The Unsettling Depths of 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 and Joe as they explore the avian mind.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stop
Work dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow 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 durance to the pats. Let's do it, okay.

(00:23):
So I want to ask you to think about the
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 civilization. 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

(00:44):
that the apes we call our cousins. They're all things
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. Were they for process and carcasses,
where they for throwing it prey or some combination, you know,
where they just merely useless status items. But they were

(01:07):
these chipped stone tools used in the hand. And then
of course we had handheld and thrown weapons, handheld tools
for processing the carcasses 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

(01:29):
shape of the human hand. Everything was based on the
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

(01:51):
age artists would make patterns and cave walls and what
used to be soft cave walls by dragging their fingers
through the soft surfaces which lay or 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.

(02:13):
And of course what do you do with those holes?
You cover 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.

(02:39):
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 by
peedle 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.

(02:59):
But 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 managed to ascend that
staircase we've mentioned earlier. What kind of the tools would
they have used? How would they have used them? Yeah,
and that's stairs, So their spiral staircase might not have
had hands. What if there was an advanced technological species

(03:20):
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

(03:40):
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 a slunch break and feed the monkeys some some breadcrumbs,

(04:03):
or feed on the monkeys. Could be because yeah, because
this is it's especially interesting when you when you when
you when you look back, say about fifty million years
uh to the to the early EO 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

(04:24):
flightless terror birds stalking the land terror birds, terrib birds, 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

(04:44):
but as for just birds in general, you know, why
not why not the birds? Because birds are builders, They
build nests, they put them together, their tool users, as
will 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 of

(05:08):
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 being

(05:31):
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 alternate universe.

(05:54):
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 talking about this earlier.

(06:15):
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. And this
paper was called Cognition Without Cortex, and it was a

(06:38):
review of recent findings on avian cognition and neuro 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 how a
bird's brain works and how that compares to the mammalian brain.

(07:00):
And and so this paper was written by owner Gunterkun
and Thomas Bugnier, and it was in Trends and Cognitive Sciences,
published on March on. Well you know this, Uh, this
raises the question of Joe, what is your attitude towards birds?
What is your experience with the perception of bird intelligence? Well,

(07:20):
I know exactly what it is, because I've always thought
that birds looked kind of dumb, 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

(07:40):
heard this before, 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

(08:01):
is just overwhelming. You have 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 back at
you is just amazing. By the way, it's very easy
to hypnotize the chicken. They're very prone to hypnosis, and

(08:21):
in one or two films I've actually shown that. Okay,
so he's talking about chickens here, 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,

(08:44):
that's that's true. There are there are one subspecies there also,
we should point out domesticated and 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

(09:07):
about chickens. Maybe chickens are a lot smarter than we
give them credit for. But anyway, 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

(09:29):
that she grew up around dogs. She grew up around horses,
and she says that those animals 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.

(09:51):
And certainly the bird I can just seem like a
glassy um, you know, a cavern of nothingness. I think
of what Quint says in Jaws, the shark side. It's
like a doll's eyes. Yeah, yeah, very much. Though you
get that kind of glassy dolls, I uh impression from them.
But you know, I go to the zoo a lot

(10:11):
with my my son, and there are a lot of
birds there, and some of them, in particular, like the
ground hornbill that they have there. I'm just always startled
by how intelligent they seem to be, and that I am.
I am observing them, but they seem to be observing
me almost on equal footing. So in in in that area,
I have to disagree with the perceived stupidity of the bird.

(10:35):
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 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

(10:55):
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 and birds
is ancient. There are last common ancestor with birds is
believed to exist. It to have existed about three hundred

(11:16):
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 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

(11:38):
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 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 where does human intelligence come from? What?

(12:01):
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
conscious control of thought, like using working memory and constituting
the planning and execution of actions. That that that's cortex stuff.

(12:22):
And so the old line of the of the neuroscientist
or the nero 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
just don't have much cognition going on. I watched a
presentation by Owner Gunderkun, and he called attention to the
work of the German neuro anatomist Ludwig Eddinger who lived

(12:46):
eighteen fifty five to nineteen eighteen, and he said that
Eddinger was the leading comparative neuro anatomist of his time.
UH and his project was sort of to understand the
evolution of the brain invertebrates. Vertebrates all creatures to have
a backbone. UM, so birds and mammals both vertebrates. Where
where do the differences in brain evolution come along? And

(13:07):
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 you
had amphibians and and so they've got a part of
the basal ganglia that's sort of a little bit extending
what the brains are capable of. And then you've got

(13:27):
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 of
developed the basal ganglia improve the skills more. And then
finally with mammals, you get the cerebral cortex, which gives

(13:47):
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 Edinger, you should
look at a monkey and you should see cognition. 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

(14:11):
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 one hand,
this gets into the whole idea of the sort of
the ice cream scoop model of of neurophysiology, right, that

(14:33):
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 own
uh uh, you know, anthropomorphic bias in terms of what

(14:53):
constitutes intelligence. Yeah, And of course We've conducted plenty of
experiments on top of that to really get down for
its to take apart intelligence, even human intelligence divided into
components that can then be tested for in other species. Yeah,
and I think what we're learning in recent years, over
many experiments is not just like one experiment has changed

(15:15):
the way we're thinking about this. There there are so
many more experiments than we could even talk about in
this episode and out on many of these areas. Right,
But there's so much new research showing that bird intelligence,
bird cognition seems to go far beyond what was previously assumed.
That this old theory of the determination of cognition by

(15:36):
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 long associated birds like like corvids,
which include crows with higher brain function. I know we

(15:57):
came across this, uh this great north Smith right, Oh yeah,
Hohogan and moon in those are Odin's ravens, Yeah, companions.
He also had some of some lupine companions Gary and
freki Um. But the interesting thing about to sound like
fraggle names. They do kind of the interesting thing about
Whogan and Moon, and I also think of and maybe

(16:17):
they were, but Whogan and moon and also sound like
they should be 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. They are his thoughts and memories, respectively.

(16:39):
And so some argue that Moonen is actually desire rather
than memory. But essentially the idea, here's that Hohoganum who
can represents the thoughts of Odin Moon and represents the memories. Man,
that's too cool, because they're they're embodied cognition, right yeah, yeah,
And uh, here's a little little bit of old Norse,
uh that has been a translated that tells you a

(17:01):
little bit about Hoogan and Moon. And this is a
parent This is supposed to be from Odin himself, who
can and moon and fly every day over the world.
I worry for Hohogan 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, that these are just they're they're birds

(17:24):
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
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 of battle, like the wolf which we mentioned earlier,

(17:44):
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,

(18:04):
I 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 iberials right, well,
I think it's time to actually look at some of

(18:26):
these studies of of avian cognition, of exactly what bird
brains are capable of in practice, and the to summarize
recent discoveries. We'll get into the details in a moment,
but basically what we have found, what scientists have found
is that some birds like parrots uh, and that that
would mean birds of the order Sa Taciforms that include

(18:48):
true parrots, cockatoos, and New Zealand parrots uh. And then
also Corvid's which are birds of the family corvid A,
and that would include crows, ravens, rooks, magpies, cuffs, jay's,
and nutcrackers. These bird groups display cognition on par with primates,
which means primates of course being the order containing monkeys

(19:11):
and apes like us, so on par with primates 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

(19:31):
that you take for granted. 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
that's how 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

(19:54):
to so much of human experience, you know, our ability
to or our 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

(20:19):
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, 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.
It's you're gonna get into projection concerning the animals that

(20:40):
we think we we understand the most and that 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.

(21:02):
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

(21:25):
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

(21:45):
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 from Karina Logan
of the Universe of Cambridge and Sean O'Donnell of the
University of Washington, and they argue that this mental time

(22:06):
travel is demonstrated in certain tropical birds who engage in
bivouac that's temporary ant 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 activity exactly,

(22:27):
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 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 time travel and birds. Uh,

(22:48):
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. That's right. There are a

(23:09):
number of examples of tool use and birds, some more
complex than others. For instance, Egyptian vultures use stones as
tools to bust open Ostrojaggs's great. Yeah. There are also
that you have, like the brush turkey builds. This is
rather simple, builds a gigantic mount of soil and decaying
vegetation to lay their eggs in. But then they'll kick

(23:30):
the garbage and 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 I said, this is very basic tool use,
Like but yeah, kicking rubbish, you're still making a tool
out of something in your environment trash soccer. Yeah. Now,

(23:53):
one of the more elaborate examples here, you have the
woodpecker finch, which is one of Darwin's finches from the
Lafcas 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 as a woodpecker, but it hasn't involved the necessary

(24:13):
long tongue to scoop them out. So it goes it
breaks off something sharp to get in there, and it
may even trimm 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.
But if you've ever used part of a crab claw

(24:35):
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, but it goes
beyond that, right because they are actually trimming the twig,
these finches, these finches, they're trimming the twig. They're they're
manufacturing a tool, so they're they're going from what's called
a nature fact to an artifact. And nature fact is

(24:58):
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 it wants to
process the carcass to get some meat off of it,

(25:19):
it could just pick up a kind of flat rock
and use that for help. That would be a nature 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 used their four levels of artifact fact tool use.
There's reduction that's where you reduce the mass of functional

(25:39):
of the functional form, so you're chewing the stick downs
within the bark, et cetera. That's what we just talked.
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 hafted axe. Uh. Number three is replication, that's conjunction,
but with two or more from similar units required, So
a double long fishing spear trident. Yeah. And number four

(26:03):
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 tool use you see in

(26:23):
birds is really the word I would use as 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, but also just so they can

(26:44):
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's messed up. Now,
crow is in ravens. I'm sorry. Let let me let
me take the judgment off of that. That's nature. Yes,

(27:05):
that's nature. Um and and yes, so there's nothing wrong
with LETI face crows and ravens. Uh. This is where
we see some some wonderful tool uses where well, crows
have demonstrated 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 make another tool. Now

(27:28):
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 the edge of a glass,

(27:48):
then use 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. That 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 just that failing. Yeah. I mean,

(28:10):
it's the kind kind of steps that you can imagine
just an individual on the street going through if they
dropped their keys down a sewer grate and I see them,
They're like, how am I gonna get that back? All right? Well,
what's around me? Is there a code 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

(28:30):
do involve very strange ideas 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 Uh so You've got a tube and
it's got some water in it, and floating on the

(28:52):
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,

(29:14):
of course of asobs fable of the crow in the picture,
like 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. Yea, 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

(29:36):
of the New Caledonian crow, essentially saying it evolved for
tool use, right, Yeah, I should mention that they that
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 use
shape analysis and h CT scanning to compare the shape

(29:57):
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.

(30:19):
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?

(30:40):
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 thing about the

(31:00):
like 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 formata? It's so
different than what we have to work with in terms
of thinking about the human hand and tool us as
humans appreciate it. There's another thing that some studies have

(31:21):
found birds can do that even some humans struggle with,
and that's a delay of gratification. So I'm sure you've
seen these studies before. Like a kid is given the
opportunity to have they put a marshmallow in the marshmallow
test and say, if you can resist eating this marshmallow
for five minutes, you'll get two marshmallows. You know, so

(31:44):
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 function higher cognitive functioning animals like primates

(32:08):
and in some cases like birds. Uh So, there was
one paper I came across that talked about how goffin
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

(32:30):
corvids 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.

(32:52):
Anytime I think about this scenario or any of these
scenarios involving crows eating, I just think of them like
picking at corpses, 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

(33:14):
of you'll get two marshmallows, you'll get I don't know
what's better than a marshmallow human eyeball, human eyeball. I
just assume that is the ultimate treat, 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. It's time

(33:35):
to hold the mirror up to avian cognition because we're
gonna talk a little bit about mirror self recognition tests
n 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,

(33:55):
and uh, and this is something we could easily do
an entire episode on the mirror tests. It's pretty interesting.
It's it's one of 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

(34:17):
to those two 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.

(34:38):
Are they gonna 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

(34:58):
does seem like 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,

(35:19):
but how we perceive others. Now, for those creatures that
do react with hostility when they see their own reflection
in the mirror, they may actually be onto something. Oh yeah,
if in fact you're Haluis Borges rainbow fish story is true. Uh,
if you're not familiar with this one, it has to
do with the fact that that everything you see in
the mirror, that the mirror people, the mirror creatures are

(35:43):
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 that we've

(36:04):
never seen in this world. That'll be the sign that
opes it's about it's about to go nuts here and
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 pass the mirror tests?

(36:27):
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, and that's

(36:49):
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 and as well as mc cash 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

(37:10):
itself in the mirror. 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.

(37:30):
One is a black colored dye that just matches the
color of 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

(37:51):
underneath its neck, and it starts scratching at the patch
trying to get it off. Now, they used the black
colored dyes that 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.
In forms of this this uh, this ain't method are

(38:12):
are utilized with a number of MSR tests, particularly those
aimed at at 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

(38:34):
in social behavior and mirror directed uh exploratory behavior, but
they lack self directed behavior in front of mirrors. And
New Caledonian crows and gray parents all parents 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

(38:57):
the food, and then they will utilize the mirror to
do huh interesting. Okay, so I got another one for you.
How about some bird math it's not going to be
very complex math, but it's math that's that's 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

(39:21):
operations with number concepts, like comparing numbers and stuff like that.
But back in the scientists were able to successfully train
reciss 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

(39:43):
is greater than 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.

(40:05):
They'll point out that eight is more than six. So
basically checking for algorithmic thinking on the part of the animal,
like can I sort of deal with with quantities visual
quantities into 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 classic

(40:28):
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 order
of magnitude. So for the pigeon sees three screens, one

(40:51):
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 reciss monkeys, and they
can do the same thing. They can look at six
and nine and and compact them in ascending order. They
can extend their math skills to unfamiliar numbers. And so

(41:15):
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 the convergent evolution, two different evolutionary

(41:36):
solutions to reach the same goal in different creatures, because
ultimately both creatures live in the same world, a world
of fixed, immovable 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, separate solutions leading to the

(41:56):
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 or the terrible before the dinosaurs. Yeah, three
million years ago with number skills, I mean, before the
age of the dinosaurs. That's very creepy. But I think

(42:21):
we've got one that's even creepier, and that's theory of mine. 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 they'll want to show it to me. Or
if they don't have really they seem to be showing

(42:43):
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 get into theory of mind, and it's
a pretty big deal in human cognition and the human

(43:05):
experience overall. Theory of mind allows us to see the world,
or attempt to, 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 crucial part of sort of human development,
Like when children at what age do children gain a

(43:27):
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 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

(43:49):
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. Every one in
your life, from a stranger on the street to you know,
loved when you see every day, the best you have
is a theory of what their mind state consists of.

(44:09):
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 have to use
those in our our 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

(44:31):
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 but how about animals? Right?
Can animals do this? That's been one of the big questions.
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

(44:55):
a two thousand sixteen study and this the year published
in Nature Communications suggest 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
that something else has intentions? Well, it comes down to this.
You often hear this phrase thrown around, Right, It's particularly

(45:17):
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 complex game of hide and seek among the ravens,
where they that where they're they're they're trying to hide
and acquire pilfer bits of carrying. Yeah, so they gorge
themselves on I don't know, like the eyeballs and whatever

(45:40):
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
them away. Now, subordinate ravens wait, 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,

(46:00):
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
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

(46:23):
Raven got the best parts. But then 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
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,

(46:44):
I gotta bury this fast before anybody notices where I'm
putting the goods or digging behind a visual barrier so
you can't quite see what she's doing, avoiding the hiding
place after burial to avoid drawing attention to it. Alright,
so I'm gonna bury it over here, but I'm to
stand over here because I don't want you to think
that I'm guarding something precious. And then finally, this one

(47:05):
is really key. She'll pretend to dig a hole, but
keep the loot in her throat pouch until a better
opportunity to hide it presents itself. So I'm digging a
hole just pretending to bury it so you'll think I
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

(47:25):
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
introduce unnatural scenarios to test and sy is this really?
Is this bird thinking flexibly or is it just carrying
out some instincts, right, Yeah, Is it just responding to

(47:48):
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 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

(48:12):
when they could see their competitor and when they couldn't,
and also how they factored in this peopole through which
somebody else human might 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

(48:34):
when they had they had only the peep hole 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 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

(48:56):
there that they're aware of? And how do they behave
when there's no sable raven? But there's the possibility that
something else, perhaps this human, is viewing them as well,
and they seem to infer that someone could be watching
and acted as if the possible watching entity might behave
like another crow. So they attributed theory of bird mind

(49:17):
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. 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

(49:38):
for you. Prove me wrong. It's probably what they would
say that. 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 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 u

(49:59):
you know, a fairly complex um um hierarchical group of
friends and frenemies and different factions. So they're like special birds. Yeah,
they're instantly thrust into like a mini Game of Thrones scenario,
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

(50:20):
that it might not be impossible to have a bird
DJ your wedding. Yeah, you could book DJ bird Brain,
or perhaps DJ budgery guard buddery garza or the basically
the common pet parakeet, a vocal mimicking parrot species, the
one you teach to say bad words. Yeah, yeah, of course. Uh.
In a two thousand eleven study published in Scientific Reports,

(50:42):
a team of researchers trained eight budgery guards to perform
isochronus that means occurring at the same time tapping tasks
in which they picked a key to the rhythm of
audio visual metronome style stimuli, so keeping 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,

(51:07):
though the Budgerty guards, 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 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,

(51:29):
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 instead of spoke. Yeah, it's a
fascinating material. Have you ever done an episode on the
origins of music before? I know I have explored it

(51:53):
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
to do that. Well, anyway, that's not the end. 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

(52:17):
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 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

(52:37):
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 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 better cognition is essentially thoughts about thoughts,

(52:58):
thoughts about the limits of thought um and large build
crows succeed in retrospective but fail in perspective meta memory task,
So 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

(53:21):
And to put this in perspective of other animals. I've
I've read studies where um, where rodents 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 this research turns

(53:42):
out to be misinterpreted or or refuted by future studies,
there's so much of it that there's obviously some real
phenomenon here. Yea. 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 with the bird brain.

(54:03):
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 mammalian brain, the powerhouse

(54:24):
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 in both classes

(54:46):
mammals and birds can be divided into two regions. You've
got the paliole region up on top and the sub
paliole region and the sub paliole region that's ancient. That's
extremely similar in mammals and birds can probably be trace
back to a common ancestor more than five million years ago,
like five thirty five million years ago. It's pretty similar

(55:06):
between animals as different as and this is the example
gunter Cune and buggy or give 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 your nervous system works. But then
you've also got the pallium, the upper part of the brain,

(55:29):
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 paliol amygdala, the claws drum, and the
old factory bulb. And in the uh the paliole brain
is where the major differences between mammals and birds show up.
So in mammals this region is dominated by what's usually

(55:51):
called the neocortex that 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 groups of things that have been
called nuclear aggregations, which is a good name. And the

(56:14):
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, the cognitive power of the
bird seems to be located in the A, V and pallium,

(56:34):
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 evolution would be something you know, one
example would be like wings. You've got wings on bees,

(56:54):
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 the common ancestor between mammals and birds, but
these structures continued to evolve in parallel, eventually converging on

(57:19):
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 an example of convergent evolution, it seems to
apply to the study of machine cognition because when you

(57:40):
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 brains like us, why not other physical structure
years that give rise to information processing. Yeah, this just

(58:02):
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
magical architecture in the mammalian brain that creates the phenomenon
of thinking. If it looks for all, we can tell

(58:25):
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
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 my I am be any

(58:49):
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 some strange conclusions about what intelligence is and where
it emerges from physical reality. Indeed, indeed, it really it

(59:10):
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 the ascendant intelligent life form on Earth is avian
rather than mammalian. If it's not primates, but it's birds

(59:32):
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 when I think of sci Fi visions, like
existing sci Fi visions of of intelligent avian species. Uh,

(59:54):
you know, I instantly think to Flash Gordon the Hawkman,
particularly Prince uh Principle Alton played by Brian Blessed and
one of his uh most uh spectacular, one of his
loudest roles, one of many loud roles over the years.
You know, 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

(01:00:18):
and we've we've envied them, but only for one thing.
We just want the wings. We don't want the talions,
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 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

(01:00:40):
the arms. Yeah, We've got to choose. Yeah, that's one
of the things that I've looked in the past with
some of these high one plastic surgeon in particular, doctor
rosen Um, has argued that there's a way that you
could turn 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,

(01:01:02):
And most angels are depicted 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
consistent or what they might think like um. The best
example I've run across is in the second book of
Richard K. Morrigan's Takishi Kovacs novels, the most stuff famous

(01:01:24):
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
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, mean on Mars. So

(01:01:45):
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. But Morgan plays with the idea of a
technological civilization that evolved from solitary predatory predatory at avian creatures.
So in their maps, the local settlement is always positioned

(01:02:08):
at the center of the universe. Uh. So they seem
to have existed in their most evolved state in a
form of highly advanced and automated fiefdoms controlled by and
consisting of a lone individual Um. 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.

(01:02:31):
But indeed, what how would the model differ if the
species was inherently solitary instead of social, I mean, would
it even 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

(01:02:51):
mammalian influences run, the fact that we things we think
of as inherent to intelligence or inherent to civilization are
really facts about mammals. And you know, you wonder how
different things would be if it weren't mammals 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

(01:03:13):
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, 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,

(01:03:36):
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 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 theyre swords
at each other, Yeah they did, but they were they

(01:03:58):
behaved the way that they behaved like bickering movie vulture creatures.
They their their attitude was seemed very avian. Yeah, they
were essentially, well, they are a their their culture embodies
the scavenging impulse, like they're all squabbling over scraps. Yeah. Yeah,
and their their their outfits and their environments are all

(01:04:20):
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. It is, Yeah, for 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,

(01:04:40):
the practical effects wouldn't have been there to make it
look as good as it as it does. And if
it came 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 a movie, a
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,

(01:05:01):
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 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

(01:05:24):
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 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

(01:05:46):
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 pigeon with an eight, but this
is also true for mice and rats. So to put
it in a bit unscientific way, chicken and pigeon are
possibly comparable in many aspects with rats when it comes
to cognition. That said, it is important to state that

(01:06:06):
the cognitive differences between rats and monkeys on the on
the one side, and pigeons and corvettes on the other
side are often overestimated. 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

(01:06:26):
sort of like a general lack of awareness we have
about how smart all different kinds of species are, not
just birds, but that 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

(01:06:49):
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 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

(01:07:14):
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 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.

(01:07:35):
The second aspect that I find fascinating is social cognition.
We also talked about this one. He says. Corvids seem
to know in 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 corvid's, and they possibly are able to at

(01:07:57):
least anticipate how another bird is feeling in a certain situation.
Just a 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

(01:08:18):
want to just touch on very briefly the more science
fiction oriented question that we asked him. UM. We asked
him about. You know, he said, revolution has got a
different way. Could avians rather than primates have become the
dominant intelligence on planet or even developing a technological civilization?
What might that look like? And I have to give
him credit for taking our bait, you know, they're not

(01:08:39):
not every scientist out there is willing to play the
what if game um with interviewers. But uh, I thought
he 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

(01:09:00):
fact that in reptile brains and so also in bird
brains the fore brain is not divided into gray matter
and white matter. In mammals, 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,

(01:09:23):
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 come up with that, we
rule 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 bow your mind dot com. Uh
that's where we will have the interview. If you're checking

(01:09:45):
this out within a week or two of this episode's publication,
it is probably gonna be on the front page somewhere.
We also really want to thank 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 to include a link
to this on the landing page for this episode. All right,
so there you have it. Avian intelligence. We would love

(01:10:06):
to hear from our listeners about this topic. Um, how
do you feel about the mind of bird? Do you
have birds in your life? 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 a fictional avian intelligence,

(01:10:27):
particularly avian intelligence? Uh, then you know involves the use
of technology. If so, share those with us. We would
love to hear 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 on
us that blow the mind at how stuffords dot com

(01:10:53):
well more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com? I think the bigot