Neurobiology student Sara Matiş takes a close look at the world around her – and the lessons to be learned from nature. In her third column, she marvels at birds.

The last time I saw a Monet painting was a couple of weeks ago. It was towards the closing time of the museum, so I had the painting all to myself for a few quiet minutes. I thought about a study from the 90s in which pigeons learned to discriminate between Monet and Picasso paintings. I don’t think we give enough credit to pigeons. Or birds in general.

Crows can recognize faces, use tools to forage, and were observed to leave walnuts on the road for cars to crack open. They know to drop sinking objects rather than floating ones in water-filled tubes to raise the water level and reach floating food. New Caledonian crows are capable of delayed gratification, meaning resisting an immediate reward in favour of a better reward later, which is an ability that arises only after about five years of age in humans. You get it, I think birds are awesome. And yet, we still use ‘birdbrain’ as an insult.

There was a false theory that started in the late 19th century about the structure of bird brains which deemed them unintelligent. This view persisted for over a century until 2004. It was still there when I was born. It really made me think about how easily we accept theories which imply that mammalian brains, and especially the human brain, are superior. We are too preoccupied with what makes us, humans, special.

Now we know, especially thanks to some studies from 2020 onwards, that bird and human brains are not as different as we thought. Despite not sharing the same anatomical organization, human and bird brains are remarkably similar in their connectivity, meaning the way the neurons are wired together. The areas responsible for higher cognition in birds and mammals don’t seem to stem from a common precursor. Instead, evolution might have independently reached similar ways of cognition over the last 320 million years, since birds and mammals split on the evolutionary tree.

Different paths that converged by coming up with a similar solution – and I find so much wonder in that. I find it so special that I share characteristics with other creatures on this earth, that evolution shaped us all beautifully, not aiming for human intelligence as the end goal, or any end goal for that matter. I like to see the evolutionary tree for what it is – a tree, that splits and converges, rather than a ladder towards a perfect species.

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