Brains of Humans and Birds Wired in Similar Way

Calling someone a "bird brain" may now officially be an outdated insult.

According to a recent study on the neural pathways in human and bird brains, we share more in common with the avian creatures than previously thought.

A newly plotted map of a typical bird's brain reveals the neural wiring is similar to mammal brains, including humans'.

Despite the brains of mammals and birds taking different evolutionary paths across hundreds of millions of years, areas in a bird's brain linked to long-term memory and problem solving are wired up to other regions of the bird's brain in a way similar to humans, the researchers found.

"Birds have been evolving separately from mammals for around 300 million years, so it is hardly surprising that under a microscope the brain of a bird looks quite different from a mammal," said study author Murray Shanahan from Imperial College London.

"Yet, birds have been shown to be remarkably intelligent in a similar way to mammals such as humans and monkeys. Our study demonstrates that by looking at brains that are least like our own, yet still capable of generating intelligent behavior, we can determine the basic principles governing the way brains work."

Shanahan's team used pigeon brains in their study, focusing on what are known as "hub nodes" - regions of the brain that are major centers for information processing and are important for high-level cognition, such as problem solving and long-term memory.

They focused particularly on the hippocampus, which is important for long-term memory and navigation in both birds and mammals. After analyzing 34 pigeon brains, the researchers found the birds had hub nodes with very dense neural connections to other parts of the brain, a feature common in mammal brains as well. The find suggests the brains function in a similar way.

A similar neural networking find was observed when the researchers examined the prefrontal cortex of pigeon and other mammal brains.

The long-term goal of the research, according to Imperial College, is to eventually build computer models that mimic the way animal brains function and program the data into a robot.

Shanahan and his colleagues' study is published in the journal Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience.