Makes sense, given that to birds, optimizing for weight is everything. But seeing that the ridiculously smart border collies have a comparatively low density of neurons, clearly there’s more to intelligence than that.
Neurons are used for more tasks than just problem-solving. Dogs have a good smell, so a big part of their brain is probably used for just this. They seem to be also much more acrobatic and reacting faster in general than an Octopus, so theses are probably also areas where additional neurons are used. Dogs have also a high social intelligence, not sure how Octopi are in that regard.
And are Octopi really better at problem-solving than a dog in general?
Fun fact: octopus does not come from Latin, which would give the plural an -i ending. It comes from Greek, which means that if you want to be particularly correct about your plurals, then the plural is octopodes.
That's fun. Octopii rolls off the tongue though, doesn't it? Since we have survived both the Greek and Roman cultures, and have absorbed aspects of both into languages now widely distributed, I'd like to propose that we seed the path of a true lingua franca and declare the plural of octopus to be octopii.
It's no worse than inserting greek words (octopodes) into English language.
Something interesting about the octopus is that it is independent and learning from the time it is tiny.
It continually learns from the real world, as more and more neurons accumulate.
This layered learning may be an advantage in terms of compact representations.
No doubt, the human fetus brain learns much earlier than birth, or even from emergence of first neurons. But it isn't learning from the environment directly, or making survival critical choices, from first neural emergence.
--
Another octopus advantage maybe that it has relatively independent "brains" behind each eye, and along each leg. The distribution of brain in a way that reflects its physical distribution, might offer optimizations too.
We know humans benefit from partially independent spinal cord activity. This is suggestive evidence that the distributed intelligence of an octopus may be an advantage.
--
For exhibited intelligence per time, no other creature including humans comes anywhere close. They even learn "theory of mind", i.e. the ability to model other creatures situational awareness, ability to perceive, and likely responses to different situations.
To learn all that, without any mentoring or social examples, in the order of a year, along with their exotic body plan and amazing sensory configurations, would make the octopus a wildly implausible science fiction invention, if we didn't actually happen to have them living successfully in astonishing numbers, and pervasively in essentially all ocean environments.
It may have been enormous luck for us, that they live in an environment where technological progression would be very challenging.
The octopus is a very strong candidate for "smarter than humans", as an individual. If we equalize age, it isn't even a contest. If we normalize for lifespan, but equalize for lack of social mentorship, I expect they win decisively again.
(We often forget how much of our survival and progress is predicated on not being individuals. We have a species intelligence that is much higher than our individual intelligence. Since we as individuals gain so much from what is passed to us, we imagine that we would naturally know countless basic things, that if we actually grew up with people who did not know those things, would be far out of reach. Having people around to teach us things, allowed us evolve to be mentally lazy! Shades of current tool/dependency issues. The octopus has never had a crutch.)
--
There is no credible estimate of how many octopus individuals inhabit our oceans. But the number is in the billions at a minimum. Including young, it may be tens of billions or more.
This code base is larger, so it’s certainly a smarter product!
"Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication" was likely not uttered by Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s still a pretty cool expression. Anyway, architecture matters.
No its pretty well understood that brain size in it self doesn't signify intelligence, even if correcting for body size. Density, connectedness, and complexity are important. Modeling the information processing capacity of animal brains it is shown that smaller brain like those of octopi and corvides are highly capable despite a relative low neuron count compared to humans.
That seems like an unfounded inference. Plenty of animals have more neurons than humans but lesser cognitive and language abilities. Language has lot to do with structure of the brain in addition to neuron count.
Birds have areas of the brain that we would consider language alike. Both for native bird communication and I would also speculate that for human to bird communication.
If you have ever owned a parrot this is blatantly obvious since they actively communicate and vocalize both observations and needs/desires
This reminds me of being told dogs don't feel emotions by someone who never owned one. Parrots most definitely can talk. Their language is extremely primitive but if you've ever been around a grey and it's owner for some time, they definitely talk to each other. The parrot will readily communicate observations and desires.
Isn't that what humans do too? We mimic noises we've heard before and we associate meaning to the noises. Parrots can do that. Our quaker parrot would bite you, then say 'not supposed to bite'. He clearly associated some kind of meaning to that phrase.
Common misconception. Parrots are much more than just mimicry machines. There is also Apollo the parrot that shows this in detail and following from Irene's research with Alex
Bumblebee (the Transformer) might have an objection here. Purposeful mimicry can be used for talking on certain complexity. It does not have to be human-level to be communication.
I mean, isn’t that just what you’re doing too? If you see a cow, and you’ve been taught that ‘cow’ is the sound that describes a cow, don’t you say “cow?”
> Dr. Irene Pepperberg studied an African grey parrot named Alex for 30 years. Alex could identify objects, colours, shapes, and numbers. He understood abstract concepts like "same" and "different." His vocabulary exceeded 100 words. When he died in 2007, his last words to Pepperberg were reportedly "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow." I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off.
The author takes forgranted the claim of intelligence; and does not assess at all whether the researcher simply said those words to the parrot every night. (Why not? It sounds exactly like what a researcher would tell a parrot before turning off the lights.) A quick search on Wikipedia says the parrot was also found dead in the morning, not in the implied "parrot has last words" scenario.
Ah yeah that's exactly what it was but thought I'd try to add a bit more emotion to this point haha. Even if the parrot said this every night as a good night - its still very sweet that Alex said that every night :)
I have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.
Sure, but the speed of change is also related to lifespan. The longer lives you have (technically how long it takes to start reproducing and how many offspring you have), the less time you have to adapt.
This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
I suspect the more significant difference here is the selection pressures. Take a good look at any part of a bird and you'll see millions of years of selection for reduced weight.
The cost of weight is just so much greater when you're flying. Interesting too that bats tend to have lower neuron counts than say rodents.
Did dinosaurs have a more weight efficient brain before flight, or were they forced to shrink before re-evolving that complexity in a smaller package?
Most of our mammal ancestors between us and dinosaur times had likely had extremely short lifespans as well, often shorter than the ancestors of modern songbirds.
> This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
There's no indication that this is what the OP meant. If the OP meant that, they'd be saying that birds evolved faster, not that they had an ancestor that evolved a very long time ago, which is a meaningless statement.
I agree one should interpret what people say charitably, but there's a difference between that and just pretending that someone made a totally different claim in order to make a nonsense statement seem less silly.
It's unclear what you're saying or how it responds to the OP and his critics.
If birds and primates today belong to equally long evolutionary lineages, then they have both had the same amount of time to adapt.
Now, speciation is what makes things interesting, because species diversify the subjects of adaptation. So, if we say some bird species has been around for longer than the human species, then you can say that that bird species has been subjected to adaptation pressures for longer (though this, too, is too simplistic; adaptation pressures are not uniformly distributed).
This, of course, starts getting into philosophical questions about the notion of "species". Modern biology has a poor grasp of what it means to be a species. The biological literature alone contains about 20 different operating definitions. To reconcile evolution with the notion of species, some have argued that all or almost all living things belong to a single species, but we're actually seeing a resurgence of functionalist/teleological notions in biology today, because it turns out you cannot explain or classify living things without such notions.
If you go a bit farther back, we all ultimately come from the same lizard-like amniotes, newly emerged onto land from amphibious ancestors. It just took dinosaurs and mammals a little bit to evolve out of the "four-legged monster with teeth" body type.
Parrot owner here. This doesn't surprise me at all. I'm actually a bit surprised they cared about the gyms!
This fits right into the ABC model of parrot psychology:
https://www.parrots.org/pdfs/all_about_parrots/reference_lib...
Makes sense, given that to birds, optimizing for weight is everything. But seeing that the ridiculously smart border collies have a comparatively low density of neurons, clearly there’s more to intelligence than that.
Adding to this a chart of neuron count [1]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
Interesting... I would have thought Octopi have more total neurons than dogs, given their problem-solving capabilities.
Now I wonder if the decentralized organization / hub and spoke model octopi alone exhibit offers some advantage when it comes to problem-solving
Neurons are used for more tasks than just problem-solving. Dogs have a good smell, so a big part of their brain is probably used for just this. They seem to be also much more acrobatic and reacting faster in general than an Octopus, so theses are probably also areas where additional neurons are used. Dogs have also a high social intelligence, not sure how Octopi are in that regard.
And are Octopi really better at problem-solving than a dog in general?
Fun fact: octopus does not come from Latin, which would give the plural an -i ending. It comes from Greek, which means that if you want to be particularly correct about your plurals, then the plural is octopodes.
That's fun. Octopii rolls off the tongue though, doesn't it? Since we have survived both the Greek and Roman cultures, and have absorbed aspects of both into languages now widely distributed, I'd like to propose that we seed the path of a true lingua franca and declare the plural of octopus to be octopii.
It's no worse than inserting greek words (octopodes) into English language.
They are all already in use https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus
Yeah their nerve cells are much larger. The axons of a giant squid are up to a millimeter in width.
Something interesting about the octopus is that it is independent and learning from the time it is tiny.
It continually learns from the real world, as more and more neurons accumulate.
This layered learning may be an advantage in terms of compact representations.
No doubt, the human fetus brain learns much earlier than birth, or even from emergence of first neurons. But it isn't learning from the environment directly, or making survival critical choices, from first neural emergence.
--
Another octopus advantage maybe that it has relatively independent "brains" behind each eye, and along each leg. The distribution of brain in a way that reflects its physical distribution, might offer optimizations too.
We know humans benefit from partially independent spinal cord activity. This is suggestive evidence that the distributed intelligence of an octopus may be an advantage.
--
For exhibited intelligence per time, no other creature including humans comes anywhere close. They even learn "theory of mind", i.e. the ability to model other creatures situational awareness, ability to perceive, and likely responses to different situations.
To learn all that, without any mentoring or social examples, in the order of a year, along with their exotic body plan and amazing sensory configurations, would make the octopus a wildly implausible science fiction invention, if we didn't actually happen to have them living successfully in astonishing numbers, and pervasively in essentially all ocean environments.
It may have been enormous luck for us, that they live in an environment where technological progression would be very challenging.
The octopus is a very strong candidate for "smarter than humans", as an individual. If we equalize age, it isn't even a contest. If we normalize for lifespan, but equalize for lack of social mentorship, I expect they win decisively again.
(We often forget how much of our survival and progress is predicated on not being individuals. We have a species intelligence that is much higher than our individual intelligence. Since we as individuals gain so much from what is passed to us, we imagine that we would naturally know countless basic things, that if we actually grew up with people who did not know those things, would be far out of reach. Having people around to teach us things, allowed us evolve to be mentally lazy! Shades of current tool/dependency issues. The octopus has never had a crutch.)
--
There is no credible estimate of how many octopus individuals inhabit our oceans. But the number is in the billions at a minimum. Including young, it may be tens of billions or more.
This code base is larger, so it’s certainly a smarter product!
"Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication" was likely not uttered by Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s still a pretty cool expression. Anyway, architecture matters.
[1] https://checkyourfact.com/2019/07/19/fact-check-leonardo-da-...
The prevailing research is “more neurons = intelligence”
And that doesn’t make any sense, unless there really is no configuration necessary
octopi bucking that trend is an example we need
No its pretty well understood that brain size in it self doesn't signify intelligence, even if correcting for body size. Density, connectedness, and complexity are important. Modeling the information processing capacity of animal brains it is shown that smaller brain like those of octopi and corvides are highly capable despite a relative low neuron count compared to humans.
“More neurons = intelligence” always felt like an oversimplification. If that were true, we wouldn’t be surprised by birds or octopuses anymore.
It's not a 1:1 relationship but they are related.
Reminds me of:
https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070716/full/news070716-15.h...
> Scans reveal a fluid-filled cavity in the brain of a normal man.
is this a straight-up advantage, or is the trade-off lower connectivity?
Given parrots can talk, there must be a neuron count that activates language (assuming anatomy allows it), similar to LLM parameter count.
That seems like an unfounded inference. Plenty of animals have more neurons than humans but lesser cognitive and language abilities. Language has lot to do with structure of the brain in addition to neuron count.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02855-9
Birds have areas of the brain that we would consider language alike. Both for native bird communication and I would also speculate that for human to bird communication.
If you have ever owned a parrot this is blatantly obvious since they actively communicate and vocalize both observations and needs/desires
Where do you get the conclusion from, that there is a "must"? There can be lot's of neurons ... but dedicated to other purposes.
Parrots can't "talk". They just mimick noises they've heard before
So do we, otherwise we would all speak our own individual language.
This reminds me of being told dogs don't feel emotions by someone who never owned one. Parrots most definitely can talk. Their language is extremely primitive but if you've ever been around a grey and it's owner for some time, they definitely talk to each other. The parrot will readily communicate observations and desires.
Isn't that what humans do too? We mimic noises we've heard before and we associate meaning to the noises. Parrots can do that. Our quaker parrot would bite you, then say 'not supposed to bite'. He clearly associated some kind of meaning to that phrase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)
Common misconception. Parrots are much more than just mimicry machines. There is also Apollo the parrot that shows this in detail and following from Irene's research with Alex
Bumblebee (the Transformer) might have an objection here. Purposeful mimicry can be used for talking on certain complexity. It does not have to be human-level to be communication.
This is also what toddlers do until bit by bit they're repeating everything you say back to you in context.
Many animals can communicate.
Parrots can't speak fluent English, which shouldn't be surprising. Last I checked, no human is fluent in Parrot or Dolphin.
Though, at least one parrot may have demonstrated an ability to understand language at more than a surface level.
Like Starlings do.
So what you’re saying is that parrots are stochastic parrots.
You've just described most of the information economy.
This thread is going to end with Monty Python jokes.
I mean, isn’t that just what you’re doing too? If you see a cow, and you’ve been taught that ‘cow’ is the sound that describes a cow, don’t you say “cow?”
Lots of birds can talk, not only the very clever ones like parrots and covids. Its mimicry and that generally doesn't seem to take many neurons.
Plausible, and likely similar.
mimicking is not talking....
Its part of their calling social members wiring....
Given parrots eat their own poop (https://lafeber.com/pet-birds/questions/parrots-eating-poop/), there must be a neuron count/density that activates self-poop eating (assuming anatomy allows it), similar to LLM parameter count.
Dogs do that too.
My dogs eat poop, and therefore are also like LLMs.
Your hypothesis has therefore been peer-reviewed.
> Dr. Irene Pepperberg studied an African grey parrot named Alex for 30 years. Alex could identify objects, colours, shapes, and numbers. He understood abstract concepts like "same" and "different." His vocabulary exceeded 100 words. When he died in 2007, his last words to Pepperberg were reportedly "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow." I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off.
The author takes forgranted the claim of intelligence; and does not assess at all whether the researcher simply said those words to the parrot every night. (Why not? It sounds exactly like what a researcher would tell a parrot before turning off the lights.) A quick search on Wikipedia says the parrot was also found dead in the morning, not in the implied "parrot has last words" scenario.
Ah yeah that's exactly what it was but thought I'd try to add a bit more emotion to this point haha. Even if the parrot said this every night as a good night - its still very sweet that Alex said that every night :)
iirc there’s a similar mythos around coco the gorilla
bird brains are a die shrink of mammalian brains.
> Calling someone a "bird brain" is honestly more of a compliment.
Well no. Some birds are flat-out dumb. Chickens for example.
One fact that I find very curious is that I see all sorts of animals killed on the road, but never chickens. And I see plenty of them by the road.
Maybe they never try to cross roads?
or perhaps it's an artefact of them having a higher contrast against the asphalt and being somewhat fat and puffy compared to most roadkill animals
"Chicken" is also an idiomatic synonym for "frightens easily." They do have some instinct for avoiding danger.
Chickens are not dumb, check out:
https://thehumaneleague.org/article/are-chickens-smart https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5306232/
This gives a whole new meaning to the term “stochastic parrots” for LLMs :)
I have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.
All living beings have been evolving for the same amount of time.
Sure, but the speed of change is also related to lifespan. The longer lives you have (technically how long it takes to start reproducing and how many offspring you have), the less time you have to adapt.
This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
I suspect the more significant difference here is the selection pressures. Take a good look at any part of a bird and you'll see millions of years of selection for reduced weight. The cost of weight is just so much greater when you're flying. Interesting too that bats tend to have lower neuron counts than say rodents. Did dinosaurs have a more weight efficient brain before flight, or were they forced to shrink before re-evolving that complexity in a smaller package?
Most of our mammal ancestors between us and dinosaur times had likely had extremely short lifespans as well, often shorter than the ancestors of modern songbirds.
> This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
There's no indication that this is what the OP meant. If the OP meant that, they'd be saying that birds evolved faster, not that they had an ancestor that evolved a very long time ago, which is a meaningless statement.
I agree one should interpret what people say charitably, but there's a difference between that and just pretending that someone made a totally different claim in order to make a nonsense statement seem less silly.
Of course, it gets more complicated when you also consider susceptibility to mutations.
It's unclear what you're saying or how it responds to the OP and his critics.
If birds and primates today belong to equally long evolutionary lineages, then they have both had the same amount of time to adapt.
Now, speciation is what makes things interesting, because species diversify the subjects of adaptation. So, if we say some bird species has been around for longer than the human species, then you can say that that bird species has been subjected to adaptation pressures for longer (though this, too, is too simplistic; adaptation pressures are not uniformly distributed).
This, of course, starts getting into philosophical questions about the notion of "species". Modern biology has a poor grasp of what it means to be a species. The biological literature alone contains about 20 different operating definitions. To reconcile evolution with the notion of species, some have argued that all or almost all living things belong to a single species, but we're actually seeing a resurgence of functionalist/teleological notions in biology today, because it turns out you cannot explain or classify living things without such notions.
Whatever humans are descended from existed during the time of the dinosaurs
If you go a bit farther back, we all ultimately come from the same lizard-like amniotes, newly emerged onto land from amphibious ancestors. It just took dinosaurs and mammals a little bit to evolve out of the "four-legged monster with teeth" body type.
But we and dinosaurs share a descendant that already had neurons/a brain?
If you haven't seen Apollo on YT, crazy
What is it made out of? meTUL
Want a pistach
He's so charming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8-ZmuJixIg