Should 'bird brain' be a compliment? Here's how crows think fast

New research in the journal Science finds that crows turn visual information into decisions twice as fast as humans and primates. They also process information is quite similarly to humans. NPR Science LISTEN & FOLLOW NPR App Apple Podcasts Spotify Amazon Music iHeart Radio RSS link Science Should 'bird brain' be a compliment? Here's how crows think fast October 22, 20264:47 PM ET Heard on All Things Considered Pien Huang Should "bird brain" be a compliment? Listen · Transcript Toggle more options Download Embed Embed <iframe src="https://www. npr. org/player/embed/nx-s1-6010587/nx-s1-9974811" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"> Transcript New research in the journal Science finds that crows turn visual information into decisions twice as fast as humans and primates. They also process information is quite similarly to humans. Transcript JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: It might be time to rethink the phrase birdbrain. New research suggests that crows actually make good decisions twice as fast as humans. Here's NPR's Pien Huang with how they do it. PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: A crow's brain is the size of a walnut, which isn't very big. But Andreas Nieder, a comparative neuroscientist at the University of Tubingen in Germany, says there's a lot in there. ANDREAS NIEDER: For a long time, birds have been considered to be dumb creatures, which is totally wrong. HUANG: Nieder says birds are really smart, especially crows.(SOUNDBITE OF CROW CAWING)HUANG: Crows make tools. They hold funerals, and they can remember human faces for years. In his research, Nieder trains carrion crows to do complex tasks. NIEDER: So in our case, we placed the crows in front of a touch-sensitive computer monitor, and the crows performed a so-called random dot motion discrimination task. HUANG: It's a classic test that measures decision-making speed done . A bunch of dots show up on the screen, and some of them start to move in a clear direction. NIEDER: The crows were watching these movies and then indicated whether this was a left or rightward movement a target.(SOUNDBITE OF CROW COOING)HUANG: Those that got it right were rewarded with a juicy mealworm, he says. On average, the crows made their decisions in a fifth of a second, about twice as quickly as humans and primates. NIEDER: It's really amazingly fast, and this was self-pacedly (ph), so chances are they can even be a little quicker if it would force them.