For more than a century, neuroscientists believed that the brains of humans and other mammals differed from the brains of other animals, such as birds (and so were presumably better). This belief was based, in part, upon the readily evident physical structure of the neocortex, the region of the brain responsible for complex cognitive behaviors.
A new study, however, by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine finds that a comparable region in the brains of chickens concerned with analyzing auditory inputs is constructed similarly to that of mammals.
“And so ends, perhaps, this claim of mammalian uniqueness,” said Harvey J. Karten, MD, professor in the Department of Neurosciences at UCSD’s School of Medicine, and lead author of the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.
