14 DAY TRIAL // People usually think of apes as their closest relatives. According to a team of scientists at the Imperial College London, humans are not all that different from birds either.
In a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, the researchers explain that bird brains are similar to our own.
More precisely, brain areas in charge of high-level cognition, i.e. long-term memory and problem solving, are connected to other regions of the brain in roughly the same way in both humans and birds.
Hence the fact that some birds have been documented to craft and use tools.
Besides, birds are known to be capable of complex social reasoning, and many appear to have little trouble solving various problems.
“Birds have been shown to be remarkably intelligent in a similar way to mammals such as humans and monkeys,” Professor Murray Shanahan stresses.