Should 'bird brain' be a compliment? Here's how crows think fast
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New research in the journal Science finds that crows turn visual information into decisions twice as fast as humans and primates. They also process information is quite similarly to humans.
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It might be time to rethink the phrase birdbrain. New research suggests that crows actually make good decisions twice as fast as humans. Here's NPR's Pien Huang with how they do it.
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PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: A crow's brain is the size of a walnut, which isn't very big. But Andreas Nieder, a comparative neuroscientist at the University of Tubingen in Germany, says there's a lot in there.
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ANDREAS NIEDER: For a long time, birds have been considered to be dumb creatures, which is totally wrong.
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HUANG: Nieder says birds are really smart, especially crows.
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HUANG: Crows make tools. They hold funerals, and they can remember human faces for years. In his research, Nieder trains carrion crows to do complex tasks.
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NIEDER: So in our case, we placed the crows in front of a touch-sensitive computer monitor, and the crows performed a so-called random dot motion discrimination task.
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HUANG: It's a classic test that measures decision-making speed done by humans and monkeys. Here, it was done by two crows. A bunch of dots show up on the screen, and some of them start to move in a clear direction.
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NIEDER: The crows were watching these movies and then indicated whether this was a left or rightward movement by pecking at a target.
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HUANG: Those that got it right were rewarded with a juicy mealworm, he says. On average, the crows made their decisions in a fifth of a second, about twice as quickly as humans and primates.
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NIEDER: It's really amazingly fast, and this was self-pacedly (ph), so chances are they can even be a little quicker if it would force them.
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HUANG: And their decisions were accurate. The study is published in the journal Science.
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HUANG: Michael Colombo is a neuroscientist who studies pigeons at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He's not involved in the study. From a learning perspective, he says, he can train pigeons to do everything monkeys can do.
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MICHAEL COLOMBO: And that's a pigeon. When you start to get into things like corvids - crows, rooks, ravens - you know, they're considered, nowadays, feathered apes.
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HUANG: Feathered apes because of their high intelligence. While human brains have six distinct layers with many folds, bird brains are organized as clusters. But Colombo says if you look at how those neurons connect in bird brains, it's remarkably similar to humans.
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COLOMBO: It's not about the architecture. It's the circuitry that matters, and it's the same circuitry. Even though the architecture is different, it's the same circuitry.
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HUANG: That means birds can learn, adapt and plan much like humans do. Nieder, who conducted the research, says there may even be advantages to the crow's walnut-sized brain. Since signals don't travel far, information gets processed very quickly.
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NIEDER: Birds are really fascinating creatures, and you see, in many instances, that evolution really pushed them to the limit.
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HUANG: So the next time you see crows, be kind to them, Nieder says. Otherwise...
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NIEDER: You will notice if you do them any wrong, they will remember your face immediately, and you will have a hard time for the weeks to follow.
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HUANG: So a smart human would show birds some respect.
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