Talks from the ESI Systems Neuroscience Conference (ESISyNC) 2022: The ever changing brain: Through development and evolution.
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Talk by Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, GER): Why birds are smart

For about a century, bird brains were seen as small, non-cortically organized systems that cast a dim prospect on the cognitive abilities of their beholders. Within the last two decades, this view has changed dramatically. My talk will concentrate on discoveries of about the last decade that demonstrate that birds have a prefrontal-like area with identical functional, electrophysiological, neurochemical, and connectional features as the mammalian prefrontal cortex. Similarly, the avian pallium, although topographically and topologically different from the mammalian one, harbors a connectome akin to those of mammals. In addition, avian neuron numbers are not only much higher than expected by brain size, but also mostly allocated to associative areas in corvids. In parallel, birds developed the ability to cut down the metabolic demands of their neurons by a factor of three. This not only makes a brain with so many neurons affordable but may also provide cellular computational properties that are out of reach for mammals. Lastly, birds even developed a sophisticated cortex within their sensory pallial areas – possibly independent from mammals. Thus, avian and mammalian forebrains converged within 315 million years to an astounding degree. Most importantly, these changes happened very likely in convergent manners without relying on common ancestry. Possibly, evolution does not lack creativity but is just facing a severe limitation of degrees of freedom when wiring a vertebrate brain for sophisticated cognition.

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