Did You Know? Crows are highly intelligent species that are self-aware, just like humans

FACT OR FAKE 2023-09-11

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CROWS

Crows are highly intelligent species that are self-aware, just like humans. They are as smart as Gorillas and have complex brains that can reason.


Crows, known for their remarkable intelligence, has fascinated researchers for years. These avian masterminds, especially the New Caledonian crows native to the South Pacific island, are known to fashion twigs into hooks to extract grubs from rotting logs. However, recent studies have unveiled that crows are even more intelligent than previously believed.

Belonging to the corvid family, which also includes ravens and magpies, crows exhibit a remarkable understanding of their own knowledge and can contemplate the contents of their minds. According to a 2020 study published in Science, this cornerstone of self-awareness is a trait shared by only a few animal species, such as humans, monkeys, and great apes. Crows' highly developed cognitive abilities allow them to devise innovative solutions to problems, like dropping nuts on roads for passing cars to crack them open.

Researchers attribute crows' problem-solving skills to their densely packed brain cells, a characteristic found in both humans and non-human primates. A study published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology in January 2022 revealed that corvid brains have between 200 and 300 million neurons per hemisphere, facilitating efficient communication between brain cells. As a result, crow intelligence is considered comparable to that of some monkeys, and according to a 2017 study in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, it may even be closer to great apes like gorillas.

In the 2020 study, scientists subjected crows to a series of complex tasks to measure neural activity in different neurons and track the birds' sensory and reasoning abilities. The researchers aimed to investigate sensory consciousness, a specific kind of thinking that allows for subjective experiences that can be explicitly accessed and reported. They chose birds as their subjects due to their unique position in the evolutionary tree of life.

Remarkably, the crows' performance in the study affirmed their sensory consciousness, which the researchers believe could indicate that the "neural correlates of consciousness" date back to at least the last common ancestor of birds and mammals. This would place the evolution of consciousness at least 320 million years ago, when reptiles and birds, as well as mammals, evolved from their common stem-amniotic ancestor.


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