Think you’re evolved? Pigeons can multitask better than you!
Pigeons are capable of switching between two tasks as quickly as humans – and even more faster in certain situations, despite their small brains, a study suggests. Researchers performed behavioural experiments to test birds and humans and found that the cause of the slight multitasking advantage in birds is their higher neuronal density. “For a long time, scientists used to believe the mammalian cerebral cortex to be the anatomical cause of cognitive ability; it is made up of six cortical layers,” said Sara Letzner from Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany.
In birds, however, such a structure does not exist. “That means the structure of the mammalian cortex cannot be decisive for complex cognitive functions such as multitasking,” said Letzner, researcher of the study published in the journal Current Biology. The pallium of birds does not have any layers comparable to those in the human cortex, but its neurons are more densely packed than in the cerebral cortex in humans.
Pigeons, for example, have six times as many nerve cells as humans per cubic millimetre of brain, researchers said. The average distance between two neurons in pigeons is fifty per cent shorter than in humans, they said. As the speed at which nerve cell …read more
