🐦⬛ Crows decide what they see twice as fast as people do
In a German lab test, carrion crows judged the direction of moving dots in about 235 milliseconds — roughly half the time humans and monkeys need.
The mystery
We already know crows are clever. Now it turns out they are also astonishingly quick. Their brains are built very differently from ours, yet they seem to reach decisions in the same way — only faster.
The answer
Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen trained two carrion crows on a touchscreen task, reporting the work in the journal Science. A cloud of dots moved across the screen, and each bird had to judge whether most dots drifted left or right, then peck a target on that side. On average they answered in 235 milliseconds. When the motion was clear they were right almost every time, and even with faint signals they did better than chance. Recordings from single neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale — a region that plays a role similar to our prefrontal cortex — showed the brain separating the two options just 70 milliseconds after the dots appeared, with activity building up to a decision threshold. That pattern matches models of decision-making in primates. The researchers think fast vision helps birds steer in flight and aim their beaks, but the exact reason for the speed is still unknown.
Now think about this
If a bird's brain can make the same decision twice as fast, what else might we be underestimating in animals?
