RE: How smart are birds?
April 17, 2014 at 12:38 pm
(This post was last modified: April 17, 2014 at 12:46 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(April 17, 2014 at 12:06 pm)rasetsu Wrote:(April 17, 2014 at 11:40 am)Chuck Wrote: A lot of empirical research into cognitive function of the brain has been done on mammals, so there is a tendency to correlate the thickness, area and infold convolutions of the cereberal cortex, which are entensive in humans, chimps and dolphins, with intelligence. This makes it surprising to many people that birds, with much smaller brains and minimal cerebral cortex, can also perform surprising amount of cognitive function.
The last episode of Nova delved into the question of bird intelligence. One of the things it pointed out is that "intelligence" in a species is generally characterized by the encephalization quotient, which is the ratio of brain size to body size. It pointed out that, relatively speaking, in terms of EQ, a crow is in the same ballpark as a chimpanzee, based on brain and body size.
PBS Nova: Inside Animal Minds - Bird Genius
I also came across the following while searching, but haven't watched it yet. It's a Nova ScienceNOW segment on bird intelligence.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/bird-brains.html
Hmmm, that's unexpected, because bird encephalization quotient is generally lower than mammals'. Some autonomous control functions in birds also take up less space and brain matter than in mammals. This also contributes to birds having smaller brains relative to body size compared to mammals.
During evolution of at least flying birds, there were likely much greater selective pressure for weight efficient solutions than there were for land dwelling mammals. I wonder how much that impacted the functional structural differences.
It has been suggested that in animals with larger brains, encephalization quotient (brain weight)/(body weight) is not as good a predictor of intelligence as (brain weight - brain stem weight - spinal cord weight)/(body weight)
