Consciousness is always a debate. Philosopher Descartes said, famously, “I think, therefore I am.” But the idea of how to know if an animal is conscious or self-aware is not as simple as that. However, certain birds may indeed be conscious of themselves, much in the way that humans and other mammals are.
Conscious of Self–The Mirror Test
Perhaps one of the most famous tests to determine if an animal (or young person) is conscious of their own selfhood is the “mirror test”. Designed by Gordon Gallup Jr in 1970, the mirror test checks to see if an animal can understand the reflection in the mirror is, well, them. Usually, the test is conducted by applying a dot of dye to an animal’s body on a place they can only see in the mirror, then seeing if they engage with the dot on their own body. Even human children tend to fail this until they are a year-and-a-half or two years old.
In 1981, there was an article in Science magazine by a trio of scientists including famous animal psychologist B.F. Skinner, inventor of the Skinner box. The scientists gave pigeons the mirror test–and they passed. (1, 2)
Birds Are Conscious of Their Own Minds
Neurobiologist Andreas Nieder, from Germany’s University of Tübingen, performed a test to see if crows “know what they know.” Nieder trained two crows, Glenn and Ozzy, to respond to a faint flashing light. If they saw the light, they were to hit one button. If they didn’t, they were to hit another. The birds did very well–but a scan of their brains revealed some very interesting things. “A population of neurons contained information about the crows’ subjective experience throughout the trial,” says the article from Science magazine. That means that not only were the crows thinking about what they had seen, they were also thinking about their response before they made it. I think it demonstrates convincingly that crows and probably other advanced birds have sensory awareness, in the sense that they have specific subjective experiences that they can communicate,” Nieder told Stat News. (3)
Birds Have Conscious Brain Structure
Another recent study out of Germany, led by Martin Stacho of Ruhr-University, looked at the structure of the brain of different birds. It’s been thought that the neocortex, a uniquely mammalian part of the brain, is responsible for higher levels of intelligence. Birds, in this study pigeons and barn owls, have columns of computing neurons instead of a neocortex; however, they may work similarly. “The avian version of this connectivity blueprint could conceivably generate computational properties reminiscent of the [mammalian] neocortex,” says the article, also published in Science magazine. “Similar microcircuits … achieve largely identical cognitive outcomes from seemingly vastly different forebrains.”
The Implications
Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neurobiologist who wrote analyses of both studies for Science magazine, says that the structure of the birds’ brains could lead to “flexibility and complexity to behavior. That is my favorite operational definition of intelligence,” she says. “Behavioral flexibility.” In fact, this flexibility means pigeons and owls could be trained to do things much like monkeys. (3)
