Hacker News Reader

Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

I'm continually fascinated by how corvids seem to show this level of intelligence without any of the brain structures that we usually associate with it. Can someone point me to a source that explains this?

View on HN

I have magpies outside my window and they are very intelligent and nice creatures. They sit in trees two together, close to each other, enjoying each other's company. I've seen them group together in bigger numbers to fend off cats and I've seen them tease cats in situations where they know the cat can't reach them.

They are known to recognize faces of people and have stunning memory, remembering hundreds of places where they stash their food reserves etc. I think they are awesome.

I think they're awesome too, such interesting creatures! Thanks for sharing your observations.

I'm not gone on them, they persecute the local song bird population, we have a plague of them and the even more unwelcome grey crow. The magpie's call is either a horrible squeal or an equally unpleasant chchchchchch sound

Magpies are often assholes. One kid throws a stone at one and they swoop anyone near their nest for generations. Smart? Yeah. Nice? Not so much.

I don't have an explanation, but I recommend looking into the work of Onur Güntürkün who is doing research on bird brains.

Güntürkün: Cognition without cortex. https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S136...

Press release: http://news.rub.de/english/press-releases/2016-03-03-complex...

His talks are pretty good, there may be higher quality recordings than this one though: https://youtu.be/nHTTVFDjQ1Q

Not specifically a text about corvids, but there are stories and studies about corvids discussed in this book I really enjoyed reading: Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30231743-are-we-smart-en...

FWIW, I recently read the observation that intelligence seems to be correlated with brain volume relative to body volume, rather than absolute brain volume. Who knows why- but think about the animals we know to be smart. Elephants, whales but not fish, corvids but not warblers, humans, great apes but not monkeys, ...

> brain structures that we usually associate with it

That's just human (or, more generally, mammalian) exceptionalism/bias.

As a sibling comment helpfully linked, there's now research showing that avian brains create/house intelligence in different parts, with different structures.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4445165-corvus

Not too scientific I’m afraid but maybe useful.

If we could explain this then we could probably explain intelligence in general.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com