A pamphlet published by dozens of neuroscientists calls for recognition of the complexity of the bird's brain
Sandra Blakeslee New York Times, Haaretz
New Caledonian crow. She took a straight wire, folded it and put it in a jar to take out food
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"Bird's brain" has always been an expression for Galgani. The common perception holds that birds have a simple brain - at least that's what scientists thought and taught for many years. But this perception is being undermined by studies on the behavior of crows, parrots and other birds, which apparently exhibit intelligence no less than that of chimpanzees.
Faced with the contrast between a simple brain and complex behavior, some neuroscientists have begun to remap the brain of birds. In the February 1 issue of the journal "Neuroscience Reviews Nature" an international group of bird researchers published an article on the subject. According to them, almost everything written in anatomy books about the brains of birds is fundamentally wrong. According to them, the bird brain is as complex, flexible and creative as the brain of mammals, and the time has come to adopt more precise terminology that reflects the new understanding.
The Bird Brain Terminology Renewal Consortium, which includes 29 scientists from six countries, has worked for seven years to develop new, more precise terms for structures in the brains of both birds and mammals. For example, the center of the bird's intelligence, or its upper brain, is now called the "cerebral cortex".
The re-examination of the bird brain explains some types of behavior in birds, which are puzzling if you assume that they are quite stupid creatures. Crows, for example, make hooks and spears from twigs to help them search for food. The gray African parrot not only talks, it also has a sense of humor and the ability to invent new words. Whereas songbird chicks babble like human babies, using the left side of their brain.
Bird brains got a bad reputation about a century ago, due to the work of the German neurobiologist Ludwig Edinger, who is considered the father of comparative anatomy. According to Dr. Erich Jarvis, a neuroscientist from Duke University and one of the leaders of the consortium, Edinger believed that evolution is a linear development. The brain, in his opinion, developed similar to geological layers: layer upon layer the brain progressed from new to new, from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds and mammals.
Edinger found that the lower third of the mammalian brain contains nerve cells organized in clusters. The upper two thirds of the brain, or cerebral cortex, contain cells arranged in six layers that lie one on top of the other. The "new brain", which is the seat of reason, envelops the "old brain", which is responsible for instinctive behavior. In humans, the cerebral cortex grew to such large dimensions that it had to develop folds and grooves to fold inside the skull.
Edinger found that the brains of birds contain only clusters of nerve cells. From this he concluded that without a six-layered cerebral cortex it is impossible for birds to be intelligent creatures. Instead, he stated, they are only capable of impulse-based behaviors.
This view was accepted throughout the 20th century and it still appears in most biology textbooks, says Dr. Harvey Carten, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego and one of the members of the consortium. Carten's research challenges the common view. According to him, birds and mammals have different ways of creating intelligence. The birds use clusters of cells; the mammals use cells arranged in layers. Each of the animal families uses the structure Basics of lower brain and upper brain connected to each other.
Carten and others in the consortium believe that the aggregates at the top of the bird's brain are analogous to the layers in the brain of mammals. The cells in these clusters originate from similar structures in the body of the fetus, and they perform the same functions. For example, in mammals, the sensory information - sights, sounds, touch - passes through an area in the lower brain known as the thalamus and connects to the cerebral cortex in the fourth layer out of six. In birds, the sensory information passes through the thalamus and connects to the clusters corresponding in terms of their functions to the fourth layer.
Meanwhile, examples of the brilliant brains of birds continue to flow from field and laboratory studies around the world. Dr. Nathan Emery and Dr. Nicola Clayton from the University of Cambridge in England, for example, are conducting a comparative study between great apes and crows - a family that includes the ravens, ravens, black crows and jackdaws. The relationship between the brain of the crow and its body is the same as the relationship between the brain and body of the chimpanzee.
Great apes use simple tools such as twigs, Emery said. But it turns out that crows in New Caledonia create more complex tools with the help of their beaks and claws. They trim and sculpt twigs to make hooks for retrieving food in case it is not accessible. They create "spears" from jagged leaves and use them to poke under the leaf rot, looking for prey.
The raven-tailed crow develops at an earlier age than any other creature tested an understanding of the fact that when an object disappears behind a curtain, it is still there.
The nut castor is able to hide up to 30 thousand seeds and bring them out of hiding six months later. He also knows how to hide and steal. If he sees another bird following him while he is hiding food, he returns later to move the food to another hiding place. Some researchers believe that this behavior indicates the existence of a basic version of the so-called Theory of Mind - that is, that the bird can imagine to itself that others have consciousness and intentions.
And on a university campus in Japan, European crows patiently line up on the sidewalk and wait for the traffic light to turn red. When the cars stop, they jump to the crosswalk, place nuts picked from nearby trees on the road and jump back to the sidewalk. After the light changes and the cars trample the nuts, the crows wait until the area is clear and jump back to collect the food.
The scientists were amazed: the crow made a hook out of wire and pulled food with it
Even chimpanzees have not demonstrated the ability to make tools like this
The crows the scientists observed
10/9/2002
A female crow named Betty proved to scientists that even "feather minds" can make tools, when she bent a straight wire into a hook and used it to pull food out of a container.
The researchers at the University of Oxford watched in amazement as she successfully repeated the operation nine more times. This is probably the first time an animal, other than humans, has shown
A complete understanding of cause and effect and created a tool for an individual task from a material not found in nature.
Even chimpanzees, the animals closest to humans in terms of mental abilities, have not demonstrated such an ability.
Betty is one of a pair of crows from the island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, which are being studied by the team of scientists of the University's Behavioral-Ecological Research Group.
The crows of the species to which Betty belongs are known in their homeland for their ability to use twigs and branches to catch caterpillars. The researchers first noticed Betty's special ability after trying to test whether the birds would prefer to use a straight wire or a wire bent into the shape of a hook to obtain food. The other crow snatched the wire hook from Betty, and to the astonishment of the researchers, she bent the straight wire wire and made a hook herself.
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