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Fetch is a free app for earning  rewards on anything you buy. Download the app and use the code SCISHOW to get 5,000 points when you scan your first receipt! [♪ INTRO] Humans like to think of ourselves as special.

We point to how smart we are, how  many wrinkles our brains have, and our unique brain regions to show  just how different we are from animals. And other animals’ brains? Totally an insult.

Calling someone a “birdbrain”  is the height of wit, probably. But it’s long past time to retire that one. Because studying bird brains isn’t  just showing us how smart birds can be.

It’s challenging old ideas of how  smartness evolves in the first place, as well as just how unique humans really are. Various human cultures have  observed the smartness of corvids (birds like crows, ravens,  and jays) for a long time. It’s just taken science a little bit to catch up.

It’s hard to test the intelligence of  animals that can’t communicate with humans, so we have to interpret their behavior to  get a sense of what’s going on in there. One of those is tool use. Scientists define tool use in terms of  using an external object to physically interact with something and change it in some way, or get information about the environment.

So things like using a leaf to  get ants out of a hole in a log, or using a stick to scratch an itch. And with that definition, tool use  isn’t something all animals do, but it’s not totally uncommon. There have been reports of birds doing this  kind of thing since at least the 1930s.

But some birds, much like  primates, take it one step further. They don’t just use tools, they  manufacture and combine tools. In a study published in  2002, researchers in the UK watched a New Caledonian crow make  her own tool to lift a bucket.

The crows in the study had been  choosing between a hooked wire and a straight wire to pick up a bucket of food. But when one of the other birds  stole the hooked wire (rude), this little genius took the straight  wire and bent it into a hook. She made her own, more efficient tool.

And in a 2018 paper, researchers  put food in a box and taught crows that they could  use a dowel to push food out. Then, they took away the dowel  and gave them objects that were too short to reach the food on their own. But put them together and you  could achieve the same effect.

And half of the birds figured that out. The researchers figure making  tools like that may require higher cognitive abilities like  planning and task coordination. In fact, most modern humans don’t  start to show tool innovation skills until they’re between ages five and nine.

Most impressive of all, crows  may even exhibit consciousness. Consciousness in this sense means  not just experiencing something, but being aware that you’re experiencing  it, something that historically we’ve only thought humans and  a few other mammals can do. In a 2020 paper, researchers in Germany showed two carrion crows a bunch of shapes.

Sometimes the shapes were bright and easy to see. Sometimes they were dimmer  and right at the edge of what the crow could see, and other  times, nothing was visible at all. The crows were trained to give a couple responses.

Sometimes they would say “yes I can see the thing” while other times they were supposed  to respond when they could not see it. But the real key was what was  happening in the crows’ brains. The term neural correlates of  consciousness refers to the neuron activity required for a conscious experience, and  only that specific conscious experience.

Scientists study the neural  correlates of consciousness by looking for brain activity that’s  different when someone reports being aware of some stimulus,  versus when they don’t. Now, here’s the key to this research. When you get right at the edge of what  brightness you’re capable of seeing, sometimes you’ll see the  shape, and sometimes you won’t.

So the researchers weren’t so much looking for whether the crows’ brains saw the shape. They were looking for whether the  crow was going to say if they saw it. Certain neurons in the crows’ brains  had a bigger response when the crow was going to say they did see the shape,  whether or not it had actually been on the screen, versus when they were  going to say they didn’t see the shape, even if it had actually been there.

So scientists think those neurons that say “yes I saw something” are a  neural correlate of consciousness. There is some debate over this, but  neural correlates of consciousness typically involve the cerebral cortex,  specifically with the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the very  front part of mammals’ brains that’s critical for complex functions like  attention, impulse control, and flexibility.

But bird brains don’t have the right structure to count as a prefrontal cortex  in the traditional sense. Instead, the neurons in the crows’ brains were in the nidopallium caudolaterale, or NCL. Anatomically, it looks really  different from the PFC.

But functionally, the two regions  seem to have similar functions. Much like the PFC, the NCL receives  signals from sensory areas and sends out signals to the motor parts of the brain,  and plays a role in making decisions, assigning value to things, working  memory, and understanding numbers. One scientist in the 1990s  compared it to computers: Macs and PCs are wired differently  and process things differently, but in the end they serve the same  purpose and do the same things.

Because they’re so different, it’s really  unlikely that this type of intelligence and brain connectivity evolved before birds and mammals split apart 320 million years ago. Instead, similar evolutionary  pressures may have led to the NCL and PFC evolving totally separately. So for animals in multiple  niches, there was so much value in developing consciousness that brains ended up getting to the same capabilities,  just in different ways.

And not just primates and crows. Cephalopods like octopuses are also  super smart, also show behaviors that look like consciousness, and  also have brains that are completely different from mammals or birds. So these behaviors and functions might have evolved totally separately at least three times.

Which means humans might not actually  be all that exceptional after all. And that’s good news, though, because  it means there are even more animals to study to understand how our super  smart brains developed (and theirs, too). And that’s something to crow about.

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