Birds Are Intelligent and Perhaps Even Self-Aware, Their Brains Reveal

To be clear, the revelation that birds are intelligent and even perhaps self-aware was made in two steps. First, a study discovered an arrangement of microcircuits in the avian brain that may be analogous to the mammalian neocortex. 

“This research confirms the old adage that looks can be deceiving,” Marzluff explained to Science magazine. Although bird and mammalian brains “look very different, this study shows us they are actually wired in very complementary ways.”

Then, another study discovered that that neocortex is responsible for conscious thought. The two works combined together led scientists to believe birds may have incredible thinking capabilities.

This work is definitely bound to raise some eyebrows, explained to Science magazine Irene Pepperberg, as “some researchers argue that consciousness is uniquely human." Pepperberg is a comparative psychologist at Harvard University who has worked with an African gray parrot who can communicate in English about abstract concepts — she also was not affiliated with the two new studies. 

In the meantime, the researchers actually involved in the two studies; Martin Stacho, a neuroanatomist at Ruhr-University Bochum, and Andreas Nieder, a neurophysiologist at the University of Tübingen, argue that while mammal and bird brains evolved differently they are still very similar in their "perceptual and cognitive abilities.”