I once saw a crow look both ways before walking across the street and I thought “Wow. What a dumbass, he could just fly over it and not have to worry about cars.”

I bet a crow would know what to do with that information.

You’re supposed to reevaluate brain size as a measure of intelligence. The expression “bird brain” is so outdated we need to stop using it. Bird neurons are significantly smaller than ours, so they can fit a lot more brain in a smaller volume.

While you’re at it, you should probably reevaluate everything about intelligence and memory because apparently jellyfish have memories despite having no brain or ganglia of any kind.

Not only that, corvids understand the concept of zero fucks given.

It’s only the beginning. Then they will get negative numbers, integers, reals, you name it

https://www.livescience.com/crows-understand-concept-of-zero.html

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/41/22/4889

ABSTRACT: Different species of animals can discriminate numerosity, the countable number of objects in a set. The representations of countable numerosities have been deciphered down to the level of single neurons. However, despite its importance for human number theory, a special numerical quantity, the empty set (numerosity zero), has remained largely unexplored. We explored the behavioral and neuronal representation of the empty set in carrion crows. Crows were trained to discriminate small numerosities including the empty set. Performance data showed a numerical distance effect for the empty set in one crow, suggesting that the empty set and countable numerosities are represented along the crows’ “mental number line.” Single-cell recordings in the endbrain region nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) showed a considerable proportion of NCL neurons tuned to the preferred numerosity zero. As evidenced by neuronal distance and size effects, NCL neurons integrated the empty set in the neural number line. A subsequent neuronal population analysis using a statistical classifier approach showed that the neuronal numerical representations were predictive of the crows’ success in the task. These behavioral and neuronal data suggests that the conception of the empty set as a cognitive precursor of a zero-like number concept is not an exclusive property of the cerebral cortex of primates. Zero as a quantitative category cannot only be implemented in the layered neocortex of primates, but also in the anatomically distinct endbrain circuitries of birds that evolved based on convergent evolution.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: The conception of “nothing” as number “zero” is celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in mathematics. To explore whether precursors of zero-like concepts can be found in vertebrates with a cerebrum that anatomically differs starkly from our primate brain, we investigated this in carrion crows. We show that crows can grasp the empty set as a null numerical quantity that is mentally represented next to number one. Moreover, we show that single neurons in an associative avian cerebral region specifically respond to the empty set and show the same physiological characteristics as for countable quantities. This suggests that zero as a quantitative category can also be implemented in the anatomically distinct endbrain circuitries of birds that evolved based on convergent evolution.

edit: The idea of zero is always one of those things that seemed like it didn’t need big brain mathematicians to develop, like the Pythagorean theorem being a common sense thing you naively get if you’ve ever walked somewhere with a diagonal shortcut. You have a practical need to understand the absence of something numerical if you are a social animal dealing with resource scarcity. If I forage 10 handfuls of berries and need to distribute that to my group of little monkey-ass things, I don’t eat unless I understand that I can give away 9 handfuls but not 10. Even if I knew nothing else about mathematics I’d know 10-10 equals some kind of total absence of berries, with those still existing as a category without a quantity.

makes zero sense

TIL Euler invented crows, but Poe got to name them because he was 2nd.

It means DONT GIVE THEM A CALCULATOR.

Then they are already smarter than the average Mangalore.

If I’ve learned anything from Stargate, such knowledge leads directly to the ability to build self-propelled autonomous space mines.

Oh no! They understand my bank statement!

Everytime I hear this I can’t help but imagine some researcher out in the wild taking a twig or something off of a magpie, the swoopy boi retaliates and the researcher is like “corvids understand the concept of zero?!”

There’s a crow and seagull war around where I work. Pretty wild sky fights, but otherwise typical bird business. One time I heard what sounded like a tornado of crows outside, so I went out to see if some kind of crow Voltron was assembling. Outside was every crow I’ve ever seen screaming and swooping around one unlucky seagull that was tangled in fishing line and hanging from a tree. I cut it down untangled it and it flew off but what really freaked me out was how quiet all of the crows got when I got involved. I can’t prove it and I don’t know how they did it but I know the crows did this.

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