The birds have nothing to be jealous of the cuteness of the monkeys!

Songbirds, parrots and crows have been ‘squatting’ in the small brain of the same and some times more neurons (brain cells) than what the supposedly most intelligent – mammals such as monkeys…
This was the conclusion reached by a new us-Czech scientific research, which comes to overturn the not-so-good image that the people have for the brains of birds.
And this even though they have found birds, which are doing impressive things, such as count, make tools, solve problems, plan for the future and recognize themselves in the mirror.
The new study shows that there is in the brain of birds, the neural basis for this kind of… smart.
The researchers of the University of Vanderbilt, Tennessee, and of Charles University in Prague, headed by Susanna Χερκουλάνο-Χούζελ and Pavel Νέμετς, who made the relevant publication in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences of USA (PNAS), studied anatomically the brains of 28 bird species.
This is the first time that was attempted to be measured systematically and compared the number of neurons in the birds. The key finding is that some species, such as songbirds, κορακίδες and parrots are surprisingly tiny, but a lot of neurons within the small brains, as well as terribly dense connections between neurons.
The tiny brain of a 10-g has 2 billion. neurons
Birds with a brain weight of only ten grams and at least two billion neurons.
A parrot can be a maximum of 3,1 billion neurons, while a raven 2.1 billion.
These numbers are about twice the neurons of the brain of a monkey with the same mass and four times as many of the neurons in the brains of rodents with a similar weight.
“For a long time it was the riddle how is it that the birds have rather small brains, but often it’s incredibly smart. They can do things that only humans and apes were considered to be in a position to do,” said Νέμετς.
However, as is revealed, what they lack in size of brain, the υπεραναπληρώνουν in number of neurons.
“This gives the answer: they Have so many neurons, that the processing power is comparable to that of primates (p.p. monkeys and humans),” said the Νέμετς, who expanded the study to more species of birds, including pigeons and chickens.
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