkeys.
I view it as more fundamental than that. Size for size, joule for joule and cm3 for cm3 a smart bird seems to get a lot more out of their brain than smart mammals. I big chunk of the determinant of intelligence is diet quality, which is why horses, cows koalas are so dumb and why koalas are so sleepy.
Domestic turkeys were bred to be stupid. Wild turkeys are smart. They have large vocabularie, and complicated social structures.
Adrian Tchaikovsky explores each of these kinds of intelligence across his sci-fi Children of Time trilogy.
Yes, and the third book, Children of a Memory, which features the corvids, is particularly interesting in the age of AI and questioning what intelligence really is.
Spiders?
Jumping spiders are the geniuses of their size/energy tier. It almost makes no sense that so few neurons should be so capable, but my favorite hypothesis is that nature golf coded a specially tuned, unexpectedly flexible, highly optimized recurrent architecture that sequentially overthinks to simulate a far higher intelligence level than its size profile would suggest.
They are furry and with large eyes which may bias the human evaluator.
Are written like mammals in this book, just with a different way of comminucating.
Tiger shrimp are also in the picture eventually.
Cato is actually more of a mantis shrimp.
Yeah my bad, at least I had shrimp! I was about to just write punchy shrimp tbf
Neil deGrasse Tyson argues that bees are "the other major intelligence on Earth."
https://youtu.be/ubE9hjrsHmI
Can we count mammals and corvids separately if their common ancestor was already set on the path to intelligence? The amazing book Other Minds by Peter Godfrey Smith hinges it's argument on minds evolving twice, on the fact that the common ancestor of humans and octopi was probably a simple worm-like creature that had little or nothing in the way of a brain or consciousness.
I have to imagine that corvids and mammals had a common ancestor with more working brain structure. Though maybe you can make the case that "intelligence" showing up later on isn't the same thing as simply having a brain.
But it's much more impressive to me that there's convergent evolution from brainless to brain-having, than from brains to intelligent brains. Don't get me wrong, it's still awesome but doesn't feel like an out of nowhere path for natural selection to take.
A very important fact to remember is that brains are not a requirement for intelligence (in the very broadest sense, not the more specific one used here), nor even neurons. All cells have some amount of computational power and can meaningfully react to their environment; a common example is white blood cells quickly adapting to pathogens to try to destroy them. Networks of cells are even more powerful, such as slime mould exploring the space around it until it detects nutrients and then channeling all resources in the direction of such nutrients. Plant roots have sophisticated sensory abilities detecting numerous kinds of chemicals in the soil, and actively search for nutrients and avoid contaminants. Even jellyfish, some of the simplest animals, long thought to be essentially passive, in fact detect and actively steer themselves towards prey.
Intelligence actually exists at all levels of life, and brains are just an apex of achievement, just like eyes are an apex achievement of light-sensing mechanisms that similarly exist all around the tree of life.
I understand what you're saying but it sounds like you know what it means to separately ask about animal intelligence in the sense relevant for evaluating, say, crows vs pidgeons, and that question obviously is not just about animals having sophisticated immune responses.
I would venture a guess that nearly all animals will turn out "intelligent" if all we really mean is they things like complex immune responses to disease, or complex coordination needed to grow an embryo. Those matter and raise profound questions about how incredible natural selection can be, but I would wait for an actual sin of commission before treating any commentary on animal intelligence like it neglects to appreciate sophisticated behavior of cells.
Additionally, both plants and slime mold have been shown to be capable of keeping track of time elapsed in experiments, it’s so cool and bewildering (how this is done as it seems quantitatively different from other automaton like behavior that could be programmed so to speak from a layman’s perspective at least).
Superstitious humans never really gave up their believe system that we have souls. Sure, we expanded it to include non-humans, and sure, the age of science compelled people to give it a more secular label ("neurons"), but we're as superstitious as ever. We have entire quasi-religions out there masquerading as lifestyles and "just common sense", and they all rely on the neuron being special.
So it doesn't really matter that technically you are correct.
Agree. Birds still have two eyes, two arms, two legs, heart, liver, kidneys, etc. there's clearly a common ancestor after the basic vertebrate anatomy evolved.
like Siglip, Dino and LFM :D
The title doesn't make sense because "bridbrain" doesn't imply slow decision making.
I think you're basically right. I might phrase it differently: the connotation of "birdbrain" to negative intelligence isn't disproven by noting quick read and react capabilities to certain problems, as intelligence is about more than that.
Some birds have impressive specializations, and corvids clearly punch above their brain mass weight due to impressive efficiencies with their brain architecture, but I think the framing of the article is more wrong than right to frame it around speedy information processing of particular problems.
If the decisions are not routine then it is fast problem solving. You have to own a bird to understand that they are in fact capable of problem solving in their own universe.
Right, and fast decisions aren't always good decisions.
Though lots of humans' "slow decisions" are really just the conscious mind working hard to justify something that the fast path had already decided long ago. We are exceptional in lying to ourselves.
As a native speaker, "birdbrain" means stupid.
The term implies something that feels like "dodo" or imbecile.
Corvids and parrots and raptors are remarkably smart, yet not every bird species is. Some are incredibly stupid.
There's also the anecdote (maybe just in the American South?) of a chicken running around with its head cut off.
Also think of the "Always Sunny" meme where they call Dee a "bird" all the time [1]. It's meant to mean stupid, amongst other things.
[1] https://youtu.be/60D7SN06A8M
Chickens will run around with their heads cut off. It's the nerves going haywire after being chopped. Similar observations were made of guillotined corpses twitching after death (and heads trying to speak, but that's just until the blood runs our), human bodies are just too heavy and unbalanced to move effectively without coordination.
There's more to the story than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken
Birdbrain can also mean "flighty"; which corresponds to fast (and wrong) decision making.
The chicken with its head cut off saying extends beyond the south. I grew up hearing it in the Midwest. Since chickens do run around when their heads are cut off, I think anywhere with chickens would end up with this phrase.
The Always Sunny thing is more about her looks. When they call her dumb, they tend to just call her dumb/stupid/etc.
I would imagine the Dodo is a big reason for the birdbrain insult meaning dumb. Since Dodo itself can be used to mean dumb, and since they weren't afraid of humans they were easy targets and hunted to extinction. That may say more about humans than the Dodo.
Mike the headless chicken was extensively documented, if an incredible fluke. He also had an intact brainstem, even if not a full brain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken
Sure, and you can reach a stupid decision quickly. "Birdbrain" has never had a connotation of being slow to react.
Some sayings are wrong or half-truth but they stick anyway e.g. "blind as a bat".
The chicken tale predates discovey of the new continent.
You will find similar middle age tales.
> Some are incredibly stupid.
That's from an anthropomorphized angle though? In their evolutionary niche, their level of expressed intelligence seems to be spot on, otherwise they'd have evolved or been outcompeted long ago.
In fact, some of those species that you might consider "incredibly stupid" may have existed long before humans and might easily outlive us if we follow some not-very-unlikely paths that we have opened up with technology and (lack of) social maturity. Who is "incredibly stupid" then?
You can be stupid and still well adapted to your niche. Most of existence doesn't require much in the way of intelligence.
> Corvids and parrots and raptors are remarkably smart, yet not every bird species is. Some are incredibly stupid.
Raptors are pretty stupid. They don't _need_ to be smart. They're solitary and they are typically apex predators.
I have a great view out of my window, and I have a family of crows living nearby. They cooperated to drive out owls and eagles that were nesting in a nearby park. Right now it's raining with pretty strong gusty winds and the crows are flying outside, doing pretty crazy aerobatics. They are clearly having a lot of fun!
I have never seen pigeons or seagulls do that.
Raptors soar on thermals
Sure, as do seagulls and plenty of other birds. Hell, _I_ can do that in a glider!
But crows were not just soaring, they were diving, doing loop-de-loops, chasing each other. Something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIWEFaVeWfw
It's really hard to take a good video of that.
Yeah it implies.. what I see when I look at some of the !@#$ my pigeons and budgies do.
Do they do that slowly or quickly?
My chickens do what passes for thinking quickly. Not that it passes well.
Those birds are geniuses, compared to chickens.
Yeah I can think of plenty of impulsive and dumb things to do without much thought.
They might think faster because the brain is smaller - a shorter distance for connections.
For example, learning to play a piano is training the spine, not the brain. Because the feedback loop with the spine is shorter.
It's the same with dancing. One is trained to not look at one's feet, because the feedback loop is too slow.
I think the only reason we can actually do things like dancing and playing of pianos is because our brains are capable of predicting the future. Maybe not very far but far enough to compensate for the end to end latency. I don't think you train your spine when you learn an instrument. I think you learn a predictive model of the world that allows you to anticipate events far enough in advance to execute correctly.
> I don't think you train your spine when you learn an instrument.
I saw an article about it years ago.
That is going to be part of the answer, simply because birds have much smaller neurons that are more densely packed than in mammals. They are also much more energy efficient, using something like 1/3 of the energy. They also have a different neural architecture, which may also contribute.
I believe that there are fundamental architectural differences. It's possibly related to birds doing continuous breathing rather than tidal breathing like mammals, so the limit of oxygen availability is higher.
The flying lifestyle creates size constraints, and nerve conduciton distances will be shorter and that will make some sort of difference.
But dusting off some very rusty student memories, we're not really working in real time - some latencies bottom out a 5ms, but 30-100ms is more common - if I am recalling correctly.
Looking at one's feet is also inefficient since you don't dance with your feet.
And playing a musical instrument like piano depends heavily on interactive processes throughout the brain and PNS
> Looking at one's feet is also inefficient since you don't dance with your feet.
What do you dance with, then, and why there are step diagrams (with lines and little shoe prints) for classical dances?
You dance with your entire body. You do shift weight to parts of your foot and use toes to various extents , but the ankles, knees, thighs and waist are all more important than the feet if we're simply focusing on lower body motion.
Re: the gotcha question, because these are simplified diagrams for teaching beginners or communicating genre-informed choreographies in shorthand. Even then, nobody achieve's any dancing simply by moving their feet as the diagram depicts (and they couldn't possible do so without the rest of their body). Part of the reason for their success is that people are already familiar with dances and combine the diagram's directions with the understanding that they must achieve it with a full body vocabulary.
> For example, learning to play a piano is training the spine, not the brain. Because the feedback loop with the spine is shorter.
It may train the spine too but good luck trying to play the piano without a brain. More concretely, your eyes read the notes you like to play, your ears provide the feedback loop whether you are playing the right thing (and dynamics and interplay with other musicians in an ensemble), and you need things like planning ahead, sense of form, etc. Twiching fingers from some spine impulse is just part of playing the piano. (Besides, the latency between brain and finger muscels is insubstantial w.r.t. the time scales you need for general music playing, beyond certain nuances.)
> It may train the spine too but good luck trying to play the piano without a brain.
I think you missed the point.
The brain is the general, the spine is the sergeant.
There's a wonderful book titled The Genius of Birds[1] by author Jennifer Ackerman which explores bird intelligence.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25938481-the-genius-of-b...
Birdbrain should mean the opposite of what it does, for this reason, but for many others. Birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation, a process that's about the one bona fide quantum biological paradigm.
Their body clocks are also significantly more sophisticated and decentralized than ours.
And in the end, the physical intelligence of flight itself demands a brain that's gotta be incredibly spatially and temporally aware.
I wish our brains had some of the skills and efficiencies of birds.
> Birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation, a process that's about the one bona fide quantum biological paradigm… I wish our brains had some of the skills and efficiencies of birds.
You can harness your somatic infrastructure to gain some senses, like magnetic field sensitivity. Some people implant small permanent magnets in a fingertip to sense magnetic field, and claim it makes the world more interesting.
Unfortunately such an implant is not itself permanent (you'd want to coat it with something safe that doesn't trigger the immune system like gold or PTFE). Also though you want to be careful around other magnets I imagine!
But you could probably wear a magnetic sensor that used something attached to your skin that you could learn to "read" intuitively. The problems are dermatalogical sensitivity from the adhesive and the inability to wear it 24/7 to make the erading really feel like a new sense. But who knows?
Right, and importantly for this context, impressive as that capability is, it does nothing to debunk or demystify bird intelligence. There are impressive capabilities built into somatic functioning, and other things carved into the structure of our biology by evolution itself but those things don't signal intelligence.
Seeing the earth's magnetic field is amazing, but it's just as built in as a mantis shrimp's ability to see a wider color spectrum. Incredible, but not in and of itself a mark of intelligence.
They have to be faster than us. They casually fly at 40mph.
Why? There aren't very many obstacles at altitude. Humans routinely travel at 40mph+ too (bicycles, motorcycles, cars) and have to contend with much more diverse and surprising conditions on the ground. (Obviously, airplanes go even faster, but similarly benefit from a lack of obstacles.)
> Why? There aren't very many obstacles at altitude.
Most birds don't spend their time flying at high altitudes. Most of the time they're remarkably close to the ground, and there are lots of obstacles when you're close to he ground. Some of those are trying to avoid being eaten, and others are looking for dinner.
> Humans routinely travel at 40mph+ too (bicycles, motorcycles, cars) and have to contend with much more diverse and surprising conditions on the ground.
That's just within the last 150 years, and has no relevance for our evolutionary history.
Humans going fast is a thing that happened just yesterday (from evolutionary perspective).
From an engineering point of view their control loop must be much faster. Things that fly need much tighter loops than we do that lumber about on the ground.
Watch a bird come in fast and then land on a narrow twig.
Bird neurons are roughly half the length of mammal neurons. This means you can pack in around 8x more neurons in a given volume.
Yeah, you can just (try to) watch them move their heads around looking at things. They move faster than the human eye.
https://archive.is/GX4uW
I have to agree but not just the crows.. The two parakeets that I owned as a kid were quite smart and would stir their own seeds to move the good seeds above the spent seeds with tooth pick that I had been using to scratch them. They would play with the tooth pick and grab it from each other. And they were affectionate and liked to snuggle.
They had complete trust in my family and not others. So they could tell the difference.
Intelligence is not about some IQ test.
When you’re lower on the totem pole of life, aren’t your decisions much faster since there are less neurons and pathways to traverse?
Despite the title, humans can react much faster than that. Gamers are commonly around 150 ms in visual response time.
Humans can make decisions and an action in less than 125 ms for very fast people.
Maybe if the birds were gamers [trained since birth] and they selected very fast birds, could they then beat humans?
The experiment compared humans and birds at the same task. Reaction times of humans on other tasks is irrelevant.
Considering how quickly birds can move and how twitchy they are this does not surprise me at all.
They really need to qualify "decisions" here, as quick decision making may very well reflect an automatic reaction with zero thought behind it.
Some of the traditional folk tale stereotypes seem to be correlated quite well to what we now know about bird cognition.
Hens/chickens are usually synonymous with "not very bright". Crows and ravens are usually depicted as smart and cunning.
Chickens actually have a very advanced social intelligence though
Ah!, thanks! [lightbulb]
Went to find something to read on the matter. This paper is fun!: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-016-1064-4
Chickens are a great example of how expertise in one domain does not necessarily transfer to other domains.
So can Jev!
The title is a misnomer. Redarded decisions are usually done fast. So birdbrain is very accurate for someone who does that regularly.
But birdbrain doesn't mean you're slow, it means not very smart.
The "journalist" just really wanted to make article out of "smol brain processes faster"
I had to double check to make sure this wasn't a new decision model. However, I do look forward to the new crow-themed models that will follow.
It's faster probably because their neural network is less deep :)
Humans think fast and slow, but birds only think fast.
"eat like a bird" is also a misnomer. birds are so misunderstood
Let me guess, must be either Jev or Clef
Yeah, well... My SHARP pocket calculator turns on faster than my PC does.
Jev brained
Maybe they use Jev
I know more than one person who believe that certain birds, especially crows, ravens, and cardinals, are reincarnated loved ones bringing a message.
I don't share this belief, but the more we find out about avian intelligence, the less surprised we should be that people actually think this.
Given the tiny size of avian brains compare to mammals, particulary humans, it's hard to ascribe a lot of intelligence to them. But for what they can do, they seem quite well optimized.
Brain size is not a decisive factor in estimating intelligence and corvid brains pack twice the neurons per volume compared to humans. The factor is: effective "Information Processing Capacity" (IPC), which is high for body size and rivals great apes on specific executive tasks.
Extreme miniaturization eliminates travel distance, giving near-zero latency and high metabolic efficiency despite 1/5th the neurons of a chimp.
Bird brains are wired differently, neuron density is higher... so using size to compare brains is not enough.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bird-brains-have-...
And that’s why Elephants are generally considered more intelligent than humans!
I'm not sure why you get downvoted for pointing out that some people have a belief that is not shared by most other people.
Seems that some posters would rather shoot the messenger that delivers information that they don't agree with.
From interacting with domestic and wild animals for most of my life I figured out a long time ago that they understand their own world and their place in it way better than many of us understand the world we have created for ourselves.
Another article I read recently said that Birds use anaerobic metabolism inside their eyes so that there's much less biological clutter in front of the rods and cones.
I wonder if this could also have something to do with it. The bird would presumably be sharper at spotting the pattern partly because our eyes are trying to pick it out from in the midst of other kinds of "floater" patterns that we're (very) used to filtering out
I hate popular science articles like this. Ummmmm listen sweetie, you're just ignorant and Ima police you a bit here... sit down for some really wild SCIENCEism!
Ugh.
It's also just attacking a straw man. "Birdbrain" doesn't mean slow -- it means stupid! These are not the same concept.