
Why Neuroscientists Need to Study the Crow - sergeant3
http://nautil.us/blog/why-neuroscientists-need-to-study-the-crow
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lr4444lr
The reasoning ability and executive function of birds, crows in particular, is
astonishing. Intelligence (certain kinds, at least) may be just as reliant on
brain:body mass ratio as it is on overall brain size and complexity.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVaITA7eBZE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVaITA7eBZE)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04)

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api
That's unbelievably mysterious, since one would assume there to be some
minimum amount of _absolute_ processing power needed for this stuff.

It's like saying CPU to overall device size determines processing power, so a
12-core Xeon in a giant box is less powerful than an ARM32 chip in a phone.

My guess would be that this ratio is a proxy for how important brains are to
that animal in its evolutionary niche. A small brain vs. body size indicates
that brains must not matter as much as other things, therefore no need to
waste resources on it. But a large brain vs. body size indicates that brains
are important. This might in turn correlate with greater evolutionary pressure
to optimize brain function and efficiency, leading to some super-interesting
adaptations and a very minimal parsimonious design.

... which supports the idea that studying these small and efficient brains
might be deeply revealing. They're so small and powerful that everything in
there must be really important.

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TheOtherHobbes
Very true. We're talking about something the size of a small nut that appears
to have the same cognitive power as the much larger brain of a much larger
mammal.

It would be interesting - not very ethical and possibly deeply creepy, but
interesting - to select birds and other animals for intelligence, and see how
just how far you could take a selective breeding program.

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fdej
No need to speculate. Selective breeding for intelligence is how we got
herding dogs (Border Collies, German Shepherds, etc.).

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derefr
The kind of intelligence working dogs were bred for is a very specific kind of
intelligence.

I'd like to see a species selected for _social_ intelligence—the kind of
tribal-affiliation status-dynamic thing that is theorized to have brought
about language.

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blennon
The author is wrong in stating, "yet neuroscientists have not scrutinized
their brains for one simple reason: They don’t have a neocortex."

Birds have an analogous structure to the mammalian neocortex [1].

[1]
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2906560/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2906560/)

~~~
nickledave
Thank you for posting this. It is a bit mistaken to say "neuroscientists
haven't scrutinized their brains" when people like Harvey Karten (one of the
authors on the paper at that link) have dedicated their lives to studying the
avian brain. Not only do birds have something that looks analogous to
neocortex, they also have a bit of actual cortex, and the rest of their brain
(below the cortex) is very similar to ours as well. (Here's a review:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2507884/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2507884/)
)We study mainly mouse brains because that's where the genetics worked first,
but hopefully new tools like Crispr will change that. By way of analogy,
imagine you were an alien race trying to figure out how computers work: would
you rather have infinite Windows boxes, or would you rather have some Windows,
some Macs, and maybe a TRS-80 and a Commodore?

edit: punctuation, removed crankiness

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danharaj
I wonder to what extent intelligence is just brute arithmetic and not
sophisticated interconnections. Our neurons and cortical structure are really
good at packing as many neurons as possible into a skull and training them on
living experience as early as possible relative to the developmental timeline
of the brain.

~~~
KingMob
Former neuroscientist here. There's certainly brute arithmetic going on. At a
crude level, most individual neurons can be thought of as "voltage < threshold
? fire() : noop()".

But like individual transistors, the overall pattern is what determines its
functionality. My former field was in consciousness, and one of the
interesting puzzles was the cerebellum. The cerebellum contains 3x the number
of neurons in the neocortex, but in cases where it's been removed (resection
for epilepsy or cancer), people have fine-motor control issues, but not much
more. By contrast, removing a much smaller area like visual area V1 will wipe
out your visual experience and leave you blind!

So, what explains the opposite interaction between size and effect? Structure.
The cerebellum is highly regular, like a GPU designed for repetitive graphics
operations. The rest of the brain is more like, uh, an FPGA.

~~~
danharaj
Cool! I think i take issue with "fine motor control issues, but not much
more", though. Fine motor control's a really important feature of human
intelligence, don't you think? Do you think the cerebellum isn't as efficient
as it could be or that the number of neurons dedicated to the task reflects
how computationally intensive motor control is?

I suppose a possible investigation of that question would be, say, comparing
our cerebellum to that of another animal with extremely good fine motor
control, like the cephalopods.

~~~
KingMob
Depends on what one means by intelligence. People with cerebellectomy have
difficulty with balance, but it doesn't really interfere with their general
intelligence or their sensory experience.

I think the cerebellum is no more or less efficient than other areas, and I
don't know if "computationally intensive" is the right way to look at it. The
cerebellum really is similar to GPUs. GPUs use a lot of silicon to do
constrained, repetitive tasks efficiently, but they don't support general
processing models outside their narrow domain.

It's hard to compare with cephalopods, though they're very interesting,
because their neural architecture is so _radically_ different from ours. For
starters, ganglia in their arms allow each arm a certain measure of
_independent_ activity. E.g., arms that get severed can try to "feed" the
mouth for up to an hour after detachment.

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vacri
I did a psych/neuroscience comajor about 20 years ago, and I remember
comparitive neuroscience, showing that in general, as the animal's brain gets
more complex, so does intelligence. Parrots and crows were recognised as
outliers to this trend - they showed intelligence that bucked the trend, given
the complexity of the brain. They're not the smartest animals around, but they
do buck the trend in terms of neural complexity.

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thaw13579
If they're so intelligent, to what extent is it ethical to study them
experimentally?

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maaku
To whatever extent allows us to learn more.

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shmageggy
Yes! And we could learn even more by studying the neural activity in infants.
Where do I sign up?

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maaku
Could we? That seems dubious. Infants have very little structure formed in
their cortices.

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zardo
You could take a sample every month for a few years. That should be pretty
informative/horrific.

