In The Genius of Birds, Jennifer Ackerman argues that humans have long misunderstood the avian brain. Any dodo can tell you our bias against the animal is woven into our language. All our bird slurs essentially translate to “dummy.” Plus, bird brains are small. They don’t have a cortex like we do, and their brain cells, Ackerman says, are organized into weird little clusters, almost like garlic bulbs. A kind of linguistic and scientific speciesism may explain why scientists have trained their attention on dolphins and primates.
But recent research, which Ackerman folds effortlessly into a series of lyrical chapters, reveals that bird brains are actually much larger than you’d expect for their body size. And when it comes to intelligence, she says, what really matters is not the size of the brain but the density of neurons and the connections between them.
