The Moral: Aesop Knew Something About Crows

ScienceTake: Those Clever Crows

Scientists are trying to understand the limits to the well-established intelligence of crows.

Crows and their relatives, like jays and rooks, are definitely in the gifted class when it comes to the kinds of cognitive puzzles that scientists cook up.

They recognize human faces. They make tools to suit a given problem.

Sometimes they seem, as humans like to say, almost human. But the last common ancestor of humans and crows lived perhaps 300 million years ago, and was almost certainly no intellectual giant.

So the higher levels of crow and primate intelligence evolved on separate tracks, but somehow reached some of the same destinations. And scientists are now asking what crows can’t do, as one way to understand how they learn and how their intelligence works.

One very useful tool for this research comes from an ancient Greek (or perhaps Ethiopian), the fabulist known as Aesop. One of his stories is about a thirsty crow that drops pebbles into a pitcher to raise the level of water high enough that it can get a drink.

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Researchers have modified this task by adding a floating morsel of food to a tube with water and seeing which creatures solve the problem of using stones to raise the water enough to get the food. It can be used for a variety of species because it’s new to all of them. “No animal has a natural predisposition to drop stones to change water levels,” said Sarah Jelbert, a Ph.D. student at Auckland University in New Zealand, who works with crows.Photo

New Caledonian crows can use tools to solve problems, such as getting at hard to reach food.CreditMick Sibley

New Caledonian crows, rooks, Eurasian jays, and humans (past age 5) can do it, said Ms. Jelbert, who noted that great apes can do a slightly different version.

But in the latest experiment to test the crows, Ms. Jelbert, working with Alex Taylor and Russell Gray of Auckland and Lucy Cheke and Nicola Clayton of the University of Cambridge in England, found some clear limitations to what the crows can learn. And those limitations provide some hints to how they think.

The birds, Ms. Jelbert and her colleagues reported in PLOS One last month, were wild New Caledonian crows trapped for the experiment and then released.

The crows were first trained to pick up stones. This is not something they do in the wild. They then dropped the stones into a dry tube to gain a reward. Then they took the Aesop’s test, in several different situations.

The birds learned not to drop the stones in a tube of sand with a treat. And they correctly chose sinking objects rather than floating ones, and solid rather than hollow objects to drop in the water.

But if part of the tube apparatus was hidden, the birds could not learn. They also didn’t seem to be able to learn that the water would rise more quickly with fewer stones in a narrow tube.

This suggests two things, said Ms. Jelbert. They weren’t just learning abstract rules, because otherwise they would have been able to learn where to drop the stones to make the water rise even if they couldn’t see what was going on.

And second, the need to see the results of the behavior suggested they did seem to have “a level of causal understanding.” These are just hints, though, in terms of understanding how crows learn and think, said Ms. Jelbert, “we’re still very much at the beginning.”

ORIGINAL: NYTimes

By James Gorman

April 10, 2014

To Understand is to Perceive Patterns

ORIGINAL: Vimeo

from Jason Silva PLUS 1 year ago NOT YET RATED

Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/JasonSilva

@JasonSilva and @notthisbody

Special thanks to filmmaker/photographer Rob Whitworth for allowing a clip from his video (vimeo.com/32958521) to be featured.

Check out his website: robwhitworth.co.uk

My videos:

Beginning of Infinity - vimeo.com/29938326

Imagination - vimeo.com/34902950

INSPIRATION:

The Imaginary Foundation says "To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns"...

Albert-László Barabási, think about NETWORKS:

“Networks are everywhere. The brain is a network of nerve cells connected by axons, and cells themselves are networks of molecules connected by biochemical reactions. Societies, too, are networks of people linked by friendships, familial relationships and professional ties. On a larger scale, food webs and ecosystems can be represented as networks of species.

'For decades, we assumed that the components of such complex systems as the cell, the society, or the Internet are randomly wired together.

Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, writes about recurring patterns and networks:

“Coral reefs are sometimes called “the cities of the sea”, and we need to take the metaphor seriously: the reef ecosystem is so innovative because it shares some defining characteristics with actual cities. These patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk. Whether you’re looking at original innovations of carbon-based life, or the explosion of news tools on the web, the same shapes keep turning up... when life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents”

“Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected.

"...Johnson uses ‘The Long Zoom’ to define the way he looks at the world—if you concentrate on any one level, there are patterns that you miss. When you step back and simultaneously consider, say, the sentience of a slime mold, the cultural life of downtown Manhattan and the behavior of artificially intelligent computer code, new patterns emerge.”

Geoffrey West, from The Santa Fe Institute,

"...Network systems can sustain life at all scales, whether intracellularly or within you and me or in ecosystems or within a city.... If you have a million citizens in a city or if you have 1014 cells in your body, they have to be networked together in some optimal way for that system to function, to adapt, to grow, to mitigate, and to be long term resilient."

Author Paul Stammetts writes about The Mycelial Archetype: He compares the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe.

"Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the Constructal Law, accounts for the evolution of these and all other designs in our world.

Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity.

Geoffrey WEST on The sameness of organisms, cities, and corporations:

blog.ted.com/2011/07/26/qa-with-geoffrey-west/

Stephen Johnson’s LONG VIEW

nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08games.html?pagewanted=all

dumbofeather.com/blog/post/on-slime-molds-and-sewage-steven-johnson-s-origin-of-the-idea/

guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/19/steven-johnson-good-ideas?cat=science&type=article

A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating:

/Aaron Koblin

/entpm

/Andrea Tseng

/Genki Ito 

/ItoWorld

/Dominic

/Cheryl Colan

/TheNightElfik

/Paulskiart

/Grant Kayl

/blyon

/resonance

/gtAlumniMag

/Katie Armstrong

/Page Stephenson

/Jesse Kanda

/Jared Raab

/Angela Palmer

/elliottsellers

/flight404

/Pedro Miguel Cruz

/Takuya Hosogane

/kimpimmel

/Rob Whitworth

**and some original animations from Tiffany Shlain's film CONNECTED: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology // music is Clint Mansell's "We're going home" from Moon Soundtrack. Buy it on iTunes!

The Blob Attacks: Gooey Slime Mold is an Example of Leaderless Motion

ORIGINAL: Decoded Science

BY TRICIA EDGAR

OCTOBER 29, 2011

"Dog Vomit" slime mold is also known as Fuligo septica. Image Credit: Interro

It’s creeping, creeping, creeping toward a log near you. Perhaps it’s hanging out in the bark mulch, slowly eating its way along. The blob is here in the forests around you, and its name is slime mold.

At first glance, a slime mold appears to be a very unassuming collection of slimy bits that are often brown or yellow. It can look rather unfortunate. One of the world’s most common slime molds is also known as the “Dog Vomit” slime mold.

What Are Slime Molds?

For a long time, slime molds were identified as fungi. They appear to be fungi. They sit on a log, munching away on detritus rather than making their own food. They reproduce through spores. However, there is one big difference between slime molds and fungi: slime molds move.

A moving plant? Or is it an animal? Well, slime molds find those human-created categories to be inadequate to their amazing cellular properties. A slime mold streams over bark and leaves, engulfing them. While it moves like an animal, it acts like a fungus. A slime mold consumes dead material. However, a slime model does not have hard chitin in its cell walls, so it’s able to get together in large cytoplasmic masses.

Unlike fungi, slime molds do not have hard cell walls. Image Credit: stoon

What is a slime mold, if not a fungus? The slime mold is made out of a conglomeration of single-celled life forms called protists.

Different Types of Slime Molds

Some slime molds are naturally gregarious. Plasmodial slime molds (cue Ghostbusters soundtrack) consist of single-celled slime molds that get together in a cytoplasm gel.

Other slime molds use the social media of the slime world to get together and have a feeding frenzy. These cellular slime molds are called slugs when they are alone. Each slug leaves a chemical trail as it moves around a log. When a slug encounters another pheromone trail, it follows it. Eventually, the slugs all get together in an area that is optimal for feeding.

When slime molds get together, the party begins. They form a structure called a pseudoplasmodium that moves over logs, bark, and soil at a rate of one inch per day. When food is particularly abundant, the slime mold changes. Some of the slugs form a base, while others become spores and stalks. The slime mold forms reproductive structures as a whole organism, even though it is made out of individual parts.

Slime Mold Motivations

Slime molds are relatively simple. Each slug seeks the same thing: namely, food. They also need moisture to survive. They can communicate their success to other slugs, and this chemical communication ultimately results in a collection of slime mold cells that becomes something quite different from its parts.

• Microbe World. Slime Molds. Accessed October 29, 2011.
• University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley. Introduction to the Slime Molds. Accessed October 29, 2011.
• Nature. Cellular Memory Hints at the Origins of Intelligence. (2008). Accessed October 29, 2011.
• Adamatzky, A., Jones, J. International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos. Road Planning With Slime Mould. (20101). Accessed October 29, 2011.

Battle of the brains (DOC)

ORIGINAL: Science Dump

• Can you think of 100 different uses for a sock?
• How would you cope with glasses that turn everything upside down?
• What's your emotional intelligence?
• Can you create a work of art in ten minutes?

Horizon takes seven people who are some of the highest flyers in their field -

• a musical prodigy, 
• a quantum physicist, 
• an artist, 
• a dramatist, 
• an RAF fighter pilot, 
• a chess grandmaster and 
• a Wall Street trader. 

Each is put through a series of tests to discover who is the most intelligent?

The principle way that we measure intelligence, the IQ test, remains popular and convenient. Yet most psychologists agree that it only tells half the story... at most. Where they disagree is how to measure intelligence, for the simple reason that the experts still don't know exactly what it is.