Breakthrough Study Demonstrates #Crows' Ability to Have Subjective Experiences, Just Like Humans
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(📸: SANJAY HADKAR/TOI,BCCL/Mumbai)
A new study, conducted by a group of neuroscience researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany, has indicated that birds like crows are capable of experiencing subjective reality—a perception of reality that is dependent on their individual minds.
These findings could completely change our understanding of consciousness in animals, considering subjective reality is a trait that has been attributed only to humans and other primates until now.
🧠Consciousness is a tricky subject when it comes to animals.
It is a trait known to be shared only by mammals and is attributed to the cerebral cortex—a region in the brain of humans and other mammals, which happens to be absent in bird brains.
🧠Consciousness also has different levels.
-The most basic, primary level is sentience, which is the ability to have a point of view.
-The next level is sapience, the ability to hold a train of thought & form opinions.
-The final,highest level is understanding of the self.
To examine consciousness in birds, the study, led by Professor Andreas Nieder, the chair of Animal Psychology at the University of Tübingen, involved two carrion crows (Corvus corone) that were trained to respond to a visual stimulus projected on a screen by moving their heads.
-When the stimulus was clear, the birds signalled that they saw it.
-But when the stimulus was dim, their responses varied; sometimes they reported that they saw it, and sometimes they didn't.
-In some intriguing instances, the crows indicated that they saw something even when no visual stimuli were presented on the screen.
These observations indicated that the birds’ eyes were, in a way, tricking them, which again points towards the presence of subjective reality.
-While conducting these experiments, scientists simultaneously recorded nerve cell activity in birds’ brains as well.
It was found that the nerve cells showed activity only when the birds responded to the visual stimulus.
-Had the experiences not been subjective, the birds would have responded to every dim stimulus in the same way.
According to Nieder, these results could indicate two possibilities: first, the consciousness of perception arose in the last common ancestors of mammals and...
...crows that lived 320 million years ago, and it has been passed down ever since; and second, the consciousness of perception has developed independently in different species.
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