I know more than one person who believe that certain birds, especially crows, ravens, and cardinals, are reincarnated loved ones bringing a message.

I don't share this belief, but the more we find out about avian intelligence, the less surprised we should be that people actually think this.

Given the tiny size of avian brains compare to mammals, particulary humans, it's hard to ascribe a lot of intelligence to them. But for what they can do, they seem quite well optimized.

And that’s why Elephants are generally considered more intelligent than humans!

Brain size is not a decisive factor in estimating intelligence and corvid brains pack twice the neurons per volume compared to humans. The factor is: effective "Information Processing Capacity" (IPC), which is high for body size and rivals great apes on specific executive tasks.

Extreme miniaturization eliminates travel distance, giving near-zero latency and high metabolic efficiency despite 1/5th the neurons of a chimp.

Bird brains are wired differently, neuron density is higher... so size really doesn't matter.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bird-brains-have-...

I'm not sure why you get downvoted for pointing out that some people have a belief that is not shared by most other people.

Seems that some posters would rather shoot the messenger that delivers information that they don't agree with.

From interacting with domestic and wild animals for most of my life I figured out a long time ago that they understand their own world and their place in it way better than many of us understand the world we have created for ourselves.

The title doesn't make sense because "bridbrain" doesn't imply slow decision making.

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Those birds are geniuses, compared to chickens.

Do they do that slowly or quickly?

My chickens do what passes for thinking quickly. Not that it passes well.

As a native speaker, "birdbrain" means stupid.

The term implies something that feels like "dodo" or imbecile.

Corvids and parrots and raptors are remarkably smart, yet not every bird species is. Some are incredibly stupid.

Just think of the "Always Sunny" meme where they call Dee a "bird" all the time. It's meant to mean stupid, amongst other things.

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Sure, and you can reach a stupid decision quickly. "Birdbrain" has never had a connotation of being slow to react.

Some sayings are wrong or half-truth but they stick anyway e.g. "blind as a bat".

The chicken with its head cut off saying extends beyond the south. I grew up hearing it in the Midwest. Since chickens do run around when their heads are cut off, I think anywhere with chickens would end up with this phrase.

The Always Sunny thing is more about her looks. When they call her dumb, they tend to just call her dumb/stupid/etc.

The chicken tale predates discovey of the new continent.

You will find middle age tales with similar tales.

Birdbrain can also mean "flighty"; which corresponds to fast (and wrong) decision making.

Yeah I can think of plenty of impulsive and dumb things to do without much thought.

I think you're basically right. I might phrase it differently: the connotation of "birdbrain" to negative intelligence isn't disproven by noting quick read and react capabilities to certain problems, as intelligence is about more than that.

Some birds have impressive specializations, and corvids clearly punch above their brain mass weight due to impressive efficiencies with their brain architecture, but I think the framing of the article is more wrong than right to frame it around speedy information processing of particular problems.

They have to be faster than us. They casually fly at 40mph.

From an engineering point of view their control loop must be much faster. Things that fly need much tighter loops than we do that lumber about on the ground.

Watch a bird come in fast and then land on a narrow twig.

Bird neurons are roughly half the length of mammal neurons. This means you can pack in around 8x more neurons in a given volume.

Yeah, you can just (try to) watch them move their heads around looking at things. They move faster than the human eye.

It's faster probably because their neural network is less deep :)

Humans think fast and slow, but birds only think fast.

Yeah, well... My SHARP pocket calculator turns on faster than my PC does.

Some of the traditional folk tale stereotypes seem to be correlated quite well to what we now know about bird cognition.

Hens/chickens are usually synonymous with "not very bright". Crows and ravens are usually depicted as smart and cunning.

Chickens actually have a very advanced social intelligence though

Ah!, thanks! [lightbulb]

Went to find something to read on the matter. This paper is fun!: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-016-1064-4

"eat like a bird" is also a misnomer. birds are so misunderstood

Intelligence has evolved on Earth at least three times - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. All the mammals have roughly the same brain architecture. But the corvids are not on the same evolutionary branch, and have a different neuron design and a different brain architecture. "Such behavioral flexibility might seem unexpected because a layered cerebral cortex, the highest integration center in the mammalian brain, is not existant in birds."[1] So there's more than one way to do intelligence. Useful to know for AI purposes.

Octopuses have a much more distributed system than mammals, suggesting a quite different approach is possible.

[1] https://niederlab.org/Nieder%20(2017)%20COBS.pdf

Adrian Tchaikovsky explores each of these kinds of intelligence across his sci-fi Children of Time trilogy.

Spiders?

Are written like mammals in this book, just with a different way of comminucating.

Tiger shrimp are also in the picture eventually.

Cato is actually more of a mantis shrimp.

Yes, and the third book, Children of a Memory, which features the corvids, is particularly interesting in the age of AI and questioning what intelligence really is.

like Siglip, Dino and LFM :D

Can we count mammals and corvids separately if their common ancestor was already set on the path to intelligence? The amazing book Other Minds by Peter Godfrey Smith hinges it's argument on minds evolving twice, on the fact that the common ancestor of humans and octopi was probably a simple worm-like creature that had little or nothing in the way of a brain or consciousness.

I have to imagine that corvids and mammals had a common ancestor with more working brain structure. Though maybe you can make the case that "intelligence" showing up later on isn't the same thing as simply having a brain.

But it's much more impressive to me that there's convergent evolution from brainless to brain-having, than from brains to intelligent brains. Don't get me wrong, it's still awesome but doesn't feel like an out of nowhere path for natural selection to take.

Birdbrain should mean the opposite of what it does, for this reason, but for many others. Birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation, a process that's about the one bona fide quantum biological paradigm.

Their body clocks are also significantly more sophisticated and decentralized than ours.

And in the end, the physical intelligence of flight itself demands a brain that's gotta be incredibly spatially and temporally aware.

I wish our brains had some of the skills and efficiencies of birds.

> Birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation, a process that's about the one bona fide quantum biological paradigm… I wish our brains had some of the skills and efficiencies of birds.

You can harness your somatic infrastructure to gain some senses, like magnetic field sensitivity. Some people implant small permanent magnets in a fingertip to sense magnetic field, and claim it makes the world more interesting.

Unfortunately such an implant is not itself permanent (you'd want to coat it with something safe that doesn't trigger the immune system like gold or PTFE). Also though you want to be careful around other magnets I imagine!

But you could probably wear a magnetic sensor that used something attached to your skin that you could learn to "read" intuitively. The problems are dermatalogical sensitivity from the adhesive and the inability to wear it 24/7 to make the erading really feel like a new sense. But who knows?

Right, and importantly for this context, impressive as that capability is, it does nothing to debunk or demystify bird intelligence. There are impressive capabilities built into somatic functioning, and other things carved into the structure of our biology by evolution itself but those things don't signal intelligence.

I hate popular science articles like this. Ummmmm listen sweetie, you're just ignorant and Ima police you a bit here... sit down for some really wild SCIENCEism!

Ugh.

They might think faster because the brain is smaller - a shorter distance for connections.

For example, learning to play a piano is training the spine, not the brain. Because the feedback loop with the spine is shorter.

It's the same with dancing. One is trained to not look at one's feet, because the feedback loop is too slow.

Looking at one's feet is also inefficient since you don't dance with your feet.

And playing a musical instrument like piano depends heavily on interactive processes throughout the brain and PNS

> Looking at one's feet is also inefficient since you don't dance with your feet.

What do you dance with, then, and why there are step diagrams (with lines and little shoe prints) for classical dances?

Jev brained

Despite the title, humans can react much faster than that. Gamers are commonly around 150 ms in visual response time.

Humans can make decisions and an action in less than 125 ms for very fast people.

So can Jev!

They really need to qualify "decisions" here, as quick decision making may very well reflect an automatic reaction with zero thought behind it.

Let me guess, must be either Jev or Clef

There's a wonderful book titled The Genius of Birds[1] by author Jennifer Ackerman which explores bird intelligence.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25938481-the-genius-of-b...

Maybe they use Jev