Bird Brains
So thats how it works
One of my philosophic interests is cognition. How is it possible that meat can think?
I like corvids.
It seems everybody does.
The Mind of the Raven by Bernd Heinrich is about Heinrich's experimental research with ravens in Maine that demonstrated amazing cognitive abilities.
My old friend John was a naturalist and woodsman who would wave in a stylized way at ravens as they flew by.
Once he was doing some work far from home in terms of driving but not far as the crow flies. A raven flew by. John waved. The bird did such a double take that it sort of stumbled in the air.
Lately I've been interacting with the local crows by offering bits of bacon on my windowsill early in the morning.
When I'm working on my computer I'm facing a window that looks out into a grove of trees where the crows hang out. I have a database that lets me easily track timestamped behavior events.
It is way interesting to observe the crows behavior that way.
For instance, there are 3 ways that crows approach the offering.
One way is to swoop in and see me and get startled at the last second then fly off to a nearby branch. I can see that they are upset by the way their feathers get ruffled.
As they calm down they often come back and do a swoop behavior.
That is, they come and snatch the offering without landing and flee.
And often a crow will land on the windowsill, look me in the eye, calmly take the offering and fly away to a branch to eat it.
Point is, if you observe crows in any detail you get the impression that they are pretty smart.
How can they be so smart when they have such tiny brains?
This article talks about recent research about that.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bird-brains-are-far-more-humanlike-than-once-thought/
Two papers published today in Science find birds actually have a brain that is much more similar to our complex primate organ than previously thought. For years it was assumed that the avian brain was limited in function because it lacked a neocortex.
In mammals, the neocortex is the hulking, evolutionarily modern outer layer of the brain that allows for complex cognition and creativity and that makes up most of what, in vertebrates as a whole, is called the pallium.
The new findings show that birds do, in fact, have a brain structure that is comparable to the neocortex despite taking a different shape.
It turns out that at a cellular level, the brain region is laid out much like the mammal cortex, explaining why many birds exhibit advanced behaviors and abilities that have long befuddled scientists.
The new work even suggests that certain birds demonstrate some degree of consciousness.
Its not that the bird equivalent of the mammalian neocortex (called the DVR) is the same as the neocortex
but rather that the whole of the pallium in mammals and in birds has similar developmental origins and connectivity, and therefore [the pallia of both classes] should be considered equivalent structures
Other research indicates that crows may have at least a rudimentary form of sensory consciousness.
The other new paper, by a group at the University of Tubingen in Germany, lends still more insight into the avian brain, suggesting that birds have some ability for sensory consciousness - subjective experiences in which they recall sensory experiences. Consciousness has long been thought to be localized in the cerebral cortex of smart primates - namely, chimps, bonobos and us humans. Yet crows appear to have at least a rudimentary form of sensory consciousness.
Other work sheds light on how this is possible in such a small brain.
Work by Herculano-Houzel demonstrates that the brains of corvids - members of a family of so-called "smart birds" such as crows, ravens and magpies - are very densely populated with interconnected neurons. . . . it all comes together very nicely, she says, pointing out that the corvid pallium holds about as many neurons as you'd find in primates with a much larger brain.
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.