Bird brains (2023)

https://www.dhanishsemar.com/writing/bird-brains

by DiffTheEnder • 4 months ago

341 220 4 months ago

dhanishsemar.com

Bender2• 4 months ago

Adding to this a chart of neuron count [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

pcthrowaway• 4 months ago

Interesting... I would have thought Octopi have more total neurons than dogs, given their problem-solving capabilities.

Now I wonder if the decentralized organization / hub and spoke model octopi alone exhibit offers some advantage when it comes to problem-solving

yieldcrv2• 4 months ago

The prevailing research is “more neurons = intelligence”

And that doesn’t make any sense, unless there really is no configuration necessary

octopi bucking that trend is an example we need

Nevermark2• 4 months ago

Something interesting about the octopus is that it is independent and learning from the time it is tiny.

It continually learns from the real world, as more and more neurons accumulate.

This layered learning may be an advantage in terms of compact representations.

No doubt, the human fetus brain learns much earlier than birth, or even from emergence of first neurons. But it isn't learning from the environment directly, or making survival critical choices, from first neural emergence.

Another octopus advantage maybe that it has relatively independent "brains" behind each eye, and along each leg. The distribution of brain in a way that reflects its physical distribution, might offer optimizations too.

We know humans benefit from partially independent spinal cord activity. This is suggestive evidence that the distributed intelligence of an octopus may be an advantage.

For exhibited intelligence per time, no other creature including humans comes anywhere close. They even learn "theory of mind", i.e. the ability to model other creatures situational awareness, ability to perceive, and likely responses to different situations.

To learn all that, without any mentoring or social examples, in the order of a year, along with their exotic body plan and amazing sensory configurations, would make the octopus a wildly implausible science fiction invention, if we didn't actually happen to have them living successfully in astonishing numbers, and pervasively in essentially all ocean environments.

It may have been enormous luck for us, that they live in an environment where technological progression would be very challenging.

The octopus is a very strong candidate for "smarter than humans", as an individual. If we equalize age, it isn't even a contest. If we normalize for lifespan, but equalize for lack of social mentorship, I expect they win decisively again.

(We often forget how much of our survival and progress is predicated on not being individuals. We have a species intelligence that is much higher than our individual intelligence. Since we as individuals gain so much from what is passed to us, we imagine that we would naturally know countless basic things, that if we actually grew up with people who did not know those things, would be far out of reach. Having people around to teach us things, allowed us evolve to be mentally lazy! Shades of current tool/dependency issues. The octopus has never had a crutch.)

There is no credible estimate of how many octopus individuals inhabit our oceans. But the number is in the billions at a minimum. Including young, it may be tens of billions or more.

jrrv• 4 months ago

Fun fact: octopus does not come from Latin, which would give the plural an -i ending. It comes from Greek, which means that if you want to be particularly correct about your plurals, then the plural is octopodes.

PurpleRamen2• 4 months ago

Neurons are used for more tasks than just problem-solving. Dogs have a good smell, so a big part of their brain is probably used for just this. They seem to be also much more acrobatic and reacting faster in general than an Octopus, so theses are probably also areas where additional neurons are used. Dogs have also a high social intelligence, not sure how Octopi are in that regard.

And are Octopi really better at problem-solving than a dog in general?

psychoslave2• 4 months ago

This code base is larger, so it’s certainly a smarter product!

"Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication" was likely not uttered by Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s still a pretty cool expression. Anyway, architecture matters.

[1] https://checkyourfact.com/2019/07/19/fact-check-leonardo-da-...

sva_• 4 months ago

Yeah their nerve cells are much larger. The axons of a giant squid are up to a millimeter in width.

fusslo• 4 months ago

I wonder how they count neurons, 11 billion is a lot of counting.

Bender2• 4 months ago

I too was curious so I searched and found "using a technique called the isotropic fractionator (or "brain soup" method) which involves dissolving brain tissue and creating a homogeneous mixture of nuclei to allow for accurate sampling and estimation."

cyjackx• 4 months ago

I have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.

rf15• 4 months ago

But we and dinosaurs share a descendant that already had neurons/a brain?

argsnd• 4 months ago

Whatever humans are descended from existed during the time of the dinosaurs

AlotOfReading• 4 months ago

If you go a bit farther back, we all ultimately come from the same lizard-like amniotes, newly emerged onto land from amphibious ancestors. It just took dinosaurs and mammals a little bit to evolve out of the "four-legged monster with teeth" body type.

eigenspace2• 4 months ago

All living beings have been evolving for the same amount of time.

vlovich1233• 4 months ago

Sure, but the speed of change is also related to lifespan. The longer lives you have (technically how long it takes to start reproducing and how many offspring you have), the less time you have to adapt.

This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.

small_model2• 4 months ago

Given parrots can talk, there must be a neuron count that activates language (assuming anatomy allows it), similar to LLM parameter count.

jayers• 4 months ago

That seems like an unfounded inference. Plenty of animals have more neurons than humans but lesser cognitive and language abilities. Language has lot to do with structure of the brain in addition to neuron count.

vablings2• 4 months ago

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02855-9

Birds have areas of the brain that we would consider language alike. Both for native bird communication and I would also speculate that for human to bird communication.

If you have ever owned a parrot this is blatantly obvious since they actively communicate and vocalize both observations and needs/desires

pegasus• 4 months ago

One thing I've learned by following a link from elsewhere in this thread is that while the total count of neurons in an animal's nervous system is not a good proxy for intelligence, the count of neurons in the forebrain is. By that measure, only the orca ranks higher than humans [1].

That doesn't mean language ability is a natural outcome of crossing a certain threshold of brain complexity; if anything it's more likely the other way around: this complexity being be driven by highly social behavior and communication.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

Zambyte2• 4 months ago

Language also has a lot to do with what we do. We do more complex things than animals, so we say more complex things than animals. The biggest difference in the evolution of human language versus the evolution of elephant language might just be that we have thumbs.

dboreham• 4 months ago

Plausible, and likely similar.

lukan• 4 months ago

Where do you get the conclusion from, that there is a "must"? There can be lot's of neurons ... but dedicated to other purposes.

tokai2• 4 months ago

Lots of birds can talk, not only the very clever ones like parrots and covids. Its mimicry and that generally doesn't seem to take many neurons.

fredgrott• 4 months ago

mimicking is not talking....

Its part of their calling social members wiring....

Philip-J-Fry• 4 months ago

Parrots can't "talk". They just mimick noises they've heard before

tobr• 4 months ago

So what you’re saying is that parrots are stochastic parrots.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 months ago

Many animals can communicate.

Parrots can't speak fluent English, which shouldn't be surprising. Last I checked, no human is fluent in Parrot or Dolphin.

Though, at least one parrot may have demonstrated an ability to understand language at more than a surface level.

deelowe• 4 months ago

This reminds me of being told dogs don't feel emotions by someone who never owned one. Parrots most definitely can talk. Their language is extremely primitive but if you've ever been around a grey and it's owner for some time, they definitely talk to each other. The parrot will readily communicate observations and desires.

unzadunza2• 4 months ago

Isn't that what humans do too? We mimic noises we've heard before and we associate meaning to the noises. Parrots can do that. Our quaker parrot would bite you, then say 'not supposed to bite'. He clearly associated some kind of meaning to that phrase.

vablings2• 4 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)

Common misconception. Parrots are much more than just mimicry machines. There is also Apollo the parrot that shows this in detail and following from Irene's research with Alex

mock-possum2• 4 months ago

I mean, isn’t that just what you’re doing too? If you see a cow, and you’ve been taught that ‘cow’ is the sound that describes a cow, don’t you say “cow?”

ofrzeta• 4 months ago

Like Starlings do.

PurpleRamen2• 4 months ago

Bumblebee (the Transformer) might have an objection here. Purposeful mimicry can be used for talking on certain complexity. It does not have to be human-level to be communication.

throwway120385• 4 months ago

This is also what toddlers do until bit by bit they're repeating everything you say back to you in context.

small_model2• 4 months ago

So do we, otherwise we would all speak our own individual language.

DetroitThrow• 4 months ago

Given parrots eat their own poop (https://lafeber.com/pet-birds/questions/parrots-eating-poop/), there must be a neuron count/density that activates self-poop eating (assuming anatomy allows it), similar to LLM parameter count.

SoftTalker6• 4 months ago

Dogs do that too.

IAmBroom• 4 months ago

My dogs eat poop, and therefore are also like LLMs.

Your hypothesis has therefore been peer-reviewed.

ge96• 4 months ago

If you haven't seen Apollo on YT, crazy

What is it made out of? meTUL

Want a pistach

frou_dh• 4 months ago

He's so charming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8-ZmuJixIg

gjsman-10002• 4 months ago

Dr. Irene Pepperberg studied an African grey parrot named Alex for 30 years. Alex could identify objects, colours, shapes, and numbers. He understood abstract concepts like "same" and "different." His vocabulary exceeded 100 words. When he died in 2007, his last words to Pepperberg were reportedly "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow." I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off.

The author takes forgranted the claim of intelligence; and does not assess at all whether the researcher simply said those words to the parrot every night. (Why not? It sounds exactly like what a researcher would tell a parrot before turning off the lights.) A quick search on Wikipedia says the parrot was also found dead in the morning, not in the implied "parrot has last words" scenario.

DiffTheEnder4• 4 months ago

Ah yeah that's exactly what it was but thought I'd try to add a bit more emotion to this point haha. Even if the parrot said this every night as a good night - its still very sweet that Alex said that every night :)

gjsman-10002• 4 months ago

Then to put it bluntly; you lied to your audience.

"I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off."

If your audience conceived it as possibly being a merely repeated phrase that the researcher probably said thousands of times, not something the parrot actually understood, then it is very easy to brush off as something we already knew parrots could do.

mock-possum2• 4 months ago

iirc there’s a similar mythos around coco the gorilla

lucasay• 4 months ago

“More neurons = intelligence” always felt like an oversimplification. If that were true, we wouldn’t be surprised by birds or octopuses anymore.

IshKebab• 4 months ago

It's not a 1:1 relationship but they are related.

djmips• 4 months ago

bird brains are a die shrink of mammalian brains.

tos1• 4 months ago

This gives a whole new meaning to the term “stochastic parrots” for LLMs :)

SoftTalker6• 4 months ago

Calling someone a "bird brain" is honestly more of a compliment.

Well no. Some birds are flat-out dumb. Chickens for example.

forinti2• 4 months ago

One fact that I find very curious is that I see all sorts of animals killed on the road, but never chickens. And I see plenty of them by the road.

Maybe they never try to cross roads?

SoftTalker6• 4 months ago

"Chicken" is also an idiomatic synonym for "frightens easily." They do have some instinct for avoiding danger.

DroneBetter• 4 months ago

or perhaps it's an artefact of them having a higher contrast against the asphalt and being somewhat fat and puffy compared to most roadkill animals

Broken_Hippo• 4 months ago

They definitely cross roads.

In the mountains around Trondheim, Norway, you run into free range chicken farms (and sheep roaming the mountain top). Signs warn you that chickens are about and I think them getting hit is a real concern if you are maximizing chicken freedom.

That said, these aren't busy roads. The more traffic, the more barriers to keep the animals from getting hit.

unzadunza2• 4 months ago

Chickens are not dumb, check out:

https://thehumaneleague.org/article/are-chickens-smart https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5306232/

cultofmetatron• 4 months ago

chickens were domesticated to be easy to handle and eat. we bred them to be not particularly intelligent.

junon• 4 months ago

Parrot owner here. This doesn't surprise me at all. I'm actually a bit surprised they cared about the gyms!

This fits right into the ABC model of parrot psychology:

https://www.parrots.org/pdfs/all_about_parrots/reference_lib...

amelius• 4 months ago

Reminds me of:

https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070716/full/news070716-15.h...

Scans reveal a fluid-filled cavity in the brain of a normal man.

awinter-py• 4 months ago

is this a straight-up advantage, or is the trade-off lower connectivity?

Sharlin2• 4 months ago

Makes sense, given that to birds, optimizing for weight is everything. But seeing that the ridiculously smart border collies have a comparatively low density of neurons, clearly there’s more to intelligence than that.

aidenn0• 4 months ago

I've not spent significant time with border collies, but I'd say that if I had to rank, multiple species of corvids are smarter than german shepherds (a breed I'm more familiar with).

gbgarbeb• 4 months ago

Most people don't know it, but birds actually are optimizing against rotational inertia far more than they're optimizing for mass.

Otherwise they would barely be able to eat or drink; their stomachs are far larger and can be far heavier than their brains.

Why would inertia need to be optimized? Think a little bit.

05• 4 months ago

I don’t even know how you’d compare their intelligence, it’s so apples to oranges.. Most birds build nests so they have an advantage in tool use and that’s what gets them ahead in some tests. On the other hand, have anyone tried to train corvids to herd other birds/animals? I bet BCs will have an advantage there:)

Sharlin2• 4 months ago

I'm not trying to compare them, just noting an interesting thing in the diagram in the article :) Wrt BC cognition, one notable feat is that some of them are known to have learned the words for hundreds of different objects.

awsanswers• 4 months ago

If you're in tune with animals and spend time around a parrot, it's obvious there is a lot going on in their minds. They have incredible memories and their own understanding of their world. It looks simple to us but they are not simple creatures. That being said, I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cage.

justonceokay6• 4 months ago

I feel similarly about cats. I absolutely love cats but I didn’t have one for five years because I refuse to own one in an apartment. It seems like people torture animals to make sure that they have some attention when they get home

deaddodo2• 4 months ago

A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically. I don't know where you get "torture" from. What's most important is stimuli such as scratching posts, toys, etc. Otherwise, they're insanely copacetic to the point many "house" cats don't want to leave the home even when being dragged out.

Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. That's bordering on cruel.

That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.

a_t48• 4 months ago

What difference would a house make here? A yard?

soopypoos4• 4 months ago

But then you did get one?

kjkjadksj5• 4 months ago

Apartment is no good for a cat but suddenly fine for you? It isn’t like it is in human nature to live in a shoebox either. Human nature is to live in the sahel, sleep under the stars, forage, and track game. The office and the apartment is genuinely a prison for the human in their evolved element.

make32• 4 months ago

it's funny because domesticated cats have much more developed frontal cortexes than their ancestors & it would be one of the things that feral cats lose to genetic drift (meaning, no conservation pressure in the wild). whatever boring stuff we have them do is apparently extremely mentally taxing compared to the wild.

CalRobert4• 4 months ago

It’s for the best, house cats torture the birds and frogs around here and I hate it. I never knew frogs could scream.

stronglikedan• 4 months ago

I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cage

I'm convinced that people that keep (uninjured) birds in cages are narcissistic sociopaths. This is based on the conversations that I've had with them about it. Life's too short to deal with people like that. I'm thankful for the indicator to avoid them, but I'm sad that it's at the expense of a bird.

farkanoid• 4 months ago

That seems a bit harsh. I have two rescue parrots that live in large cages (indoors). I let them out every night when I get home from work, and they're given plenty of toys and material (including native blooms) to interact with every day while I'm gone.

I buy a couple of pinewood storage crates for them to play in and destroy every month. I also spend over half an hour every morning cleaning all their food and water containers, and cooking them breakfast (sweet potato, corn, fresh apple, assorted greens), I don't even make myself breakfast!

krona4• 4 months ago

Many animals (including birds, dogs, horses) like the sanctuary and comfort of a cage and choose to use them, but obviously it shouldn't be used like a prison.

recallingmemory3• 4 months ago

How did you arrive at the conclusion that birds like cages?

albalus2• 4 months ago

Even prisoners walk back into their cells. Comfort doesn’t erase confinement. A bird’s world is the open sky—so an open door doesn’t make a cage any less of one.

yareally4• 4 months ago

I would agree with that in most cases. They treat them like their personal house, unless the owner decides to reinforce their use as a form of punishment. Not really any different than building a dog house for a dog.

tombert• 4 months ago

That's kind of how I feel about most pets.

I've thought about getting a pet turtle or tortoise [1] because they are my favorite animal, but I found out that in order for them to be happy and healthy they need a lot more room than I could easily fit in my house. Either a very large aquarium or a very large area for them to walk around depending on the species, neither of which I can easily have in my house.

And I think a lot of animals are like that. Ultimately a lot of these animals evolved in areas that really aren't that "confined" in any meaningful sense, and forcing confines seems kind of cruel.

[1] To be clear, ethically, not one of those shady endangered black market things that you can find.

colordrops• 4 months ago

We adopted three kittens that were found locked into a suitcase and thrown into the trash. Our house is in hills with coyotes so these cats would not survive for any length of time outside. They'd probably also be sent to the pound if we didn't adopt them. I feel bad for confining them in our house but I don't know if there would have been a better outcome for them.

Totally agree on more rare/exotic animals though - they shouldn't be subject to unnatural conditions like this.

soperj• 4 months ago

I think this is why Kurt Cobain famously kept his turtles in his bathtub.

tibbydudeza• 4 months ago

We have a 3-year-old African Grey - he has 3 cages dotted around the house, but he only sleeps in one which is in our bedroom at night, and we never lock him in even if we leave the house.

He knows when we are leaving him when we say goodbye - the garage door opening - the car - the gate opening and closing.

During the day he sits in the home office with me and my office days he is around my daughter.

Most of the time he sits on the top or the side of the cage perching on wooden sticks.

Occasionally he will dismount if the gardening services are busy making a racket with the weed whacker and will walk to the bathroom and climb to the top of the shower.

The one cage is close to an outside gate so he will climb on the window or the gate itself during summer.

We also have 3 cats, but he just walks past them, and he talks and even scolds them in my voice.

yareally4• 4 months ago

If you're referring to keeping parrots in cages outside of their natural habitats, that ship sailed when they were brought to non native locations. I'm being hyperbolic, but I assume you don't want them to be released in the wild and die, right?

We have some feral colonies set up in places like Miami and San Francisco, but not all species thrive in warm locations.

That said, my palm sized green cheek conure is rarely in his extremely large cage (it's 4 by 4 feet). Door is always open unless he's sleeping or we're out of the house. Usually he's with me on my shoulder when I'm working during the day and gives his "2 cents" when I'm in meetings.

Most parrots kept as pets prefer it locked for security reasons. He'll get anxious if it's not when he's trying to sleep.

I've seen a lot of terrible bird owners, but I also know plenty that enrich their bird's lives. My little conure has a surprisingly extensive vocabulary for a species not known for speaking.

He says "poo" when when he has to poop, "what's up?" when he greets anyone, "whatcha doing", "<his name>", "yeah!" (mimicking Little Jon), "stop" (when he doesn't like what we're doing), "good boy", "Love you" and a few others I can't recall off the top of my head.

robotpepi2• 4 months ago

did you teach him the words? Mine has learned some just by context (he's still quite young though, barely 2 years old).

paulryanrogers• 4 months ago

For those with outdoor cats, please put a bell on their collar. Give the birds a fighting chance.

bloomingeek2• 4 months ago

This is really a good deed.

As a side note, FWIW, we only let our cats outside when we are there to watch them. This is because we don't want our neighbors to dislike our cats for whatever reason. A lot of neighbors use Roundup on their fence lines. And, of course, car traffic.

dinfinity6• 4 months ago

If you're in tune with animals and spend time around a parrot, it's obvious there is a lot going on in their minds.

Not saying there isn't and somewhat offtopic, but if you apply this to LLMs those are much, much 'smarter' than all the animals people like to call intelligent (or something similar). If you disagree, please tell me for which task requiring intelligence you'd rather have an animal's wit than that of an LLM.

I really do feel we should be taking the current state of affairs as a starting point to recalibrate what counts as smart or worth 'protecting', whether it's our beloved animal friends or something inorganic. Simultaneously believing "birds are super smart" and "LLMs are just stochastic parrots" seems absurd.

Jensson• 4 months ago

If you disagree, please tell me for which task requiring intelligence you'd rather have an animal's wit than that of an LLM.

Navigating your way to a location without colliding with anything. Finding food in the woods. Such stuff that animals can do that we yet have AI be able to do.

sh4rks2• 4 months ago

Dogs can be trained for a variety of tasks that require wit. Such as helping the blind navigate. And sniffing for illegal drugs.

bwv8483• 4 months ago

Been to NZ once. Keas are indeed the coolest parrots ever. Climb to the top of Avalanche Peak and you’re guaranteed to see some soaring in the sky, with snowy Mt. Rolleston in the background. Kiwis call them alpine parrots, but they are not. They were common on both islands before Polynesian/Maori hunted many of them, and European ranchers forced them to retreat to high beech forests and alpine zones. Another place is Dart Hut, I even found some kea feathers there.

Supercompressor4• 4 months ago

Kiwi here. They live in alpine regions, they have adapted to alpine life - how are they not alpine parrots? Go back far enough and you could make this argument about anything.

bwv8483• 4 months ago

Sure man, if 700 years is far enough for you. Meanwhile, human spent thousands of years to domesticate junglefowl into chicken.

lateforwork• 4 months ago

This is Alex the parrot, mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldYkFdu5FJk

netcan• 4 months ago

Parrots are definitely smart, but birds generally pack a lot into a small mass. That's required for flight.

pks0163• 4 months ago

I work on some aspects of intelligence in birds, primarily in songbirds. There have been some effort finding general intelligence ("g" cognitive factor) in birds since last 15-20 years. The results have been mixed as you would expect. Animals' intelligence have evolved for survival and designing experiments to test those are quite hard.

Research has shown brain size matters but not that much, we should look at relative brain size.

ninalanyon• 4 months ago

Animals' intelligence have evolved for survival

What do you mean by this? Surely this applies to humans too, we are animals after all. So what distinction did you intend to make?

pks0163• 4 months ago

I mean regarding the domains of intelligence and how to test them.

With humans, performance in one cognitive test correlates with another and so on, generally. So, intelligence across domains.

Researchers test the same with animals. The issue being animals' intelligence being tied to their ecology. The dilemma being what is it worth for an animal solving a task that has no significance in its life. The other argument being if the animals' intelligence is closer/similar to human intelligence, we will find similar results in both.

robotpepi2• 4 months ago

Animals' intelligence have evolved for survival and designing experiments to test those are quite hard.

My conure is extremely intelligent at times, learning a trick at the second try or doing what I ask him immediately. Most of the time, though, he understands but decides to just ignore me.

pks0163• 4 months ago

Relatable. Motivation is crucial for any task and most of time they are not motivated to do what you want.

bradley13• 4 months ago

Birds are highly optimized. For example, all cells contain a full genome. The genomes in birds are a lot smaller - less trash DNA - which saves them weight and generally makes the cells more efficient.

DiffTheEnder4• 4 months ago

This is interesting because I wonder if it compounds. Smaller genome, smaller cells, more neurons in the same volume... and now those neurons are individually more efficient too. The density numbers already seemed hard to explain just from spatial optimisation -- this might be the missing piece? Wonder what research exists here

srean2• 4 months ago

https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510

One of my all time favourite short stories, with or without intelligent parrots.

Time for me to read it again. This is the Arecibo story, don't miss if you haven't read it before.

"You be good".

Strangely enough, was having a lot of difficulty coaxing google to fetch this link.

kridsdale1• 4 months ago

I’m not sure if you used “Classic Google” or not, but I put the quoted quote in to Google AI Mode (disclaimer; I am one of its developers) and got a full description of the story with links to online hostings of the full text in under 1 second. Not the same URL as your result, and I don’t know the IP validity of the hosting result pages I got, though.

I recalled (once I was reminded of the author) that I read this originally in one of his Anthologies. I strongly recommend to everyone who likes reading and thinking to buy both of his books!

srean2• 4 months ago

I got some of those links and links to the summary of the story.

But I did not want a summary (why massacre such a beautiful story *), and neither the later links (pretty bad visual presentation of the story), but the Nautilus link in particular.

I think that's where I had read it first on the web, by far the best layout compared to the other links.

Even a few years ago the Nautilus link used to be the canonical (first) result.

* If I want Michelangelo's David summarised, I think I would mention 'summary' explicitly.

ticulatedspline2• 4 months ago

Makes me think of our current quest with creating AGI, that the metrics for measuring animal brains don't necessarily correlate nicely with "intelligence" or capability.

I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing neuron count and density at the problem without understanding the fundamental properties that actually create intelligence.

data-ottawa3• 4 months ago

It’s always amazed me how much capability baby animals have right when they’re born, when they have near zero experience with their muscles and balance and senses. Or even just the instinct of a cat to chase a string is universal.

There’s something intrinsic to the structure of brains that seems to pre-encode a lot of evolutionarily useful content without a training phase.

I’d love to take a course on just this topic and what do we know about it.

embedding-shape• 4 months ago

To be fair, it's not like the baby animals pop into existence at birth, starting from scratch at that moment, but instead they've been growing/incubating for quite some time. Who knows, maybe that's the actual "training phase" for the animals, as what you say is true, they seem to have a lot of instincts already at birth, while human babies seem to almost "popped into existence at birth" with not a whole lot of instincts yet, compared to other animals at least.

ticulatedspline2• 4 months ago

What's also fun to think about is the compression ratio of that data. the human genome is in the 725MB range.

renewiltord• 4 months ago

Also illustrates an adaptability-ability trade-off. A human baby is supplied a SOTA brain and sensors and actuators it can make sense of given time. A deer baby is preprogrammed to handle its sensors and actuators. In time, the human baby surpasses the deer baby in general ability.

mgfist• 4 months ago

Evolution is kinda like pre-training in a sense.

gfody• 4 months ago

that would make for a cute short story where a robot nurses a pet biological that suddenly displays hints of true intelligence after no less than 32 years of parrot-like behavior

api• 4 months ago

Birds are evolutionarily optimized for low mass.

roywiggins• 4 months ago

It makes you wonder how smart their ancestors- dinosaurs- were.

culi• 4 months ago

It seems like animals that have to memorize a really wide variety of plants, fruit, flowers, etc tend to have complex and dense brains

Night_Thastus• 4 months ago

Worth nothing that the "mirror test" may not be accurate for a lot of animals - like dogs. Dogs are a lot more sensitive to smell, and can pass smell-based mirror-test-equivalents.

mrec• 4 months ago

Maybe also worth noting some evidence that ants can apparently pass the mirror test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Insects

When it first came out I don't think anyone quite knew what to make of that, and I'm not sure anything's changed since.

bitwize2• 4 months ago

I think that dogs and cats fail the mirror test not because they are unintelligent or lack a "sense of self", but because their sense of self is tied up with their sense of smell. Mirror reflections don't smell like themselves, so they don't recognize the reflection as themselves. They might recognize the reflection as a strange dog or cat, which may provoke aggression.

picafrost• 4 months ago

I love watching magpies. I have seen them tease cats by "foraging" just out of sprint and leap distance. They quickly fly up to a tree when the cat moves, always keeping an eye on it, and resume when the cat resets, as other magpies in the group watch from above. I've seen them harass a hawk try to eat a fresh hunt, six magpies surrounding it, taking turns pecking at the hawk's tail until it leaves.

They have interesting interactions with the hooded crows, tolerant of each other but still competitive over food. If a white tailed eagle enters they area they will together team up and attempt to chase it away.

They have complex social interactions with each. I've seen a younger magpie in a group get pinned down by a dominant one while several in the group pecked at its belly, because it ate out of order. They acknowledge even me, their neighbor, who occasionally leaves some winter food out for them.

Anyone who is fortunate to spend real time in or at the edge of nature, and takes the time to observe, should be humbled by the complexity and intelligence of the world around us. Some species stand out, of course, like the magpies.

Most of what we have created as the human race is best characterized as complication rather than complexity, when compared to the utter complexity of the natural world. In the era of AI I find it amusing that we believe we're approaching being able to construct a kind of real intelligence when so many can barely recognize, let alone understand, the "lesser" forms of intelligence around us.

functional_dev• 4 months ago

BTW magpies have passed the mirror test

Animats• 4 months ago

Intelligence seems to have evolved on Earth at least three times - mammals, octopuses, and corvids. These are different branches of the evolutionary tree, and the brain architectures are quite different. Octopuses have a distributed system. Corvids get more done with less brain volume and power than mammals.

Supercompressor4• 4 months ago

If you'd like to read a long-form version of this, take a look at Jennifer Ackerman's "The Bird Way" from 2020. Really loved this book.

https://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/the-bird-way

Also, just my opinion, but Kea's are the best bird there is.

anotherevan• 4 months ago

The Australian sulfur-crested cockatoos are pretty smart. They would teach each other how to open heavy bin lids to raid the garbage. I seem to remember they would even team up to do it. There are studies about how this behaviour spread from suburb to suburb in Sydney.[1]

More recently they've figured out how to operate drinking fountains.[2][3]

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/cockatoos-lear...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-06-04/sydney-sulphu...

[3] https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/nature-wildlife/2025...

bloomingeek2• 4 months ago

Before our first trip to New Zealand, March of 2001, we did a lot of research because the plan was to drive up the South Island from the southern tip to the northern, then ferry across to the North Island. We consulted three different Travel books and they all said to be sure to get the rental car insurance and specifically mentioned the Keas.

Sure enough, when we pulled over to a scenic pull over where other cars were, on the way to Milford Sound, there were a couple of Keas attacking a car windshied rubber gasket. I shooed them away, only to see them return. They are really beautiful, mischievous creatures.

mkl• 4 months ago

Kea also make and use tools, e.g. to set off stoat traps to get the bait: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/366747/clever-kea-using-..., https://twig.technology/blog/alpine-kea-trap-tampering

thelastgallon• 4 months ago

A macaw's brain weighs 20 grams and has roughly the same number of forebrain neurons as a macaque monkey's brain at 70 grams. Ounce for ounce, bird brains are some of the most computationally dense organs in the animal kingdom.

Bird brains (2023)

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