Here’s a fun one. Ars Technica reports that crows solve a classic brain-science test the same way primates do, only about twice as fast.
The study
- Neurobiologists Andreas Nieder and Philipp Schmidbauer at the University of Tübingen gave two hand-raised carrion crows the “random-dot-motion” task long used with monkeys: spot which way a cloud of flickering dots is drifting.
- The crows pecked a target to answer and got a mealworm when they were right. They beat chance even when only 3 percent of the dots moved together.
- The team recorded 248 neurons in the NCL, the bird equivalent of the prefrontal cortex. Bird brains have no layered neocortex, but the crows used the same evidence-gathering math.
- Crows averaged 235 milliseconds. Monkeys took roughly 410 to 600 ms in matched studies, and the crows weren’t trading away accuracy for speed.
My take
A brain built completely differently from ours lands on the same answer, faster. I can’t look at that and not see a Designer. “Consider the ravens,” Jesus said. Pretty sure they’ve been considering us, too.
Have a blessed day! And Happy Hacking!
