Our Brains Are More Like Birds Than We Thought

In my chapter CLEVER CORVIDS I begin by pointing out that recent research reveals that the parts of the embryonic mammalian brain that eventually form the cortex arise from similar regions in birds. Birds are not so bird-brained after all. Not surprisingly, certain birds - like corvids and parrots - turn out to be exceptionally clever - rather than the robotic automata all birds were recently thought to be. This article supports this revisionist view of bird brains. It reports the work of Harvey Karten, and his group, at UC San Diego - long champions of bird brain-power - who compared a part of the chicken telencephalon which has the same duties as the mammalian auditory cortex and found it has the same laminar and columnar arrangement of neurons.