Date: June 13, 2016
Source: Vanderbilt University
The macaw has a brain the size of
an unshelled walnut, while the macaque monkey has a brain about the size of a
lemon. Nevertheless, the macaw has more neurons in its forebrain -- the portion
of the brain associated with intelligent behavior -- than the macaque.
That is one of the surprising
results of the first study to systematically measure the number of neurons in
the brains of more than two dozen species of birds ranging in size from the
tiny zebra finch to the six-foot-tall emu, which found that they consistently
have more neurons packed into their small brains than are stuffed into
mammalian or even primate brains of the same mass.
The study results were published
online in a paper titled "Birds have primate-like numbers of neurons in
the forebrain" in theProceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences early edition on the week of June 13.
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