Parrots have evolved a primate-like telencephalic-midbrain-cerebellar circuit | Hacker News Reader

Parrots have evolved a primate-like telencephalic-midbrain-cerebellar circuit

nature.com

141 pointslaurex31 comments

Parrots and some other birds (like corvids) are ludicrously intelligent for their size and brain size. They can solve puzzles, use tools, copy speech and do all sorts of things that we usually associate with big-brained higher mammals.

This looks like we're finally getting some sense of how birds' intelligence works from a neuroevolutionary sense.

They independently evolved a structure similar to the mammalian neocortex called the avian nidopallium.

Our ancestors had large brains and made tools and fire long before language or representational art. Some structural change enabled that. Probably, there were individual components of it that arose before the whole change happened, and then some further time for it to spread through the population and then leave artefacts.

The spread may have been dramatic, because to an individual who could think, everyone else might seem like zombies or animals, easily manipulated or outwitted. How some "woke" Holdenesque teenagers feel themselves to be.

My point is that, maybe such a large brain isn't really necessary for intelligence. Just the structural change. Although, since we're the only ones, sufficient processing power seems a necessary precondition. It's just not clear how much. Perhaps parrots are quite close.

There's the encephalization quotient, which finds the ratio between brain and body size is what's important. e.g. Whales have enormous brains, but dolphins seem to be more intelligent. Parrots, needing to be light enough to fly, have a high EQ. (Spiders too)

Aside: it's thought that human brain size is limited by the birth canal, and we are born prematurely, with swaddling and cots etc being artificial wombs. Bird nests are also artificial wombs.

The interesting thing I learned about birds is that they have more efficient brains, pound for pound, than mammals. It's not just about brain-size-to-total-mass ratio, it's also an absolute how-much-processing-power-does-this-brain-mass-get-me ratio. This almost assuredly would have been driven by the constraints demanded by the need for flight. Crows can use tools just like primates, with far, far smaller absolute brain weights.

Related: [1], "Scientists research man missing 90% of his brain who leads a normal life"

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...

I have a parrot that learned to call the dog over to the cage, throw food at him and then would laugh. Sometimes in a British accent, I am not sure where that came from...

Dare I say, perhaps from watching John Oliver :)

Unlikely, he is 36 years old and has been doing that for as long as as I can remember.

The parrot is 36 years old? That's very special. I know some birds can outlive humans (a web search will bring up some cases), but we generally think of pets as having shorter lifetimes than us.

He's relatively a sage and I hope he is treated with the respect one deserves. :)

For larger parrots, it is actually not that uncommon.

A responsible parrot owner should plan for the parrot to outlive them and include something in their will about how the parrot will be passed down.

Parrots can live something like 70 years.

It actually turns out the bird is a female, but thirty years of saying "he" is a hard habit to break. I was told from a pet store owner you could do a DNA analysis of the poop to determine gender. Also he incorrectly told me male birds could lay eggs if they didn't have a mate. I was 8 so I believed it.

> Also he incorrectly told me male birds could lay eggs if they didn't have a mate.

This is hilarious. You should get her a mate. :)

A British laugh; do you mean like Sid James?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVrm6Qc6neM

There's a crow in Yorkshire, UK who's been filmed "speaking" with a Yorkshire accent. "Y'alright, love?"

(It's actually an African pied crow, with a white band around its midsection. Similar crows were used in a recent Windex TV ad campaign. No idea how it got to Yorkshire; it might have been a pet that escaped.)

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-leeds-44713074/pied-c...

What is the evolutionary benefit of our large brains, when birds can achieve such high intelligence in such a small volume? I mean, having a smaller head would definitely be a tangible benefit for survival (e.g. easier birth, less prone to injury, needs less energy) , yet humans had evolved in the exact opposite direction... What is the avian brain’s secret sauce?

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116

Maybe we just need the right sort of developmental pressure.

You can write on hackernews, avians can't. I guess the answer is pretty straightforward.

What happens though if you give a avian or a tribe of sign language fluent apes.. a way to write things down permanently..

I seem to recall reading somewhere that most of our brain is just interior "wiring" and the actual thinking goes on in the outer few millimetres - i.e. most of the brain is just interconnections. If that is correct then I would expect that the amount of "wiring" (and so overall volume) would need to increase exponentially as the brain power increased.

...plus there is all that crap about us only using 2% of our brains etc.

The 2% thing and varriants are myths

More evidence that differences in intelligence are largely differences in basic brain structure, not things that significantly vary within species. IMO brains are structures that can be easily broken by mutations, but if unbroken are of roughly equal potential (although a product of surface area and density of connections might make a measurable difference in memory.) Better brains would be significantly different in structure.

Give a brain the right structure, and it could be the size of a peanut and figure out things you can't figure out.

This is certainly evidence for the obvious point that structure matters.

But it is not evidence that size does not matter. There is a reason why the human cortex is 4X the size of a chimp's. Human IQ is correlated with brain size.

Density of connections also seems to matter.

Animals generally have smoother brains than we do. It'd be fascinating to engineer a line of parrots with wrinklier brains.

Cockatiels also have an uncanny intelligence - they recognize different people, behave and play differently with each one of them, I always wonder how idle my surplus of 1298g of brain is...

Cockatiels _are_ parrots. Though it’s interesting that there are at least two not-super-closely-related groups of smart birds; corvids and parrots.

Looking at my mother’s descent from Alzheimer’s, what we have is (if you will excuse the analogy) more skill slots, not unique class skills.

Could you please expand on what you mean?

I suppose they're referencing a popular video game mechanic, in which skill-building works by collecting skills in a limited number of "slots".

The claim is that while humans may be able to master a large number of different skills, few of them are limited to humans in and of themselves (and not available to some other animals as well).

That clarifies things. Thanks.

How unused is the letter z on your keyboard when typing? Different regions of the brain serve different functions, so though they aren’t always activated, they are necessary.

Besides, obsolete and unused brain tissue is very expensive calorically to maintain, and would be a hinderance to survival over long periods of time.

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