[ExI] Birdbrains

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Mon Aug 8 21:45:57 UTC 2016


We've talked before about how smart birds are, in a new article Olkowicz et
al found that crows jays and ravens have twice as many neurons per volume
of brain as humans do, and the shorter inter-neural distances results in
faster informational speeds too. I suppose when there is evolutionary
pressure for a flying animal to get smarter because of the weight
considerations it can't just take the brute force approach and make the
brain bigger, it must make the brain better. I wouldn't be surprised if
birds have less spaghetti code in how the neurons are wired together than
humans do too
​;​
if so they would be ideal subjects for brain research.

http://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255.full

 John K Clark
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