>>March 4, 2008
I suspect this just popped back up into your feed now because Nat Geo just ran a huge story on birds called Braniacs because, as it turns out, some of them are damn smart and corvids* are the smartest.
The interesting thing is that the idea that birds are dumb was because a century (?) ago some researcher dissected the brains and didn't find a frontal cortex and assumed they were dumb. A researcher in the 1950s did amazing experiments to show how smart they were, but *she* (probably not an incidental detail) was attacked by the scientific establishment for anthropomorphizing and over interpreting the data.
More recently, though, she's been pretty much vindicated and, among other things, they discovered that
- bird brains have a completely different structure (they said mammalian brains are arranged like club sandwiches and bird brains are arranged like pizza, which may be the least helpful scientific metaphor I know).
- bird brains have a much, much higher neural density. So they have a lot more brainpower per gram than we do, which is why their small brains can get so damn smart.
*crows, ravens, jays, clarks nutcrackers, etc
