CROWS MAKE UP THEIR MINDS ABOUT TWICE AS FAST AS YOU

Researchers at the University of Tübingen sat two carrion crows in front of a touchscreen full of drifting white dots and asked them to peck which direction the cloud was going. The birds pecked the correct side in an average of 235 milliseconds, twice as fast as primates given the same task in earlier studies, at a comparable average accuracy of 74 percent. Less than a quarter second to commit. You have spent longer than that deciding whether to reply to a text. Speed did not cost them anything. The crows hit nearly 100 percent accuracy when there were a lot of dots and the motion was obvious, which is more than can be said for anyone trying to merge on the highway. The team also found that 70 milliseconds after the dots appeared, activity in hundreds of neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale, the avian analog of the primate prefrontal cortex, already predicted how the crow would answer. Crows last shared an ancestor with mammals more than 300 million years ago and have no layered neocortex at all. Nieder's read: "a brain does not need a mammalian neocortex to perform sophisticated computations." The honest caveat, which the researchers put in writing: the study used only two birds and made no direct comparisons to primates, so the human numbers are borrowed from older experiments.

Why you should give a shit: The bird picking at a fry in the parking lot is reading the world twice as fast as you are, and the actual finding is that the fancy mammal cortex we have been bragging about for 300 million years was apparently never a requirement.