The Mind of a Crow

Making Friends With the Flying Monkeys in My Backyard

The birds are noisy in Australia.

The kookaburra is arguably Australia's most famous noisy bird. She begins her call with a soft, low chuckle. But then she suddenly throws her head back and lets out a loud, infectious laugh. This raucous sound is usually an invitation for others to join in. They sure do make a racket, but it's a joyous clamour I feel lucky to hear almost every day. The kookaburra easily wins the title of my favourite bird call.

If you’ve never heard a kookaburra laugh, here’s a little recording…

The birds I hear most often are crows. They don't sound nearly as nice. But what crows lack in musical talent, they make up for in intellectual prowess and curiosity. They are one of the smartest birds around — arguably smarter than the famously intelligent African grey parrot.

A few weeks ago, I noticed a crow tossing a nut around, trying to crack it open by throwing it on the ground. It wasn't working. So I decided to help. I took a hammer to the nut while the crows watched from the treetops. With the nut cracked, I went inside to watch what they would do. It took them a few minutes, but eventually, a crow came down and ate the nut. The next day, next to the water bowl, were three nuts. I cracked them open, too.

This got me thinking. I knew crows were smart, but it had been a while since I'd read any crow research. So, this week, I decided to get curious about the world of crows. I caught up with some of the latest research and spent time observing the crows in my backyard. I even made them some food puzzles.

In hindsight, feeding the crows might not have been my brightest idea. You probably didn't need hindsight to figure that out, but apparently, I did.

Anyhow.

I thought I'd share footage from my backyard experiments and the surprising things I discovered about my new backyard friends.

I was interested in three main questions:

1. How intelligent are crows?

2. What makes a crow's brain special? and

3. Can we detect consciousness in crows?

Q1: How Intelligent are Crows?

Crows are surprisingly brainy birds. On most accounts, they are the smartest of all the birds. In fact, some playfully suggest that crows are better described as flying monkeys than birds.

In urban environments, crows have been seen dropping nuts onto busy roads, waiting for passing cars to crack them open, and then swooping down during red lights to retrieve their snack safely.

Crows can also recognise individual human faces. And seem to hold grudges! If a person is mean to a crow, that bird might harass that specific individual for years afterwards and even teach other crows to do the same. And how do crows harass humans, you might wonder? Well, anecdotally, they've been known to execute targeted air strikes at specific car windshields.

The crow research blew my mind.

These birds show an impressive range of cognitive abilities. Earlier this year, a paper published in Science suggested that crows can count. They can figure out puzzles that require understanding relationships between different objects or ideas, and they seem to understand some basic principles of physics.

For example, when food was placed into a narrow tube half filled with water, the crows dropped stones into the tube, raising the water level and bringing the floating food within reach. Understanding water displacement is a concept that many young children find challenging.

You've probably heard of the marshmallow test — that famous experiment in child psychology. In this test, children are given a choice: eat one marshmallow now or wait and get two marshmallows later. It's a test to measure self-control and the ability to delay gratification for a bigger reward.

Well, it turns out crows can pass a similar test. In experiments, crows were given a choice. They could choose a tool, or they could choose an immediate food reward. The tool would help them open a box that contained a high-value food reward, but they would have to wait 10 minutes before they were permitted to open the box. The immediate food reward was less desirable than the food in the box.

Of the crows that were tested, many chose to wait with the tool over the immediate food reward. Even more impressive is that the crows did this even when other crows were around who might compete for the food.

Crows are highly social animals with complex communication systems. They use a variety of calls and gestures to convey different messages, from warnings about predators to announcements about food sources. Their ‘vocabulary’ is so sophisticated that some researchers believe crows have ‘regional dialects’. Even more impressively, crows have been known to mimic human language. In one amusing case, a crow in New England learned to say, "Here, boy! Come on, boy! Let's go!" It then used this phrase to round up the neighbourhood dogs!

These cognitive feats are impressive. But of all their talents, crows are probably best known for their extraordinary tool use and problem-solving skills.

Tool Use

For a long time, scientists thought that tool use was a key sign of intelligence in animals. But it turns out that even insects and fish use tools. So, now scientists focus on how animals use tools rather than simply whether they do or don't.

Insects and fish seem to use tools in a fixed way. But crows are different. They learn to use tools flexibly — they problem-solve and learn new techniques on the go. Some evidence even suggests that crows might teach these tool-using skills to each other.

What's truly remarkable is how crows make their own tools. They craft a variety of tool types, including straight sticks, hooked twigs, and tools made from leaves. These clever birds don't just make tools on the spot — they carry their tools with them when they search for food. They seem to plan ahead for future use.

Even more impressively, crows can create compound tools — a skill once thought unique to humans and some primates. They can combine sticks to make a longer tool or use one stick to retrieve another, more suitable tool, which they then use to reach food.

Crows don't simply use tools in a fixed way like fish; it seems they grasp the concept of tools as problem-solving devices.

But is tool use in crows really a sign of intelligent problem-solving, or is there a simpler explanation?

Problem-Solving

When scientists study tools use in animals, they're often interested in whether the animal understands cause-and-effect relationships. For example, does a crow know a hooked stick can pull food closer because of its shape, or is it just copying what worked before?

Researchers want to determine if animals come up with solutions based on understanding how things work or if they learn purely by trial and error — trying things repeatedly until they succeed. This distinction is crucial because it helps us gauge how deeply animals comprehend their tools and the problems they're solving.

To investigate this, scientists like to give crows new problems that are similar to what they might face in nature but different from what they've seen before. If crows truly understand how their tools work, they should solve these new problems quickly. But if they're just relying on trial-and-error learning, it might take them longer to figure things out.

One experiment tested whether crows could pick the right tool for a new job. Scientists gave two crows, Betty and Abel, ten sticks of different lengths and put food at various distances in a clear tube. The results were impressive: The crows chose the appropriate tool from the start — selecting shorter sticks for closer food and longer sticks for food that was farther away.

In another experiment, Betty demonstrated an even more impressive feat: when she was given a task that required a hooked tool, she tried with a straight wire, but after a few failed attempts, bent the wire into a hook, which she then used to retrieve the food reward.

This ability to select appropriate tools for novel tasks seems remarkable, but scientists caution that while this behaviour suggests crows are selective and flexible, it doesn't necessarily mean they understand cause and effect in the same way humans do.

Despite scientists' caution, YouTube is full of videos demonstrating crows astounding problem-solving abilities. In the following video, you'll see a crow tackle an 8-step puzzle.

The crow in the above clip is a New Caledonian crow — considered the smartest of all crow species. This crow was kept in captivity, where it could learn from humans and become comfortable around them.

It's unlikely that my wild backyard crows would measure up to this crow's problem-solving skills. But I did wonder how the neighbourhood crows would handle a simpler challenge. So, I decided to set up a (not-so-scientific) experiment of my own.

On a stepping stone, I placed four pieces of food:

1. Two pieces were out in the open, easy for a crow to reach.

2. Two pieces were inside a clear tube, one at each end:

   • One piece was near the edge of the tube, easy to reach.

   • One piece was pushed deeper inside the tube, out of a crow's reach.

I left some sticks of various lengths nearby.

After setting this up, I pressed record on my phone and went inside to watch what would happen. It's not exactly a Hollywood blockbuster, but if you're curious to see what I saw, check out the following clip.

No sticks were necessary! It seems the backyard crows outsmarted me… this time.

I decided to make things a little more difficult by wedging the tubes under the stepping stone, but they managed to get most of those, too.

I never did see them use sticks (or any other tool), but I have noticed them noticing me. They seem to track my movements, watching intently whenever I step outside or get up from my desk. One of the more curious of the crows now walks past my door every half hour or so, pauses, and tilts its head. It's almost as if it's saying, ‘Hey, wanna play?’

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Q2: What Makes a Crow's Brain Special?

Evolutionarily speaking, the last common ancestor of primates and crows lived about 312 million years ago. Despite this vast evolutionary distance, crows have developed cognitive abilities that, in many ways, seem similar to primates. There are many parallels between crow brains and human brains. We both have brain regions responsible for memory and emotion, like the hippocampus and amygdala. But there are some significant differences, too, especially when it comes to the cortex.

Source: https://gcamp6f.com/2016/12/25/the-crow-as-an-animal-model-for-neuroscience/

Crows, like all birds, don't have a cortex in the way mammals do. In mammals, the cortex is a distinctive layered structure on the outer surface of the brain. It typically has six layers, each with specific types of neurons and connections. This layered organisation is often credited with enabling complex cognitive functions in mammals.

The bird brain, however, is organised differently. Instead of a layered cortex, birds have a region called the pallium. The pallium isn't layered like the mammalian cortex; instead, it's arranged in clusters of neurons called nuclei. Despite this structural difference, the bird pallium performs many of the same functions as the mammalian cortex.

What's particularly remarkable is that the crow brain has about twice as many neurons as a primate brain of equal mass. While the crow's brain might be small compared to many mammals, it's incredibly densely packed with neurons. This high neural density, especially in areas responsible for intelligent behaviour, might explain how crows achieve their impressive cognitive abilities despite having a differently organised brain.

Traditionally, we have thought that a layered cortex is necessary for higher intelligence, but the crows are showing us that brains don’t need to be built like ours to be smart.

Source: https://monicaserrano.com/Bird-Brain

Q3: Can We Detect Consciousness in Crows?

We've seen that crows are remarkably intelligent, capable of using tools, solving complex problems, and even understanding analogies. But some remain sceptical about whether these impressive abilities mean that crows are conscious. To tackle this challenging question, scientists used a technique often used to test visual consciousness in human participants.

The experiment used 'threshold' stimuli. In human experiments, a threshold stimulus is often a very dim light that participants detect only about half the time. The key feature of threshold stimuli is that the light's intensity remains constant throughout the experiment. Sometimes, a participant will see it, and sometimes, they won't, even though the light itself never changes.

This setup allows researchers to study how different mental states correlate with different brain activity. If we find a difference in brain activity between when a participant reports seeing the light and when they report not seeing it, we know this difference is due to a change in the participant's mental state, not a change caused by the light itself.

The difference in brain activity that corresponds to a conscious experience is what scientists call a neural correlate of consciousness (or an NCC).

In the crow experiment, researchers trained a crow to peck a button when it saw a light on a screen.

1. Sometimes, the light was bright and easy to spot

2. Sometimes, it was at 'threshold' intensity, and

3. Sometimes, there was no light at all

After each trial, whether the light appeared or not, the crow had to wait a moment before reporting its experience.

While the crow performed this task, scientists recorded the activity of individual brain cells in the crow's pallium — the region thought to be involved in complex thinking in birds (much like the prefrontal cortex is in mammals).

What the scientists found was fascinating. When the light first appeared (or didn't), the crow's brain cells mostly responded to the physical intensity of the light. But during the waiting period, before the crow reported its decision, something interesting happened. The brain cells' activity shifted to match what the crow was going to report, rather than simply reflecting how bright the light actually was.

If crows were simply responding to the light's intensity, we'd expect to see consistent brain activity on those threshold trials. After all, the light's brightness doesn't change. But that's not what the scientists found. Instead, they observed different brain activity patterns depending on whether the crow reported seeing the light or not, even though the light itself was identical in these trials.

The researchers believe this finding reveals something fascinating: the crow's brain seems to be representing the bird's subjective experience or decision, not just responding to the physical light. In other words, they think this shows that crows, like humans, have inner experiences that go beyond simply reflecting the physical world. Instead, these experiences represent how the crow perceives and interprets what it sees.

If the scientists' interpretation of these findings is correct, it suggests something interesting about the evolution of consciousness. Given the last common ancestor of humans and crows lived about 312 million years ago, we're left with two intriguing possibilities:

1. Consciousness evolved independently in birds and mammals, or,

2. Consciousness (at least in a basic form) already existed in our common ancestor long before humans or crows existed.

Either way, the researchers suggest these findings challenge the assumption of unique human consciousness, hinting that subjective experiences might be widespread in the animal kingdom.

While these findings are fascinating, not everyone agrees with the researcher’s interpretation. There's an ongoing debate in the scientific community about what exactly neural correlates of consciousness measure. Do they truly indicate conscious experience, or are they more reflective of other cognitive processes? But that’s a discussion for another article.

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