alt Hacker News'Birdbrain' Is a Misnomer. Crows Make Decisions Faster Than We Can
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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...
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.
The title doesn't make sense because "bridbrain" doesn't imply slow decision making.
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.
I have to agree but not just the crows.. The two parakeets that I owned as a kid were quite smart and would stir their own seeds to move the good seeds above the spent seeds with tooth pick that I had been using to scratch them. They would play with the tooth pick and grab it from each other. And they were affectionate and liked to snuggle.
They had complete trust in my family and not others. So they could tell the difference.
Intelligence is not about some IQ test.
They have to be faster than us. They casually fly at 40mph.
Considering how quickly birds can move and how twitchy they are this does not surprise me at all.
They really need to qualify "decisions" here, as quick decision making may very well reflect an automatic reaction with zero thought behind it.
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.
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.
I had to double check to make sure this wasn't a new decision model. However, I do look forward to the new crow-themed models that will follow.
It's faster probably because their neural network is less deep :)
Maybe they use Jev
"eat like a bird" is also a misnomer. birds are so misunderstood
Let me guess, must be either Jev or Clef
Yeah, well... My SHARP pocket calculator turns on faster than my PC does.
Jev brained
So can Jev!
Another article I read recently said that Birds use anaerobic metabolism inside their eyes so that there's much less biological clutter in front of the rods and cones.
I wonder if this could also have something to do with it. The bird would presumably be sharper at spotting the pattern partly because our eyes are trying to pick it out from in the midst of other kinds of "floater" patterns that we're (very) used to filtering out
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.
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.
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