> 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.