Discussion

Bird brains

cyjackx: 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.

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

vlovich123: 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.

ge96: If you haven't seen Apollo on YT, crazyWhat is it made out of? meTULWant a pistach

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

tokai: 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.

lo_zamoyski: It's unclear what you're saying or how it responds to the OP and his critics.If birds and primates today belong to equally long evolutionary lineages, then they have both had the same amount of time to adapt.Now, speciation is what makes things interesting, because species diversify the subjects of adaptation. So, if we say some bird species has been around for longer than the human species, then you can say that that bird species has been subjected to adaptation pressures for longer (though this, too, is too simplistic; adaptation pressures are not uniformly distributed).This, of course, starts getting into philosophical questions about the notion of "species". Modern biology has a poor grasp of what it means to be a species. The biological literature alone contains about 20 different operating definitions. To reconcile evolution with the notion of species, some have argued that all or almost all living things belong to a single species, but we're actually seeing a resurgence of functionalist/teleological notions in biology today, because it turns out you cannot explain or classify living things without such notions.

Bender: Adding to this a chart of neuron count [1][1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

pcthrowaway: 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

yieldcrv: The prevailing research is “more neurons = intelligence”And that doesn’t make any sense, unless there really is no configuration necessaryoctopi bucking that trend is an example we need

riverforest: We kept assuming brain size was the main variable. Turns out density matters just as much. Makes you wonder what else we got wrong about animal intelligence.

Philip-J-Fry: Parrots can't "talk". They just mimick noises they've heard before

onlyrealcuzzo: 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.

tokai: No its pretty well understood that brain size in it self doesn't signify intelligence, even if correcting for body size. Density, connectedness, and complexity are important. Modeling the information processing capacity of animal brains it is shown that smaller brain like those of octopi and corvides are highly capable despite a relative low neuron count compared to humans.

Skwid: I suspect the more significant difference here is the selection pressures. Take a good look at any part of a bird and you'll see millions of years of selection for reduced weight. The cost of weight is just so much greater when you're flying. Interesting too that bats tend to have lower neuron counts than say rodents. Did dinosaurs have a more weight efficient brain before flight, or were they forced to shrink before re-evolving that complexity in a smaller package?

gjsman-1000: > 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.

jrrv: 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.

tos1: This gives a whole new meaning to the term “stochastic parrots” for LLMs :)

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

AlotOfReading: 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.

djmips: bird brains are a die shrink of mammalian brains.

deelowe: 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.

unzadunza: 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.

SoftTalker: > Calling someone a "bird brain" is honestly more of a compliment.Well no. Some birds are flat-out dumb. Chickens for example.

forinti: 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?

junon: 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...

vablings: 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

bdamm: That's fun. Octopii rolls off the tongue though, doesn't it? Since we have survived both the Greek and Roman cultures, and have absorbed aspects of both into languages now widely distributed, I'd like to propose that we seed the path of a true lingua franca and declare the plural of octopus to be octopii.It's no worse than inserting greek words (octopodes) into English language.

DiffTheEnder: 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 :)

amelius: 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.

psychoslave: They are all already in use https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus

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

PurpleRamen: 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?

Sharlin: 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.

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

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

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

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

throwway120385: This is also what toddlers do until bit by bit they're repeating everything you say back to you in context.

unzadunza: Chickens are not dumb, check out:https://thehumaneleague.org/article/are-chickens-smart https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5306232/

nivertech: Flying and taxi-driving primates pack twice as many neurons as parrot brains of the same mass.

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

aidenn0: 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).

awsanswers: 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.

stronglikedan: > I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cageI'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.

justonceokay: 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

krona: 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.