Popular idioms aside, birds can actually be quite intelligent, with some species demonstrating the ability to use tools and to develop complex social dynamics. This despite some substantial differences in the anatomy of bird brains compared to those of mammals, particularly humans.
cognition
Science Corner: Seeing is Remembering
[R]esearch suggests that ability [to track objects] is connected to our ability to form long-term memories.
Expert versus Lay Calendars — Thoughts from “Objects of Time”
A written calendar, then, is not so much as a cognitive tool to assist the reckoning of time, but a cognitive and cultural tool that can either promote social coordination or intersubjective senses of uncanniness, or even both, as in the case of the Jewish calendar. Calendars as artifacts are tools of power and social […]
How would you describe your “time consciousness?”
While reading Kevin Birth‘s Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality, I wondered if weekends provide an opportunity to tell time differently. There is a danger in viewing the clock as necessary for certain cognitive tasks simply because we use it for those tasks. The importance of clock time in twenty-first-century economic practices cannot be used as grounds for assuming that it […]
“What, then, is time?”
As some of you know, I’ve been enjoying ESN blogger/mentor Kevin Birth‘s provocative Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY: 2012). Augustine of Hippo wrote, “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know” […]