Avian and mammal brains took different evolutionary paths, but reached similar capabilities.

Viet and Nieder, at the University of Tubingen, Germany, have researched how crows can produce strategic thinking with a brain that is very different from a human brain. Their research was summarized entertainingly at the following blog.

Crows could be the key to understanding alien intelligence

Crows are among the planet’s most intelligent animals, teaching their young to use tools for foraging and banding together to fight off intruders. Now, the first study of how abstract reasoning works in these birds’ brains could shed light on how intelligence works in a truly alien, non-mammal brain.

The Mysterious Tool-Making Culture Shared by Crows and Humans

We’ve studied brain structure pretty extensively in mammals from humans and apes to whales and mice. But German neuroscientists Lena Veit and Andreas Nieder are the first to watch what happens in crow brains as these birds worked their way through a series of brain-teasers. They actually wired the crows’ brains up with electrodes, watching as individual neurons fired when the crows did a test that required abstract reasoning. What Veit and Nieder found reveals a lot about what intelligence looks like in a brain that’s nothing like our own.

The Evolution of Intelligence

The crow, and some of its relatives in the corvid family (such as jays and magpies), are among the only intelligent species we’ve encountered outside the world of mammals. But their brains are utterly different from ours. The mammalian seat of reason is in our prefrontal cortex, a thin layer of nerve-riddled tissue on the outside of the front region of our brains. Birds have no prefrontal cortex (PFC). Instead, they have the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), which is located toward the middle of their brains. You can see the different regions in the image, below.

Crows could be the key to understanding alien intelligence

The thing that’s really interesting about comparing bird and human intelligence is that we did not evolve from a common, intelligent ancestor. Our last common ancestor with birds lived during the Permian period, about 300 million years ago, before the age of dinosaurs. It probably looked like a cross between a reptile and a rodent, and was roughly the size of a big raccoon.

This ancestor’s simple brain was ruled by instinct rather than higher-level cognition. Still, lurking inside its rather small skull was a brain part called the pallium, which over millions of years evolved into the PFC in mammals and the NCL in birds. That makes mammal and bird intelligence an excellent example of parallel evolution — both groups of animals developed intelligence independently of one another.

To see the illustration in the article which shows the portion of the avian brain that, though different from the human brain, developed similar abilities, and to read the rest of the above-quoted article, click here.

Find an extract of the Viet and Nieder paper here.

Click next page to see another comparison of the human and avian brain, identifying the two areas where reasoning is performed.