Bird brain? Ounce for ounce birds have significantly more neurons in their brains than mammals or primates

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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Bird brains may help drones fly and avoid crashing

5 November 2014

By Mandyam Srinivasan, The University of Queensland and Ingo Schiffner, The University of Queensland

Imagine a sky full of autonomous flying machines delivering anything from fast-food to important documents, medical supplies or just a surprise gift for someone special. How do you stop them all colliding with each other and any other obstacles on their journey?

Google has been experimenting with such delivery methods with test flights this year in Queensland’s Darling Downs. The online store Amazon is lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to continue testing its Prime Air autonomous flying machines to deliver packages to customers within 30 minutes.

If all the testing proves a success it won’t be long before these autonomous aircraft take to the skies. So for lessons in how to fly, why not look to nature for some guidance solutions?

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Bird brains more precise than humans'

(Phys.org) —Birds have been found to display superior judgement of their body width compared to humans, in research to help design autonomous aircraft navigation systems.

A University of Queensland (UQ) study has found that budgerigars can fly between gaps almost as narrow as their outstretched wingspan rather than taking evasive measures such as tucking in their wings.

UQ Queensland Brain Institute researcher Dr Ingo Schiffner said previous research showed humans unnecessarily turned their shoulders to pass through doorways narrower than 130 per cent of their body width, whereas birds are far more precise.

"We were quite surprised by the birds' accuracy – they can judge their wingspan within 106 per cent of their width when it comes to flying through gaps," Dr Schiffner said.

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Clever birds don't have it all

Studies show some great tits are remarkably clever when it comes to solving problems to get at food. But does this help them in the wild?

BE CAREFUL who you call a bird brain, you may be paying them a compliment. Some bird species exhibit remarkable intelligence, among them the great tit, which is a common garden bird.

The New Caledonian crow is top of the leader board with its capacity to fashion tools to retrieve food, but the local great tit doesn’t do too badly when it comes to solving problems. Dr John Quinn, a specialist in animal personality and cognition, began to study the bird four years ago while at Oxford University. He and his team caught wild great tits in a nearby wood and set the birds a simple problem. If they solved it, they would get at some food.

Now a lecturer in ecology at University College Cork, Quinn had a particular purpose in mind when conducting the experiments. “We are trying to understand why we get individual variations in the birds’ cognitive ability,” he says.

They were also trying to discover whether it is “better to be brighter” – whether the birds that were able to solve the puzzle also did better generally, either reproductively or in terms of survival. “The purpose of our study was simple: to test if it was better being a problem-solver. That hadn’t been tested in the past. Do they do better or do all individuals do equally well in the end?

Continued:  http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sciencetoday/2012/1018/1224325405737.html

Scientists find homolog of mammalian neocortex in bird brain

A seemingly unique part of the human and mammalian brain is the neocortex, a layered structure on the outer surface of the organ where most higher-order processing is thought to occur. But new research at the University of Chicago has found the cells similar to those of the mammalian neocortex in the brains of birds, sitting in a vastly different anatomical structure.

The work, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, confirms a 50-year-old hypothesis about the identity of a mysterious structure in the bird brain that has provoked decades of scientific debate. The research also sheds new light on the evolution of the brain and opens up new animal models for studying the neocortex. "If you want to study motor neurons or dopamine cells, which are biomedically important, you can study them in mammals, in chick embryos, in zebrafish. But for these neurons of the cerebral cortex, we could only do that in mammals before," said Clifton Ragsdale, PhD, associate professor of neurobiology at University of Chicago Biological Sciences and senior author of the study. "Now, we can take advantage of these other experimental systems to ask how they are specified, can they regenerate, and other questions."

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-scientists-homolog-mammalian-neocortex-bird.html#jCp