Newly Discovered Brain Structure May Grant Birds Impressive Intelligence

[Judi Lynn]

.By Ross Pomeroy - RCP Staff
September 25, 2020



AP Photo/dpa, Lukas Schulze

Birds are capable of some extraordinary cognitive feats. New Caledonian crows can make and use tools. Grey parrots can learn various human words and complete certain tests of intelligence at the level of four to six-year-old human children. Pigeons can remember large numbers of images for several years. But how birds accomplish these tasks despite having brains the size of walnuts has long eluded our own comprehension.

Now, in two tandem studies, researchers in Germany have imaged a structure in the avian brain that might just endow birds with their impressive abilities, and maybe even grant them rudimentary consciousness.

In the first study, scientists used 3D-Polarized Light Imaging, a rising technique that came to prominence in the past decade or so, to map the nerve fibers of barn owls' and pigeons' forebrains, specifically the pallium, layers of grey and white matter that cover the upper surface.

They found that the structure and circuitry of both bird species' pallia are strikingly similar to the pallia of mice, monkeys, and humans.

"If the bird pallium as a whole is organized just like the mammalian pallium, then it follows that the part of the bird pallium that is demonstrably functionally connected like the mammalian prefrontal pallium should also function like it," Vanderbilt neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel wrote of the studies.

More:
https://www.realclearscience.com/quick_and_clear_science/2020/09/25/newly_discovered_brain_structure_may_grant_birds_impressive_intelligence.html

[Mister Ed]

1. So "bird brain" is not the insult we've long thought. n/t

[mopinko]

2. sorta like eating like a bird

means eating 3 times your body weight a day.