From the Vault: Bird Intelligence

Just what are the upper limits of avian cognitive ability? Various studies reveal how certain bird species engage in mental time travel, tool use, self recognition, theory of mind and even meta-cognition. But how do their non-mammalian brains actually work, and what might a technologically-advanced bird species even look like? Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick as they explore the avian mind. (Originally published March 31, 2016)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
The vault creeks open slowly. Will you walk in with us?
You should walk in because this time the vault contains
super intelligent birds. Funny thing about super intelligent birds is
they're not the result of some kind of Dr Moreau,

(00:26):
like a mad science experiment. They already exist in the
natural world. Birds are scary smart and that's what our
episode is about today. This originally aired on March thirty one,
two thousand sixteen, and it was called The Unsettling Depths
of Bird Intelligence. All right, let us enter in. Welcome

(00:48):
to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff all your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert
I want to ask you to go with them on
a mental journey through the past. Let's do it, okay.
So I want to ask you to think about the

(01:09):
evolution of technological civilization in terms of the human hand. Okay, Well,
that is the not the only model we have for
the evolution of technologically advanced civilizations. Yeah, so I'm totally
down with it. Think about tool using intelligence, right, Yeah,
So the earliest tools used by primates are primate ancestors
that the apes we call our cousins. They're all things

(01:33):
that can be manipulated by the fingers. You had the
hand axes. I'm sure you've seen these things there, these
carved down stones, and there are different theories about what
exactly they were used for. Where they for processing carcasses,
where they for throwing it prey or some combination, you know,
where they just merely useless status items. But they were
these chipped stone tools used in the hand. And then

(01:55):
of course we had handheld and thrown weapons, handheld tools
for processing the car rcases of prey like a stone cleavers,
and then later on you had tools for cooking and
tools for farming and all just kind of a spiral
staircase of technology revolving around the solid core of the
shape of the human hand. Everything was based on the

(02:17):
assumption of thumbs, palms, fingers. Even if you look at
the beginnings of human culture, like if we go to
the oldest examples of art, we know cave paintings show
the use of handprints, pigments, applied to cave walls by hand.
And then I don't know if you've ever seen this,
but finger fluting, where it's not painting, but where Stone
Age artists would make patterns and cave walls and what

(02:39):
used to be soft cave walls by dragging their fingers
through the soft surfaces which later hardened. And then, of course,
some of the oldest known musical instruments appear to be
Paleolithic flutes made out of the bones of bears or vultures.
So you get a bare bone, you bore some holes
in it, and you could make a flute. And of
course what do you do with those holes You cover

(03:00):
them with a fingertip to change the pitch of the
note you're producing with the flute. So when you consider
all this, and then of course coming all all the
way up to our our steering wheels and our gaming
console controllers and every other thing you hold in your
fingertips today, it's almost impossible to imagine the evolution of
a technological civilization and advanced intelligent culture without hands. Uh.

(03:24):
In fact, I think some would say that it was
our primate hands that made this trajectory possible for our species,
like it was only the fact that humans went bipedal
and started having free hands to work with that encouraged
the development in the brain the powerhouses for tool use
and innovation that made us who we are today. But

(03:44):
I want to think about what if evolution had gone
a different way? Ah, So what you have another form
of life on the planet. Uh was managed to ascend
that staircase we mentioned earlier? What kind of tools would
they have used? How would they have used them? Yeah,
and that stairing, so their spiral staircase might not have
had hands. What if there was an advanced technological species

(04:05):
on Earth, but not one that evolved from primates, and
not even one that evolved from mammals. Is it possible
to imagine a technological civilization built by the cousins of
birds in the same way we have one now built
by the cousins of apes. Um like where you've got

(04:25):
highly intelligent cousins of pigeons conducting science and business and
art and education in these huge technological monstrosities of cities,
while you've got monkeys scampering around in flocks throughout the
city surfaces, pecking around for crumbs, and every now and
then you'd have a highly intelligent bird creature go out
on its lunch break and feed the monkeys some some

(04:47):
bread crumbs, or feed on the monkeys. Could be because yeah,
because this gets especially interesting when you when you when
you when you look back, say about fifty million years
uh to the to the earth really u c. N Epoch,
and you'll find that this is the only time in
history when birds ruled the world. They permeated most of
the key positions on the food chain, with a large

(05:09):
flightless terror birds stalking the land terror birds, terribs, massive, yeah,
top predator, just terrifying land birds. But I can imagine
something like what if something like that had been the
species that really took off, and maybe that was what
would live in these cities and eat the monkeys. But

(05:29):
but as for just birds in general, you know, why
not why not the birds? Because birds are builders. Yeah,
they build nests, they put them together, their tool users.
As we'll discuss, they exhibit social behavior, trickery in some
cases startlingly complex social behavior. So you know, I can
imagine on that end of things, I can imagine the
bird brain being completely capable of ascending uh. In terms

(05:53):
of manipulating objects. Will certainly get more to the details
in a bit. But I instantly think of some of
the controls that we see, uh for disabled individuals who
do not have the use of their hands, where they
use like a straw to to control the movements of
say a wheelchair. Yeah. I can imagine technology like that

(06:16):
being utilized by some sort of highly evolved bird creature,
and with the kind of intelligence that a highly advanced
technological civilization would have. I wouldn't say that something like
that is necessarily impossible. Uh. In fact, today I think
we want to make the case for why it's not
completely insane to imagine a technological culture in a hypothetical

(06:38):
alternate universe built around the core of wings, beaks, and
claws instead of fingers and thumbs and palms. Yeah, I
don't think it's even a little bit insane. That's what
it is. However, is it's a little more alien than
even most of our science fiction dreamers want to want
to want to play with. You know, we tend we're

(06:59):
talking about this later. Even when you think of of
alien species and science fiction that are avian, they're almost
always the same sort of bird human hybrids that we've
been dreaming about since they know since you know Babylonian days. Yeah.
Uh so I should say at the beginning that this
episode was inspired when I saw a recently published paper,

(07:19):
and this paper was called Cognition Without Cortex, and it
was a review of recent findings on avian cognition and
euro anatomy, sort of collecting all of the literature of
recent decades, looking into how smart exactly are birds, what
kind of cognitive traits and thinking to the exhibit and
what are we learning, uh, what are we learning about

(07:40):
how a bird's brain works and how that compares to
the mammalian brain. And so this paper was written by
Owner Gunter Kune and Thomas bugny Are and it was
in Trends and Cognitive Sciences, published on March one. Well
you know this, Uh this raises the question, Joe, what
is your attitude towards birds? What is your experience with

(08:02):
the perception of bird intelligence? Well, I know exactly what
it is, because I've always thought that birds looked kind
of dumb. You have, and I have to admit it.
I'm sorry now, I'm sorry now that I've read all
this research, but I always looked at them and said,
oh man, there's something just kind of like an ancient
emptiness in the eyes of a bird. And I was
not alone in this because you may have heard this before,

(08:26):
but I want to share it with you. A quote
from the famous film director of Werner Hertzog speaking about chickens. Yes,
can you please do it in his voice? No, I
can't do the accent, but I'm going to read his quote.
Hertzog says about chickens, the enormity if they're flat brain,
the enormity of their stupidity is just overwhelming. You have

(08:48):
to do yourself a favor. When you're out in the
countryside and you see chickens, try to look at chicken
in the eye with great intensity, and the intensity of
stupidity that is looking at you is just amazing. By
the way, it's very easy to hypnotize the chicken. They're
very prone to hypnosis. And in one or two films
I've actually shown that. Okay, so he's talking about chickens here,

(09:12):
and I have heard from people who have raised chickens before.
I think my my grandmother was very much in this
boat that the chickens are are stupid and in a
pain to keep. And but chickens are just one of many,
many species. Yes, that's that's true. There are there are
one subspecies there also, we should point out domesticated and

(09:35):
there is often something that we see in biology that
happens to domesticated animals. Animals that have kind of a
cushy life where they're fed every day tend to not
be quite so quick in the in the thinking department
as their wild cousins. But I don't know if that
explains how people feel about chickens. Maybe chickens are a
lot smarter than we give them credit for. But anyway,

(09:56):
the conventional wisdom for a long time has been in
in sort of crude terms, birds are dumb. Birds are
stupid because they do not have the right kind of brain. Yeah,
And I think a lot of this boils down to
just basic perception. Like my wife has often been kind
of like freaked out by birds. And the way she
describes it is that she grew up around dogs. She
grew up around horses, and she says that those animals

(10:19):
are easier to read. You can you can you can
get a better idea about what a dog is going
to do. You can tell if a dog is aggravated, excited,
what have you? A horse? The same way they are
all these different cues that we can pick up on
and really communicate facially with them. It's more difficult to
do with a bird, and certainly the bird I can
just seem like a glassy um, you know, a cavern

(10:41):
of nothingness. I think of what Quint says in Jaws,
the shark size it's like a doll's eye. Yeah, yeah,
very much. So you get that kind of glassy doll's eye,
uh impression from them. But you know, I go to
the zoo a lot with my my son and there
are a lot of birds there, some of them in particular,
like the ground hornbill that they have there. I'm just

(11:04):
always startled by how intelligent they seem to be, and
that I am. I'm observing them, but they seem to
be observing me almost on equal footing. So in in
that area, I have to disagree with the perceived stupidity
of the bird. Just talking about perceptions here at this point,
But I think I would have to say that that
your wife's intuition about the sort of disconnectedness of the

(11:27):
bird the space between you does make sense from a
biological perspective, because there is a biological gap between humans
and birds much larger than our gap, the gap between
humans and other mammals. So the gap between humans and
dogs is you're still both mammals. You have a much
more recent common ancestor. The gap between primates like us

(11:52):
and birds is ancient. There are last common ancestor with
birds is believed to exist. It to have existed about
hundred million years ago. We have not been related to
birds since before the dinosaurs, way before the dinosaurs. It
goes back way back. These are these are just extremely

(12:14):
different branches of the tree of life on Earth, and
so I think it makes sense to look on a
vian creatures with the with the kind of hesitance. So
there there there's an alien quality to it that's much
like the quality of a reptile or a fish. They're
just not much like us. Yeah, there's a definite alien
quality to them. But I mentioned the conventional wisdom was

(12:35):
that when people used to think all birds were really stupid,
they thought that they were stupid because of how their
brains were built. So what where does human intelligence come from? What?
Why are mammals smart? Typically people look at the cortex.
The mammalian prefrontal cortex appears to be the seat of
executive functions. So all the thinking you do that involves

(12:58):
conscious control of thought, using working memory and constituting the
planning and execution of actions. That that that's cortex stuff.
And so the old line of the of the neuroscientist
or the neuro anatomist was sort of that I can
look at your brain, and by looking at your brain,
I can tell you how you're thinking works, how your
cognition works. And if you don't have a cortex, you

(13:20):
just don't have much cognition going on. I watched a
presentation by Owner Gundercun and he called attention to the
work of the German neuro anatomist Ludwig Eddinger, who lived
eighteen fifty five to nineteen eighteen, and he said that
Eddinger was the leading comparative neuro anatomist of his time.
Uh and the his project was sort of to understand

(13:41):
the evolution of the brain invertebrates. Vertebrates all creatures that
have a backbone. Um, so birds and mammals both vertebrates.
Where where do the differences in brain evolution come along?
And Eddinger's theory was, first you got fish, and fish
basically just have a spinal cord with a little you've
got some brain stem on the end. Their fish don't
have much going on brain wise. And then after that

(14:02):
you had amphibians and and so they've got a part
of the basil ganglia that's sort of a little bit
extending what the brains are capable of. And then you've
got reptiles, and this adds more to the basal ganglia
second component of it, and you've you've got slightly upgraded
cognitive skills. And then after reptiles, you've got the fourth thing,
which is birds. And then birds have uh, they sort

(14:25):
of developed the basil ganglia improve the skills more. And
then finally with mammals you get the cerebral cortex, which
gives them this unprecedented thinking power, intelligence, cognition, flexibility, the
ability to use their brains to adapt intelligence to all
kinds of different scenarios. And so, according to Eddinger, you
should look at a monkey and you should see cognition.

(14:48):
It's behaviors that come out of thinking. It's not all
just instinct. It's weakly determined by the genes. But meanwhile,
you should look at a bird, like a pigeon that
doesn't have a cortex, and it should have a little
bit of intelligence, but it's going to be a just instinct,
you know, gene determined behaviors. Is that true? Well, on

(15:10):
one hand, this gets into the whole idea of the
sort of the ice cream scoop model of of neurophysiology, right,
that humans have the most scoops of brain ice cream
and therefore have the most powerful brains. But then also
our our understanding of how these brains are working has
evolved somewhat over the years too, and we've been forced
to sort of think think outside of the of our

(15:33):
own uh uh, you know, anthropomorphic bias in terms of
what constitutes intelligence. And of course we've conducted plenty of
experiments on top of that to really get down for
to take apart intelligence, even human intelligence for divided into
components that can then be tested for in other species. Yeah,

(15:54):
and I think what we're learning in recent years over
many experiments is not just like one experiment has changed,
is the way we're thinking about this There there are
so many more experiments than we could even talk about
in this episode, and the jury is out on many
of these areas, right, But there's so much new research
showing that bird intelligence, bird cognition seems to go far

(16:15):
beyond what was previously assumed that this old theory of
the determination of cognition by the by the structure of
the brain does seem to be flawed. It seems to
be that this is not correct anymore because it was
based on a false premise. Birds are much smarter than
we thought, and some cultural traditions seem to have actually

(16:36):
long associated birds, like like corvids, which include crows with
higher brain function. I know we came across this, uh
this great North Smith right. Oh, yeah, Hoogan and Moon
in those are Odin's ravens. Yeah, companions. He also had
some some lupine companions, Gary and freki Um. But the
interesting thing about to sound like fraggle names. They do

(16:58):
kind of in our sything about Whogan and Moon and
I also think of and maybe they were, but Whogan
and Moon and also sounded like they should be, uh
like the the host characters in like an old horror comic,
you know, they should be chatting with each other. Maybe
I'm directly maybe they were. I don't know. Someone will
have to fill me in on that. But they not
only are they Odin's companions, they are a part of him.

(17:21):
They are his thoughts and memories, respectively. And so some
argue that Moonen is actually desire rather than memory. But
essentially the idea here said Hohogan, um who can represents
the thoughts of Odin Moon and represents the memories. That's
too cool, because they're they're embodied cognition, right, yeah. Yeah,
And uh, here's a little a little bit of Old Norse,

(17:44):
uh that has been translated that tells you a little
bit about Whogan and Moon. And this is apparent. This
is supposed to be from Odin himself, who can and
moon and fly every day over the world. I worry
for Whogan that he might not return, but I worry
more from moon In. Oh well that if you interpret
moon into mean memory, and it's uh, that's kind of
a bittersweet fact about the loss of memories into time. Yeah,

(18:07):
that these are just they're they're birds that are out
there in the world, and hey, one day one or
both of them may not come back. And and it's
interesting too. I don't want to go to too far
down the rabbit hole. But you apparently don't see animals
playing a huge role in Old English Norse heroic literature.
Except in the case of certain carrion animals, the beasts

(18:27):
of battle, like the wolf which we mentioned earlier, Gary Frekie,
the eagle, the raven. Uh. So it's interesting to think
about these are the animals that fed on the battlefield
dead and therefore they have some sort of privileged status. Symbolically,
that's weird. One might think that that would make them
taboo or something like that, but instead that elevates them
to the being uh, the stuff of myth. Yeah, I

(18:50):
mean it. You certainly we see we see some of
that in other cultures, but yeah, I haven't looked into
it as much in terms in terms of Western culture because,
for instance, the vultures have elevated status uh in Tibetan
mythology because they're closer to the sky and they are
involved in the rights of death. But the Siberials, right, well,
I think it's time to actually look at some of

(19:11):
these studies of of avian cognition of exactly what bird
brains are capable of in practice and the to summarize
recent discoveries. Will get into the details in a moment,
but basically, what we have found, what scientists have found
is that some birds, like parrots and that that would
mean birds of the order Satasa forms that include true parrots, cockatoos,

(19:35):
and New Zealand parrots. And then also corvids which are
birds of the family corvid A, and that would include crows, ravens, rooks, magpies, chuffs, jay's,
and nutcrackers. These bird groups display cognition on par with primates,
which means primates of course being the order containing monkeys

(19:56):
and apes like us, so on par with pri mates. Seriously,
and just just allow us to demonstrate with a selection
of findings. What we are talking about is mental time travel, yes,
also known as chronosthesia if you want to be fancy
about it. Now that this is sort of it's something

(20:16):
that you take for granted. Is it comes very easy
to advance primates like humans. But it's just being able
to travel back and forth along a mental timeline. Yeah,
it's the ability to entertain alternate future scenarios. You know,
you tell a creature ways option A versus option B.
It's how you're able to remember past events and anticipate
and plan for future events. And that ability is core

(20:39):
to so much of human experience. You know, our ability
to or or our flaw and being able to just
regret the past, worry over the future, the entire wheel
of suffering. It's a very human thing, it's yeah, And
it seems very easy to assume that because you look
at the behavior of most animals and they really do
seem to live in the present moment, that they don't
seem to be able to consider a hypothetical unless we're

(21:04):
projecting it on them. Okay, so, especially in the case
of our pets. Um but yeah, so is it president animals.
It kind of depends on who you ask. Some say no,
not at all, mean, even some scientists. It's not just
like a popular no no. If you just ask people,
I have a feeling they're going to Yeah, they're gonna
be You're gonna get into projection concerning the animals that

(21:25):
we think we we understand the most and then we
can read more easily. But with with scientists, yeah, it depends.
A December two paper published in Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews
titled mental time travel an exclusively human capacity lets you
know where they stand? Yeah, it argues exactly that that
that quote. Some animals indeed appear to possess episodic memory.

(21:47):
There is, however, no evidence that they are able to construct, reflect,
and compare different future scenarios like humans are okay, so
episodic memory that just means having sort of not ingrained
how it always was or learned behaviors from the past,
but being able to recall a specific instance, like if
you can remember what you had for lunch yesterday, that's

(22:10):
an episodic memory. And some evidence shows that some animals
have this, But they're saying that they can't. They can't
project thoughts into the future, right, Like, it's one thing
to remember what's happened, but then can you anticipate future
events and plan around them? But not all scientists agree
with this conclusion, is right? Um So, Back in two

(22:30):
thousands seven or so, Nicola Clayton of the University of
Cambridge argued that scrub jays, which is a spacies of
large brain crow, exhibit mental time travel. And then in
two thousand eleven there's an interesting study uh from Karina
Logan of the University of Cambridge and Sean O'Donnell of
the University of Washington, and they argued that this mental

(22:51):
time travel is demonstrated in certain tropical birds who engage
in bivouac that's temporary anton nest sites checking, bivouac checking.
So basically the idea here is that the ants, the
ant colonies are moving around. They have like a cyclical
raid cycle that they go through. They have patterns of

(23:11):
activity exactly, and so the animals hunting them in this
case the birds, they have to figure out how to
anticipate those movements. The birds keep track of where the
ants are, they remember their past movements, and according to
the use of these researchers, they're actually using that data
to anticipate future movements of the ants so they'll know
where to go to score their meal. Okay, so mental

(23:31):
time travel and birds, Uh, that seems to be a
toss up some some scientists say yes, some say no,
but either way it's an interesting lead for for continuing research.
But there's one area where we can see birds excelling
in higher cognitive function where there is no doubt whatsoever,
and that's in tool use. The birds are freakishly handy,

(23:53):
that's right. There are a number of examples of tool
use and birds, some more complex than others. Uh. For instance,
Egyptian vultures use the stones as tools to to bust
open ostrojaggs. Yeah, there are also that you have, like
the brush turkey builds. This is rather simple, builds a
gigantic mound of soil and decaying vegetation to lay their

(24:14):
eggs in. But then they'll kick the garbage at enemies
to drive them away. Yeah. Wait, what are their enemies?
Things like monitor lizards? Uh? Yeah what Yeah, so they're
they're kicking garbage at monitor lizards. Yeah. It's like, like
I say, this is very basic tool, you like, but yeah,
kicking rubbish, you're still making a tool out of something

(24:35):
in your environment trash soccer. Yeah. Now, one of the
more elaborate examples here you have the woodpecker finch, which
is one of Darwin's finches from the Colapicus Islands. Tool
It uses cactus spines or wooden splinters to dig grubs
or other insects out of holes and wood so, in
other words, it obtains its food in the same manner

(24:55):
as a woodpecker, but it hasn't evolved the necessary long
tongue to scoop them out out, so it goes it
breaks off something sharp to get in there, and it
may even trim the twig. And this is key because
There are other examples of animals that say, like use
a muscle shell fragment to hammer open another muscle, or
use a piece of bark to pry another piece of
bark off we've all engaged when we we haven't all.

(25:18):
But if you've ever used part of a crab claw
to dig out crab meat, you've engaged in like this
level of simple tool use, which shouldn't be discounted. I mean,
even that's impressive, that is still impressive tool you. But
it goes beyond that, right, because they are actually trimming
the twig trying these finches, these finches, they're trimming the twig,
They're they're manufacturing a tool. So they're they're going from

(25:40):
what's called a nature fact to an artifact. And nature
fact is finding something in the world and using it
as is okay, But the artifact, you're transforming it into
a tool. Yeah, So that's sort of the difference between
a rock and a hand axe. So if you've got
an ancient, ancient primate who has managed to hunt down
and kill a piece of prey, a large animal, and

(26:01):
it wants to process the carcass to get some meat
off of it, it could just pick up a kind
of flat rock and use that for help. That would
be a nature of fact. Or it could chip down
a rock until it's got a sharper edge. That's an
artifact exactly. And just to put this, you know, and
then a framework of human tool use their four levels
of artifact fact tool used. There's reduction that's where you

(26:22):
reduce the massive functional of the functional form. So you're
chewing the stick down stuff in the bark, et cetera.
That's what we just talked. Yeah, that's what we definitely
see in birds. Uh. Then there's level two conjunction that's
combining two or more units to make a tool. This
is like a flint headed spear or a have to axe. Uh.
Number three is replication that's conjunction, but with two or
more from similar units required, so a double pronged fishing

(26:45):
spear or a trident. Yeah. And number four is linkage
that's physically distinct objects in combination, like a bow and arrow.
Obviously we're not going to see a bow and arrow
with birds here today. Now what a sling count is linkage? Yes,
I think it would. Yeah, you have two distinct objects
that are coming together to make something. Uh, even even
more powerful, you know. Yeah, but some some of the

(27:07):
tool use you see in birds is really the word
I would use is disturbing. I don't mean to give
it a negative quality, but it's kind it's unsettling when
you see it. Yeah, I mean, if you're talking disturbing,
the shrikes have always inspired a certain amount of terror.
These are the these little birds impale the bodies of
insects and small vertebrates on thorns. It partially for storage,

(27:29):
but also just so they can better strip them apart
as they you know, decided to eat them. Oh so
it's like a leather face putting somebody on a hook. Yeah, exactly,
it is. It's like sometimes they're called butcher birds for
this very reason, because it's like putting them on a
butcher's foot. That's messed up. Now, crows and ravens, I'm sorry.
Let let me let me take the judgment off of that.

(27:49):
That's a nature. Yes, that's a nature. Um and and yes,
so there's nothing wrong with letther face crows and ravens. Uh.
This is where we see some some wonderful tool uses
where well, crows have administrated tool use and even the
creation of artifacts. They've been deserved to fashion tools from
twigs to fish, beetle, larva out of logs, and in
lab environments they've been observed to use one tool to

(28:11):
make another tool. Now this is weird, Okay, this is
not just using a tool to get the thing they want,
but crafting tools, like using one tool to craft a
second tool, which is like a whole other layer of
abstract thought. Yeah. Indeed, uh, specifically the crowing question and
this one study bent the end of a wire using

(28:31):
the edge of a glass, then used the hooked wire
to retrieve another stick which was long enough to read
some food that it wanted. So those different steps there
in tool use in cognition, that's pretty advanced. It seems
like something some people wouldn't be able to figure out
how to do. Yeah. I kind of imagine myself in
the lab trying to do some problem solving puzzle and

(28:53):
just failing. Yeah. I mean, it's the kind kind of
steps that you can imagine just an individual on the
street going through if they wrop their keys down a
sewer grade and I see them and they're like, how
am I gonna get that back? All right? Well, what's
around me? Is there a coat hanger? Can get a
hold of. Is there some other you know, when we
begin to go through these these sort of basic tool
you steps to do something we we normally don't have
to engage in. But some of these steps really do

(29:16):
involve very strange ideas of of the abstract conditionals of
how to manipulate your environment. Like one of the examples
would be displacement of water. This is something that's been
observed in those New Caledonian crows. New Caledonian crows have
been documented to h So you've got a tube and
it's got some water in it, and floating on the

(29:37):
top of the water is a yummy piece of food
that the crow wants, but it's down in the tube
and it can't reach it. So the crows figure out
to drop rocks or heavy objects into the water to
raise the water level to fish out the piece of food.
It that that's again something that I wonder if I
would think to do well. I mean, it reminds me,

(29:59):
of course of Aesop's fable of the crow in the picture,
Like that just goes right back to some of our
oldest tails in which the crow is thirsty and has
to drop pebbles into the picture. To raise the water
level enough to drink from it. So we've been observing
this for for ages, I imagined, and in fact, I
think there was a study we came across just this
month that was looking at the evolution of the beak

(30:21):
of the New Caledonian crow, essentially saying that it evolved
for tool use. Right, Yeah, I should mention that they
we've also observed the New Caledonia crows forming beetle hooks
from the barbed edges of wide leaves, and in fact,
uh these Cornell researchers in this recent study they used
shape analysis and uh CT scanning to compare the shape

(30:42):
and structure of the New Caledonia crow's bill, and they
found the unique bill contributes to the bird's ability to
use and probably make tools specialized for tool manipulation. Okay,
so it's not just the brain, but the crow is
so specialized for being a technological creature that it has
evolved other body parts to aid in the creation of technology.

(31:04):
And this is where it gets interesting because it brings
us back to our original uh ponderings about the possibility
of avian evolution to a you know, technological state. Yeah,
it makes me think about if we were to really
commit to this speculation about if birds became the ascendant
intelligent species on a planet, what would their technology look like?

(31:25):
And I wonder if instead of every object being shaped
around the human hand, if you'd have all these objects
shaped around these specialized types of beaks, what would that
look like? How would be how would they control their technology,
how would they hold things? How would they control all
of the aspects of their environment with a beak? Yeah,
because you would sort of be talking about the like

(31:45):
the the end result of of you know, just just
ages and ages of stick manipulation by beak, Like what
is the like what's the optimal form of that? It's
so different than what we have to work with in
terms of thinking about the human hand and tool used
as humans appreciate it. There's another thing that some studies

(32:05):
have found birds can do that even some humans struggle with,
and that's delay of gratification. And so I'm sure you've
seen these studies before. Like a kid is given the
opportunity to have they put a marshmallow front of marshmallow
test and say, if you can resist eating this marshmallow
for five minutes, you'll get two marshmallows. You know, so

(32:29):
you'll get more, you'll get a better reward if you
can just wait a little bit. Animals are not good
at this task. Animals are not good at practicing restraint.
They can't delay gratification. If you put food in front
of them, typically they're just gonna eat it um. But some,
in some cases, animals can be trained not to do this,
especially some higher functional, higher cognitive functioning animals like primates

(32:53):
and in some cases like birds. So there was one
paper I came across that talked about how often cockatoos
were They were essentially able to wait up to about
eighty seconds for food of a preferred quality, but less
time for a higher quantity. And this was something that
was also found in a study I read about Corvid's

(33:16):
waiting for food. They can delay gratification for longer, or
in some cases they can only delay gratification at all
if they're anticipating getting a better piece of food, but
not if they're anticipating getting more food, which is interesting
to me, Like they'll they'll pay up in waiting time
for quality, but not for quantity. Okay, it's it's weird

(33:37):
anytime I think about this scenario or any of these
scenarios involving crows eating, I just think of them like
picking at corpses. Uh, like a medieval setting. Yeah, yeah, well,
I mean it makes you think, like, so, what's the
equivalent in the of the quality versus quantity fact in
like the marsh marshmallow experiments, So it would be like
the kid has given a marshmallow, and then it's instead

(33:59):
of you'll get two more shmallows, you'll get I don't
know what's better than a marshmallow, human eyeball. Human eyeballs.
I just assume that is the ultimate treat to chocolate
covered eyeball, No huge, a piece of chocolate cake or
something like a much improved object overall. And so crows
no quality when they see it, and so do cockatoos.

(34:25):
It's time to hold the mirror up to Avian cognition,
because we're gonna talk a little bit about mirror self
recognition tests or m s R. This is one of
the most interesting of these examples to me because it
deals with not just thinking about how to solve a task,
but something that's a kind of a different issue, which
is self awareness. Yeah and uh, and this is something

(34:47):
we could easily do an entire episode on the mirror tests.
It's pretty interesting. It's it's one thing we should Yeah,
it's one of the more common consciousness tests that we
roll out with other species. And there's certainly some species
that it it works better with. There are other things
like the octopus where uh, they're often difficulties in trying
to make this test applicable to uh, to those two

(35:08):
members of that species. But essentially, when presented with a
mirrors reflection of themselves, how is the creature going to respond?
Is it going to respond as if there's nothing there
at all? Is Are they gonna respond as if, oh,
there's another there's another dog, there's another fish right there
looking at me, I better react accordingly. Or are they
going to recognize that that is themselves? Are they gonna

(35:29):
look in the mirror and see themselves and know it
to be themselves? Which is sort of a holy grail
of self recognition intelligence? Like, what a what a strange
thing to be encouraged by nature? Why would nature select
for the ability to be able to recognize yourself in
a reflective surface. I mean, it just does seem like

(35:50):
a very an inherently, very complex thing for a brain
to do. Yeah, I mean it ties into your ability
to to recognize your own place within a scenario, within
a social structure, and then it also bleeds over into
some other cognitive abilities we're going to discuss in a
bit concerning not only how we perceive ourselves, but how

(36:10):
we perceive others. Now, for those creatures that do react
with hostility when they see their own reflection in a mirror,
they may actually be onto something. Oh yeah, you know,
in fact, you're Heluis Borges rainbow fish story is true. Uh,
if you're not familiar with this one, um, it has
to do with the fact that that everything you see
in the mirror, that the mirror people, the mirror creatures

(36:34):
are merely repeating our actions, and they look like they
look like us, and they go through this silly mimicry
because they lost a war ages ago, and part of
the truth is that they have to just mime everything
we do, but that but one day they will rebel
against us, and the first thing we'll see in the
mirror is the brilliant rainbow fish with you know, colors

(36:54):
that we've never seen in this world. That'll be the
sign that opes it's about it's about to go that's
here in the mirror world is about to invade ours.
So maybe the creatures that that that how and bark
at the mirror, maybe they just know what's up. Well,
I look forward to that day of reckoning. Now, what
animals that we know of other than humans can actually

(37:17):
pass the mirror tests? Which which ones can look in
a mirror and say, hey, that's me all right? Well?
As of aside from humans, you have a certain great apes.
You have apparently a single Asian elephant, their dolphins, orcas, uh,
the Eurasian magpie, um, a few species of ants interestingly enough. Yeah,

(37:40):
and that's something we'll have to explore that in a
in a later episode. But there there's an argument that
ants can pass the mirror tests. I have some questions
about that. Yeah, uh, as well as maccaques have also
passed Yeah, um yeah. And so one example I've seen
it you might be wondering, well, how can you test
to see if an animal recognizes itself in the mirror.

(38:01):
One example that I saw that was actually presented by
Professor Gunterkune was an example where they have a magpie
looking in a mirror and there is a sort of
dot of colored dye on the magpies feathers underneath the
head where it wouldn't be able to see on itself,
but it could see in a mirror. And they try
it with a couple of colors of dies. One is
a black colored dye that just matches the color of

(38:24):
the feathers, so it shouldn't be able to see it
in the mirror. And sure enough, they put a magpie
in a room with a black colored dye under its chin,
and it doesn't seem to do anything unusual. But they
do the same thing with a yellow colored dye and
the magpie starts scratching it itself. It looks in the mirror,
sees that it has a yellow patch underneath its neck,
and it starts scratching at the patch, trying to get

(38:45):
it off. Now, they used the black colored dyes a
you know, control to show that okay, it's not just
feeling something on itself, it's reacting to what it sees
and it sees it in the mirror and says, I
need to get that off me. Yes and forms of
this this uh this inc method are are utilized with
a number of MSR tests, particularly those aimed at at

(39:08):
land based animals and When it comes to other birds,
a handful species show self contingent behaviors in front of mirrors.
Magpies and jack DAWs they show self contingent behaviors. Two
out of five magpies past the mirror tests. New Caledonian crows,
gray parrots, and keys engage in social behavior and mirror
directed uh exploratory behavior, but they lack self directed behavior

(39:32):
in front of mirrors, and New Caledonian crows and gray
parents all parrots also use a mirror UH instrumentally to
localized food, so they can in these tests, they will
They'll put them in a position where they can use
the mirror to better find the food, and then they
will utilize the mirror to do so. Interesting. Okay, so

(39:53):
I got another one for you. How about some bird math.
Oh yes, it's not going to be very complex math,
but it's math that's that impressive for a non human animal.
So lots of animals can do some basic form of
counting objects, and I want to emphasize basic, but far
fewer animals can do more abstract operations with number concepts

(40:13):
like comparing numbers and stuff like that. But back in
the scientists were able to successfully train recis monkeys to
do this test where they look at a group of
objects on a computer screen, and then they'd rank the
groups according to how many objects were on the screen,
and so a group of three objects is greater than

(40:34):
a group of of two. And then after this training,
the monkeys learned how to do this task even when
they were presented with unfamiliar large numbers. So let's say
they've been trained to point out that three is more
than two and two is more than one. You can
suddenly show them new numbers they've never seen before, like
eight and six, and they'll do the test correctly. They'll

(40:56):
point out that eight is more than six. So basically
checking for algory of nick thinking on the part of
the animal, like I sort of deal with with quantities
visual quantities in the difference and and tell yeah, exactly.
And so there was a study in two thousand eleven
published in Science by Damian Scarff, Harlan Hayne, and Michael
Colombo that essentially found that pigeons, pigeons, now that the

(41:18):
classic dummies of our our jokes about bird intelligence did
just as good as reesus monkeys on this test. Uh
that birds do the the operation of magnitude comparison just
as well as primates. And the setup goes like this.
You get the birds and you train them over time
to peck at screens bearing numbers of objects in increasing

(41:39):
order of magnitude. So, for the pigeon sees three screens,
one has one object, one has two objects, one has
three objects, and you train the bird with reinforcement to
peck them at going one to three. Then you introduce
new numbers, just like you did for the Reese's monkeys,
and they can do the same thing. They can look
at six and nine and compare and can pack them

(42:00):
in ascending order. They can extend their math skills to
unfamiliar numbers, and so this leads to two possible conclusions.
The researchers pointed out, I read this in UH they
were speaking to the New York Times. They said, the
birds and the mammals here. Obviously they've both got these
number skills. The monkeys have them, the pigeons have them.
And they either separately evolved the basic number skills, meaning

(42:24):
the convergent evolution two different evolutionary solutions to reach the
same goal in different creatures. Because ultimately both creatures live
in the same world, a world of fixed and movable
objects of varying quantities, and obviously that plays into the
survival advantage to be able to uh, to determine these differences. Yeah,
Or if that's not the case, if it's not convergent evolutions,

(42:46):
separate solutions leading to the same conclusion. They must have
gotten these number skills from their last common ancestor. As
we mentioned earlier, that last common ancestor between mammals and
birds lived three hundred million years ago. So are the
terrible before the dinosaurs? Yeah, three million years ago with
number skills, I mean, before the age of the dinosaurs.

(43:08):
That's very creepy. But I think we've got one that's
even creepier, And that's theory of mind. Yes, And this
is where I definitely think back to standing on one
side of the glass and watching the ground hornbills and
and looking into the eye of the ground hornbills as
they walk up and and we'll often show off like
a dead mouse. They'll have it in their beak and

(43:29):
they'll want to show it to me, or if they
don't have really they seem to be showing it off. Yeah,
they want to show that that dead mouse to me,
And if there's not a mouse, they'll have a wood
chip and they'll pick that up and want to show
it to me. Um, But but to what extent is
that hornbill? Actually? Could it possibly be perceiving me as
an entity that is perceiving it. This is where we

(43:51):
get into theory of mind, and it's a pretty big
deal in human cognition and the human experience overall. Theory
of mind allows us to see the world or too
often quite poorly, through another person's eyes. It allows us
to attribute a mental state to our not only to ourselves,
but to other entities. Yeah, and this is considered a

(44:12):
crucial part of sort of human development, Like when children
at what age to children gain a theory of mind?
When are they not just reacting to stimuli, When are
they not reacting to uh, to a lighting up toy
and a human as if they're the same type of thing,
but recognizing that a human has intentions and starting to

(44:32):
imagine what the other humans intentions are. Yeah, this is
something we easily take for granted. I think it's important
to note that when we say theory of mind it
itself is not a theory. It is saying that our
perceptions of other mind states. All we have is a
theory of that individual's mind Everyone in your life, from
a stranger on the street to you know, a loved

(44:54):
when you see every day, the best you have is
a theory of what their mind state consists off. And uh,
and I think a lot. There's some interesting studies out
there that show that that even people we've we've known
for a long time, our vision of their mind state
isn't is far from perfect. It's just a version of
who they are, and we use those in our our

(45:14):
our calculations as we navigate our world. Yeah, and that
kind of strange. I mean, you think you live in
a world of other people, but really you live in
a world of what you imagine other people are. Like, Yeah,
you kind of live in your own little, you know,
matrix simulation of the world. But uh, but how about animals? Right?
Can animals do this? That's been one of the big questions.

(45:36):
To the degree to which non human animals can possess
theory of mind remains an open question, but some studies
suggest that ravens might have the gift. Yeah. Most recently,
a two thousand sixteen study and this the year published
in Nature Communications, suggests that ravens possess a basic theory
of mind. How on earth would they test for this?
And how can you figure out if a raven knows

(45:59):
the something else has intentions? Well, it comes down to this.
You often hear this phrase thrown around, Right, It's particularly
in uh in you know dramas where there's a lot
of deception. Right, does does he know that? I know
that he knows? You know? It all comes down to
a a complex game of hide and seek among the

(46:20):
ravens where they where they're they're they're trying to hide
and acquire pilferd bits of carrying. Yeah, so they've gorged
themselves on I don't know, like the eyeballs and whatever
they can get from these dead animals. All the best bits,
all the best bits, but there's still some nice nuggets
there that they want to come back with later. So
they tuck these into the throat pouches and they hide

(46:40):
them away. Now, subordinate ravens hold on just just to clarify,
they don't hide them in their throat pouches. They take
them in their throat pouch to hide them somewhere. They
just stick them in the throat, their throat pouch and
then they're gonna want to hide them in some external
place later on, like a dog burying a bone exactly. Yeah,
they want to create a you know, just to high.
They want to find a hiding place for the good

(47:01):
so they can come back. They want to bury that
treasure now. Subordinate Ravens will spy on their superiors to
see where they're hiding. The choice spoils sniveling little because
the Boss Raven got the best parts. But here's the thing.
The Boss Raven didn't become Boss Raven by being a dummy.
The Boss Raven knows that she's being watched, and she'll

(47:23):
often employ various strategies and deceptions in order to throw
off the others. So she she practices deceit and trickery. Right,
So she's doing things like doing a quick burial, like
I gotta bury this fast before anybody notices where I'm
putting the goods, makes sense, or digging behind a visual
barrier so I can't quite see what she's doing, avoiding

(47:45):
the hiding place after burial to avoid drawing attention to it.
All right, So I'm gonna bury it over here, But
I'm gonna stand over here because I don't want you
to think that I'm guarding something precious. And then finally,
this one is really key. She'll pretend to dig a hole,
but keep the loop in her throat pouch until a
better opportunity to hide it presents itself. So I'm digging

(48:06):
a hole, just pretending to bury it, so you'll think
I've buried it here, I'm going to do a little
slide of beak and actually bury it over on this side.
Now this is interesting because you could look at all
this and say, well, I don't know, maybe is I mean,
with a lot of these tests, you could say, is
this just some kind of instinctual behavior manifesting itself in
a very complex way, And so you'd almost have to

(48:28):
introduce unnatural scenarios to testincy is this really? Is this
bird thinking flexibly or is it just carrying out some instincts? Right? Yeah?
Is it just responding to visual stimuli or is this
theory of mind? Well that's what the researchers in this
study set out to discover. So this study involved two
experimental areas, one wall between them with a peopole for

(48:52):
viewing the human researchers who brought them food, and a
small window which could be shut or open to make
the other raven in the experiment visible. So this was
to test how they behaved when they could see their
competitor and when they couldn't, and also how they factored
in this peep hole through which somebody else human might

(49:13):
be viewing them as well. So they taught the birds
to look through the peep hole and spy on the
humans as well. Afterwards, they that the birds indeed hid
their food and acted suspicious even when they had they
had only the peephole to contend with with the window
to the other raven shut off. Wait a minute, so
they couldn't see the raven. They just knew that it

(49:35):
was possible for something to look in at them, right,
So yeah, So basically they're testing, you know, through three
different things. How are they behaving when they know there's
a raven there that could see what they're doing, how
do they behave when there's nothing there that they're aware of,
And how do they behave when there's no visible raven
But there's the possibility that something else, perhaps this human,
is viewing them as well, And they seem to infer

(49:59):
that some one could be watching and acted as if
the possible watching entity might behave like another crow. So
they attributed theory of bird mind to the unseen human.
They thought that human might be coming to steal their
carry in exactly. Yeah, yeah, so they were. They were,
according to the researchers. Here. The argument here is that
they are attributing theory of mind to the human. Right.

(50:21):
I just want to issue a disclaimer to any Corvid's listening.
I don't want to steal your delicious eyeballs. Those eyeball treats.
You earned them, they're all for you. Prove me wrong,
it's probably what they they would say back. Okay, well
that's fascinating. And and if those the interpretation of those
results are indeed correct, that's uh. I don't know that.

(50:42):
That's something else. Yeah, I mean, of course it makes
sense because they ravens from a very early age. They
have to engage in a uh, you know, a fairly
complex um um hierarchical group of friends and frenemies and
different factions. So they're like social birds. Yeah, they're instantly
throw ust into like a mini Game of Thrones scenario,

(51:02):
and they have to be able to survive in that environment. Okay,
well there's another perhaps lighter example, we could throw too,
But that is also still pretty interesting, which is the
fact that it might not be impossible to have a
bird DJ your wedding. Yeah, you could book a DJ
bird brain, or perhaps DJ budgery gar budgery garza, or
the basically the common pet parakeet, a vocal mimicking parrot species,

(51:26):
the one you teach to say bad words. Yeah, yeah,
of course uh. In a two thousand eleven study published
in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers trained eight budgery
guards to perform isochronus that means occurring at the same
time tapping tasks in which they pecked a key to
the rhythm of audio visual metronome style stimuli, so keeping

(51:48):
keeping time, keeping beat exactly and now. This has also
been observed in sea lions, Reese's monkeys, chimpanzees, and Binobo's uh.
In this case, though, the budgery guard as they seemed
inherently inclined to tap it fast tempos which have a
similar time scale to the rhythm of their own natural vocalizations,
and the researchers suggest that the vocal learning might have

(52:10):
contributed to their performance, which resembles that of a human Now.
That makes me think about theories about the emergence of
musical ability and humans and if our musical ability is
inherently tied to language. Yeah. Yeah, There's been all sorts
of interesting studies. I'm particularly thinking about those involving in
Neanderthals and the idea that they might have like sung

(52:32):
instead of spoke. Yeah. Yeah, it's a fascinating material. Have
you ever done an episode on the origins of music before?
I know I have explored it some in past episodes,
but it's one of those where there's always new research
coming out. I would I would love to re explore
it at some point. Yeah, I'd like to do that. Well, anyway,

(52:52):
that's not the end we we should probably pretty much
leave it off there. But that's not the end of
the research into bird cognition. We just have to stop
because there's so much. But there's also been research about
birds observing object permanence, Like to what extent birds can
still remember an object is present even if they can't
see it. You know, for lots of animals, it seems

(53:14):
like all that exists is what's in front of them
at the moment. But can birds remember something's there even
if it's removed from view. Looks like in some cases
they probably can, though I think not all scientists agree
on that. One. Another interesting social result we've come across
is that crows and ravens seem to be able to
recognize when they're being treated unfairly. They can respond to

(53:35):
inequity and the reward of treats and stuff like that. Uh.
And then there there's also been some research into the
metacognition of corvids. Right, Yeah, this is a betacognitions essentially
thoughts about thoughts, thoughts about the limits of thought. Um
and large build crows succeed in retrospective but fail in

(53:57):
perspective meta memory task. They haven't according to some of
the studies we're looking at here. They haven't quite pulled
off like full scale meta cognition, but they have limited
abilities there. Um. And to put this in perspective of
other animals, I've I've read studies where um, where rodents

(54:17):
have have demonstrated possible meta cognition. Okay, well, I think
one of the takeaways from everything we've just been talking
about is that there is just so much research on
the sophisticated cognition of birds that even if some of

(54:38):
this research turns out to be misinterpreted or or refuted
by future studies, there's so much of it that there's
obviously some real phenomenon here. Yeah, so many of these
are things that you see coming online with a young
human child as there, you know, as their brain powers up.
And then you see those same power ups taking place

(54:59):
with the bird brain. And so we should look at
the brain itself, I guess, because this comes back to
the concept of cognition without a cortex. As we mentioned before,
for a long time, neuroscientists thought that sophisticated cognitive powers
only came from a neo cortex, also known as the
neo pallium, which is the most recent addition to the

(55:19):
mammalian brain, the powerhouse of higher human thought. It's, you know,
the part of the mammal brain that gives us our
real intelligent flexibility and ability to adapt to all kinds
of environments and scenarios the topmost ice cream scoop exactly now.
The cerebrum takes up most of the volume of the
brain in both mammals and birds, and in the cerebrum

(55:41):
in both classes mammals and birds can be divided into
two regions. You've got the paliole region up on top
and the sub paliol region and the sub palliole region
that's ancient, that's extremely similar in mammals and birds can
probably be traced back to a common ancestor more than
five million years ago, like five thirty five million years ago.

(56:02):
It's pretty similar between animals as different as and this
is the example Gunter Cune and Bugny argue animals as
different as humans and lamprey's so so this is clearly
this is what some people might call lizard brain kind
of stuff. It's it's deep deep in there. It's one
of the older parts of how you're nervous system works.

(56:23):
But then you've also got the pallium, the upper part
of the brain, and that's the upper surface of the cerebrum.
So it's got the cortex or things that are like
the cortex, the hippocampus, the paliola migdala, the class drum,
and the old factory bulb and in the uh the
paliole brain is where the major differences between mammals and

(56:43):
birds show up. So in mammals, this region is dominated
by what's usually called the neo cortex. So I've read
apparently some the neo nous of the neo cortex has
actually been called into question in recent years. So maybe
instead we should just call it something like the cortex
or the six layered cortex um. But the bird's palio
brain doesn't have this cortex. Instead, it's got these little

(57:06):
groups of things that have been called nuclear aggregations, which
is a good name. And the question is do birds
have the equivalent to a cortex? Do they? Do they
have something that works like a cortex does. And what Gunter,
Cune and Buggy are conclude by looking at all of
this recent research is that it seems to be, Yeah,

(57:26):
the cognitive power of the bird seems to be located
in the A, V and pallium, which does a lot
of the same work as the mammal cortex. And these
are these are similar brain structures, but the big question
is why are they doing similar work? Are they an
example of convergent evolution, like we've talked about where convergent

(57:47):
evolution would be something you know, one example would be
like wings. You've got wings on bees, wings on bats,
wings on birds. They obviously did not get these wings
from a common ancestor that they shared, they separately evolved
similar solutions to hey, I need to fly. Recent findings
say that we probably get some basic homologous structures from

(58:07):
the common ancestor between mammals and birds, but these structures
continued to evolve in parallel, eventually converging on the mind
structures that we see today cognition, intelligence, complex thought, problem solving,
executive function. And uh, one thing that seemed very interesting
to me about this is, to whatever extent this is

(58:30):
an example of convergent evolution, it seems to apply to
the study of machine cognition because when you look about
at like computers and you ask the question can computers
really think? Can a machine really think? Could an artificial
intelligence program really be thinking if it doesn't have a
brain like us? Well, if birds can think without having

(58:54):
brains like us, why not other physical structures that give
rise to information processing. Yeah, It's just gets into the
idea that perhaps consciousness just simply something that emerges from
any significantly significantly complex system of information, right, Yeah, Yeah,
So you kind of can't say that there's a unique

(59:15):
magical architecture in the mammalian brain that creates the phenomenon
of thinking if it looks for all, we can tell
like birds can actually do a lot of the same
stuff that we would think of as thinking, and maybe
given different evolutionary circumstances, they might have been as intelligent
or more intelligent than us. And so if there's nothing

(59:35):
unique about the mammal brain that gives rise to thinking,
why couldn't you know dick Hart's internal protagonist, the one
that says, I think, therefore, I am be any type
of physical architecture that gives rise to information processing, maybe
a swarm intelligence and a swarm of ant like aliens
or or a computer. It it really leads one to

(59:59):
some strange inclusions about what intelligence is and where it
emerges from physical reality. Indeed, indeed, it really it really
forces you to to rethink what we think we know
about about intelligence and thought, Okay, well, I think we
should come back and finish with that question we started
with about the technological civilizations in that alternative reality where

(01:00:23):
the ascendant intelligent life form on Earth is avian rather
than mammalian. If it's not primates, but it's birds that
are the smartest creatures and create the machines and the
buildings and the cities and the social structures and everything
we think of as intelligent civilization. What would that look like?
How would it be different? Well, I instantly when I

(01:00:44):
when I think of sci fi visions, like existing sci
fi visions of of intelligent avian species. Uh, you know,
I instantly think to flash Gordon the Hawkman, particularly Prince
uh Prince Volton played by Brian Blessed in one of
his uh most uh spectacular, one of his loudest roles,
one of many loud roles over the years. You know,

(01:01:06):
they're still basically they're just humans, right, They've got arms. Yeah,
I mean it gets down to the the age old
reality that humans have looked at birds and we've we've
envied them, but only for one thing. We just want
the wings. We don't want the talons, we don't want
the cloaca, we don't want any of the other stuff.
We just want to fly. And so when we think

(01:01:27):
of avian creatures and avian intelligent avian species, we tend
to think of just people with wings, and we want
to have our cake and eat it too. We want wings,
but we don't want to give up the arms. Yeah,
we've got to choose. Yeah, that's one of the things
that I've looked in the pasta with some of these
hype of one plastic surgeon in particular, doctor rosen Um
has argued that there's a way that you could turn

(01:01:48):
the human arm into into a wing. But most people,
really they don't want that. If they want to become
a bird, they want to still have arms. Yeah, they
want to be an angel, not a bird exactly. Yeah,
And most angels are with with arms um in terms
of like actual intelligent um, you know, in more considerate
ideas about what a an avian alien species might consist

(01:02:11):
of or what they might think like um. The best
example I've run across is in the second book of
Richard K. Morrigan's Takeishi Kovacs novels, the most stuff famous
of which is is Altered Carbon, which I understand is
getting picked up by Netflix. The second book, Broken Angels,
it introduces a long extinct or at least absent, elder

(01:02:32):
race referred to as the Martians. But they're only referred
to as the Martians by humans because that's where we
first encounter their ruins on Mars. On Mars. So the species,
in particular their avian they're winged um. They disappeared from
our galaxy at some point in the long past. They
left behind all these advanced artifacts and a few functional items.

(01:02:53):
But Morgan plays with the idea of a technological civilization
that evolved from solitary predatory predatory avian creatures. So in
their maps, the local settlement is always positioned at the
center of the universe. Uh. So they seem to have
existed in their most evolved state in a form of

(01:03:13):
highly advanced and automated fiefdoms controlled by and consisting of
a lone individual. Uh, which is all kind of slightly,
slightly hard to fathom. It's so different from how we
think of civilization and technologically advanced civilizations working. But indeed,
what how would the model differ if the species was
inherently solitary instead of social, I mean, would it even

(01:03:35):
be possible? Uh, it's it runs contrary to our to
our only example of evolved uh technological civilization. Yeah, it's
just another way of highlighting exactly how deep our mammalian
influences run. The fact that we things we think of
as inherent to intelligence or inherent to civilization are really

(01:03:57):
facts about mammals. And you know, you want or how
different things would be if it weren't mammals. Yea, though,
you know, the whole idea about the creature positioning itself
at the center of the universe, I mean we all
do that. It comes back to the whole theory of
mind and how we're just all we all were doing
is engaging with this sort of mental simulation of who
we are, this idea of ourselves that may itself be flawed,

(01:04:20):
and then all these various flawed ideas of what these
other mammals in our lives are thinking. It's a very
sense of imagination from which we conjure up things like
how are the duck? Oh, yes, another great space faring
avian species, now, but how are the duck? He just
had hands, didn't he did he? Yeah? I guess he
was kind of like a cartoon failure of imagination. How
are the duck? Why didn't he have wings instead of

(01:04:41):
arms with fingers? Yeah? You know, they weren't quite it was.
This is not really science fiction, but the Skexies in
the Dark Crystal, I think they had hands too, didn't
they theyd swords at each other? Yeah, they did, but
they were they behaved. I like the way that they
behaved like bickering, you know, vulture creatures. They their their

(01:05:02):
attitude was seemed very avian. Yeah, they were essentially well,
they are a there. Their culture embodies the scavenging impulse. Yeah,
like they're all squabbling over scraps. Yeah. Yeah, and their
their their outfits and their environments are all just kind
of a big piles of junk. Really. I do love
The Dark Crystal. It's it's such a magically non human story.

(01:05:26):
It is, Yeah, just the the entire thing, like all
the creatures, all the plants, it's just a completely alien environment.
And it was made at just the right time. If
you've made it a little earlier, the practical effects wouldn't
have been there to make it look as good as
it as it does. And if you made before c G. Yeah,
if you came a little later, they would have c G.
I the heck out of it. So it was it's

(01:05:47):
a movie, perfect movie that came out around it just
the right time. So I actually got in touch with
owner Gintercune, one of the authors of the Cognition Without
Cortex paper, over email, and we had a brief exchange
and he answered some questions very generously for us, So
This whole interview will be posted on stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com, but we just wanted to talk

(01:06:08):
about a couple of his answers here because I thought
it was interesting. One of the things we asked him
about was the difference between different species of birds in
terms of cognition. Specifically, I said, uh, we're now learning
how intelligent corvids and parrots are, but are the chicken
and the pigeon probably a lot smarter than we thought
as well? I'm just gonna read his answer here. On

(01:06:29):
this particular question, he says, it doesn't make much sense
to talk about birds and mammals in general. It is
much more useful to compare some groups of birds with
some groups of mammals. There's practically no important difference in
any cognitive repertoire between corvids and parrots on one side
and primates on the other side. But obviously it would
be a bit unfair to compare a chicken and a

(01:06:49):
pigeon with an eight. But this is also true for
mice and rats, So, to put it in a bit
unscientific way, chicken and pigeons are possibly comparable in many
aspects with rats. When it comes to cognition. That said,
it is important to state that the cognitive differences between
rats and monkeys on the on the one side, and
pigeons and corvitts on the other side are often overestimated.

(01:07:11):
Careful observations show that also chicken and chickens and pigeons,
as also rats, achieve much higher levels of cognitive operations
than often assumed. I thought that was interesting because it
highlights that there might be just sort of like a
general lack of awareness we have about how smart all
different kinds of species are, not just birds, but that

(01:07:32):
we we under or overestimate the intelligence of animals across
the board. Yeah, we we. It's very difficult, even in
scientific settings to set aside um, you know, our our
human bias on these things. Another one of the questions
he answered was that I specifically asked what he thought
the most impressive display of sophisticated cognition he'd seen in

(01:07:55):
birds was. And so he says, imagine you're sitting in
front of a table full of tasty food, and you're
asked which of the many items on the table is
the most delicious one. That's my situation now, Uh, just
a feast of bird intelligence but he says, if you
force him to give an answer, he says, I'd like
to mention two points. The first is self recognition in

(01:08:17):
the mirror, as shown by magpies. Now, that was one
of the ones we talked about and we found pretty interesting.
But he says this finding possibly implies that magpies know
about themselves, and they shared this kind of knowledge with
chimpanzees and a few other ape species. The second aspect
that I find fascinating is social cognition. We also talked
about this one. He says. Corvids seem to know in

(01:08:40):
a lot of detail what other animals can know and
what they can't know. So this is the theory of
mind we discussed. Uh. He says, they also seem to
have a certain understanding of the intentions of other corvids,
and they possibly are able to at least anticipate how
another bird is feeling in a certain situation. Just a

(01:09:00):
few years ago, nobody would have thought that this was
within the reach of a bird. Now, I want to
stress that we asked a number of other key questions
related to the research. Here. Some of the question we
asked him about some of the questions that arose in
our coverage of the topic. But I do want to
just touch on very briefly the more science fiction oriented
question that we asked him. Um. We asked him about

(01:09:22):
you know, he said, evolution had got a different way.
Could avians rather than primates have become the dominant intelligence
on planet Earth, even developing a technological civilization? What might
that look like? And and I have to give him
credit for taking our bait, you know, they're not not
every scientist out there is willing to play the what
if game um with interviewers. But uh, I thought he

(01:09:42):
was game. I thought he had a very practical answer though.
So he says, in principle, yeah, he thinks in principle
you could. But he says, however, birds have a problem
that all reptiles have. They are unable to construct big brains. Uh.
This could be related to the fact that in reptile brains,
and so also in bird brains, the four brain is
not divided into gray matter and white matter. In mammals,

(01:10:05):
this division is very important, and the mammalian cortex can
grow like a folded carpet theoretically endlessly. In the reptile
slash bird brain, the upper limit seems to be reached
by a little more than a hundred grams. We haven't
understood this point completely yet, but to be as smart
as we humans are, birds possibly would need a couple
of hundred grams. And as long as they're unable to

(01:10:27):
come up with that, we ruled this planet. So it's
just mass. It's yeah, you know, that's all they lack.
But we can still lord it over them. Indeed. So hey,
if you want to check out the rest of this interview,
you can head on over to stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Uh that's where we will have the interview.
If you're checking this out within a week or two
of this episode's publication, it's probably gonna be on the
front page somewhere. But we also really want to thank

(01:10:49):
Dr Gunjakun for getting back to us. His answers were
very interesting and it was very generous of him to
share his time and his thoughts. That's right, And we'll
also include a link to this on the landing page
for this episode. All right, so there you have it,
Avian Intelligence. We would love to hear from our listeners
about this topic. Um, how do you feel about the
mind of a bird? Do you have birds in your life,

(01:11:10):
and if so, how do you objectively and subjectively um
view their intelligence? And if you're a science fiction fan
or a fantasy fan, you have you come across any
models of of of fictional Avian intelligence, particularly Avian intelligence,
uh Ben, you know involves the use of technology is
so share those with us. We would love to hear

(01:11:31):
about them. And if you want to get in touch
with us with feedback about this episode or any other
recent episodes, you can always email us that blow the
mind at how stuff works dot com. Well more on
this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff

(01:11:53):
works dot Com. The list four foot