Parrot consciousness? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, January 31, 2016, 15:18 (3007 days ago)

A very long article about using parrots to help rehabilitate PTSD veterans also indicates a degree of real consciousness in parrots:-http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/magazine/what-does-a-parrot-know-about-ptsd.html?emc=edit_th_20160131&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=60788861&_r=0-"Still, what distinguishes the mutually assuaging bond that the veterans and parrots are forming at Serenity Park is the intelligence — at once different from ours and yet recognizable — of the nonhuman part of the equation.-"There is abundant evidence now that parrots possess cognitive capacities and sensibilities remarkably similar to our own. Alex, the now-deceased African gray parrot studied for years by his longtime companion, Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a psychology professor, is regularly held up as the paragon of parrot intelligence. His cognitive skills tested as high as those of a 5-year-old child. He mastered more than 100 words, grasped abstract concepts like absence and presence (Alex excelled at the shell game) and often gave orders to and toyed with the language of researchers who studied him, purposely giving them the wrong answers to their questions to alleviate his own boredom. Alex was also given to demonstrating what we would characterize in ourselves as ‘‘hurt feelings.'' When Pepperberg returned to Alex one morning after a three-week absence, he turned his back on her in his cage and commanded, ‘‘Come here!''-***-"He was so bright,'' Anderson told me. ‘‘I taught him to say ‘thank you.' Very anthropocentric of me, I know, but he generalized it appropriately to anything I ever did for him. He never said it randomly. He only said it when I did something for him, so it appeared to have meaning to him. There appeared to be some cognition going on, and this totally blew my mind.'' Anderson read extensively about parrots and learned that anytime she left, she should say, ‘‘I'll be right back.'' ‘‘I started saying that, and then whenever I began to put my shoes on in the morning to get ready to go to work, he'd say: ‘Right back? Right back?'?''-"Though the avian cerebrum possesses only the tiniest nub of the structures associated with mammalian intelligence, recent studies of crows and parrots have revealed that birds think and learn using an entirely different part of their brains, a kind of avian neocortex known as the medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale. In both parrots and crows, in fact, the ratio of brain to body size is similar to that of the higher primates, an encephalization quotient that yields in both species not only the usual indications of cognitive sophistication like problem-solving and tool use but also two aspects of intelligence long thought to be exclusively human: episodic memory and theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states, like intention, desire and awareness, to yourself and to others.-"Nature, in other words, in a stunning example of parallel or convergent evolution, found an entirely other and far earlier path to complex cognition: an alien intelligence that not only links directly back to minds we've long believed to be forever lost to us, like the dinosaurs', but that can also be wounded, under duress, in the same ways our minds can."-Comment: From this article I can easily believe that parrots have a form of consciousness very parallel to ours, similar but different in kind. Birds evolved from dinosaurs and we evolved from monkeys, true convergence in evolution in that we have very different functional brains, but have some of the same aspects of consciousness. My dog shows some of the same features as the parrots. We were away several hours yesterday and very busy upon return. He acted very despondent until I cooked up one of his favorite suppers, and he returned to his usual boisterous self.