Here's another fascinating forward from the dinosaur list! To avoid
confusion, remember that even though my name and address are at the very
end of the message, I had nothing to do with it. Dennis

>Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 07:56:31 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "D. Victor" <dvictor at u.washington.edu>
>To: Dennis Paulson <dpaulson at ups.edu>
>Subject: Bird brains (fwd)
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 07:09:35 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Harold Fuller <halfu at u.washington.edu>
>To: Dan Victor <dvictor at u.washington.edu>
>Subject: Bird brains (fwd)
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Thu, 22 Jun 1995 21:52:55 -0400
>From: VanKathy at aol.com
>To: Multiple recipients of list <dinosaur at lepomis.psych.upenn.edu>
>Subject: Bird brains
>
>Please forgive me if you have already received this lengthy post, but I think
>that I made a mistakenly failed to mail it to all on this list. I wrote this
>as a response to Steve9120 and M. Rowe concerning the intelligence of crows
>and birds and dinosaurs in general. I am very interested in your responses
>since I pose questions well outside of my field of expertise. Here is the
>post:
>
>One more example of the intelligence of crows (or perhaps ravens -- it was
>many years ago when I read this) involves an experiment somewhat similar to
>what M. Rowe described. A bird was placed in an area where the only water
>available was in a tube so narrow that only the bird's beak could fit inside.
> Furthermore, the water level was set so that it lay just beyond the bird's
>reach. In a brilliant solution that probably is beyond many human's problem
>solving abilities, the bird dropped pebbles into the water until the water
>was displaced enough for it to reach!
>
>As far as other birds are concerned, I have heard remarkable things about
>African Grey Parrots. I read of one bird with a vocabulary of hundreds of
>words that, it was claimed, idependently developed the ability to construct
>simple two word sentences (i.e. the bird would say "Go gym" -- a request to
>go to the gym for play after being told what "go" meant and the association
>of "gym" with the gym and play). The bird could also identify not only
>objects like ball, apple, spaghetti, etc., but could identify abstract
>objects on flash cards like "blue circle" and "red triangle." According to
>the researchers, its ability to accurately identify abstract objects is
>beyond even the highest non-human primates.
>
>The intelligence of parrots and their close relatives, and crows and their
>relatives (i.e. ravens and jays) is fairly widely known, but I have also
>heard that pidgeons have exceeded humans on some tests where they were
>trained to identify complex abstract designs transformed though reflection,
>rotation, etc. In fact, in a recent _Discover_ article it was claimed that
>a group of trained pidgeons could accurately descriminate between different
>styles of art. For example, they could tell the difference between works of
>Picasso and works of Matisse (spelling?).
>
>Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that birds are gifted in identifying objects
>and patterns visually since the biggest part of their brains are the enlarged
>optic lobes while for us mammals the largest part of our brains, I think, are
>essentially swollen olfactory lobes.
>
>Birds (and other dinosaurs) possess much larger ganglia (nerve bundles) in
>their hip and shoulder regions than do mammals. It's pretty well known that
>when a chicken's head is cut off, the body still possesses the ability to
>flap and run. What I have been wondering about is if these ganglia act like
>regional "co-processors" that off-load some of the motor control from the
>brain. I don't suggest that birds and dinosaurs "think" with these areas,
>but that a level of gross motor control may occur there requiring only simple
>commands from the brain like "run" or "fly fast." This type of operation
>would be especially useful in animals like birds because it would mean the
>brain could be smaller and the weight from an advanced nervous system could
>be distributed more evenly and not make the bird quite so top-heavy. This
>type of nervous system might also prove useful to dinosaurs: in a large beast
>the ganglias might enable quicker and more complex responses to stimuli.
> Since it could take several seconds for a message to be sent from the brain
>to the tail along normal pathways, by narrowing the bandwidth of messages
>sent from the brain, it might be possible to send these messages more
>quickly, and send more complex commands enabling the large animal to be
>quicker and more coordinated than one might otherwise expect.
>
>Parrots and ravens already have big brains. If I recall correctly, in
>comparison to their body weight, their brains exceed most mammals. Perhaps
>because they "think" with what is effectively the optical processing parts of
>their brains which would presumably work differently and, not unconceivably,
>more efficiently than the olfactory regions we think with, birds may not need
>brains as large mammals' to be equally "intelligent." Also, the existence of
>ganglia might suggest that the brain could be smaller still while off-loading
>some of its functions elsewhere.
>
>I am well outside of my field in this message and welcome any suggestions
>and/or corrections to any of my ideas presented here.
>
>V. Smith
>
>

Dennis Paulson, Director phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416