Author: Candace SavagePublisher: Three Rivers Press
ISBN: 9780871569561
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 134
Book Description
Argues that the birds' powers of abstraction, memory, and creativity are equal to many mammals
Author: Nathan EmeryBird Brain
Author: Chuck MullinPublisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1783527862
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
When Chuck Mullin began to suffer from anxiety and depression aged seventeen, she turned to drawing comics as a way to make sense of her experience. She soon found that pigeons were the perfect subjects through which to explore the complexities of living with mental illness, and several years later, her funny, quirky birds have won legions of fans online. From Bad Times to Positivity, the comics in Bird Brain use humour to provide a glimpse of what’s going on in Chuck’s head: dissociative episodes; cycles of anxiety; her struggle to accept she’s not alone; and the power of optimism on the days it’s possible.
The Genius of Birds
Author: Jennifer AckermanPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399563121
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
“Lovely, celebratory. For all the belittling of ‘bird brains,’ [Ackerman] shows them to be uniquely impressive machines . . .” —New York Times Book Review “A lyrical testimony to the wonders of avian intelligence.” —Scientific American An award-winning science writer tours the globe to reveal what makes birds capable of such extraordinary feats of mental prowess Birds are astonishingly intelligent creatures. According to revolutionary new research, some birds rival primates and even humans in their remarkable forms of intelligence. In The Genius of Birds, acclaimed author Jennifer Ackerman explores their newly discovered brilliance and how it came about. As she travels around the world to the most cutting-edge frontiers of research, Ackerman not only tells the story of the recently uncovered genius of birds but also delves deeply into the latest findings about the bird brain itself that are shifting our view of what it means to be intelligent. At once personal yet scientific, richly informative and beautifully written, The Genius of Birds celebrates the triumphs of these surprising and fiercely intelligent creatures. Ackerman is also the author of Birds by the Shore: Observing the Natural Life of the Atlantic Coast.
The Bird Way
Author: Jennifer AckermanPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735223033
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds -- how they live and how they think. “There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.” But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries –– What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They are also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own: deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play. Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of, well, birdness: a mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own; a bird that collaborates in an extraordinary way with one species—ours—but parasitizes another in gruesome fashion; birds that give gifts and birds that steal; birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves; birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call—and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter. Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Jennifer Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It is what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.
Vision, Brain, and Behavior in Birds
Author: Harris Philip ZeiglerPublisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262240369
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 452
Book Description
This book provides the first comprehensive and current review of considerable progress made over the past decade in analyzing neural and behavioral mechanisms mediating visually guided behavior in birds.The visual capacities of birds rival even those of primates, and their visual system probably reflects the operation of a ground plan common to all vertebrates. This book provides the first comprehensive and current review of considerable progress made over the past decade in analyzing neural and behavioral mechanisms mediating visually guided behavior in birds.The book's five major sections deal with the visual world of birds, the organization of avian visual systems, the development and plasticity of visual structure and function, visuomotor control mechanisms, and cognitive processes. The introduction to each section discusses the nature and significance of the problem areas, providing a context for the chapters to follow, which review the current status of research on a specific problem. The contributors are an international assemblage of researchers, representing a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from ornithology to neurophysiology and including ethology, experimental psychology, anatomy, and developmental neurobiology. For the ethologist, avian behavior is the source of a wide variety of species-typical fixed action patterns; for the experimental psychologist, birds are the subject of choice for studies of conditioning, learning, and cognitive processes; for the neurobiologist they provide model systems for studying developmental processes, sensory mechanisms, orientation, and motor control. For these reasons, research on the avian brain and behavior occupies an increasingly important place in contemporary behavioral biology.
Bird Sense
Author: Tim BirkheadPublisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 140883054X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
What is it like to be a swift, flying at over one hundred kilometres an hour? Or a kiwi, plodding flightlessly among the humid undergrowth in the pitch dark of a New Zealand night? And what is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise?Bird Sense addresses questions like these and many more, by describing the senses of birds that enable them to interpret their environment and to interact with each other. Our affinity for birds is often said to be the result of shared senses - vision and hearing - but how exactly do their senses compare with our own? And what about a birds' sense of taste, or smell, or touch or the ability to detect the earth's magnetic field? Or the extraordinary ability of desert birds to detect rain hundreds of kilometres away - how do they do it?Bird Sense is based on a conviction that we have consistently underestimated what goes on in a bird's head. Our understanding of bird behaviour is simultaneously informed and constrained by the way we watch and study them. By drawing attention to the way these frameworks both facilitate and inhibit discovery, it identifies ways we can escape from them to seek new horizons in bird behaviour.There has never been a popular book about the senses of birds. No one has previously looked at how birds interpret the world or the way the behaviour of birds is shaped by their senses. A lifetime spent studying birds has provided Tim Birkhead with a wealth of observation and an understanding of birds and their behaviour that is firmly grounded in science.
How Emotions Are Made
Author: Lisa Feldman BarrettPublisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544129962
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
Preeminent psychologist Lisa Barrett lays out how the brain constructs emotions in a way that could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind. “Fascinating . . . A thought-provoking journey into emotion science.”—The Wall Street Journal “A singular book, remarkable for the freshness of its ideas and the boldness and clarity with which they are presented.”—Scientific American “A brilliant and original book on the science of emotion, by the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin.”—Daniel Gilbert, best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture. A lucid report from the cutting edge of emotion science, How Emotions Are Made reveals the profound real-world consequences of this breakthrough for everything from neuroscience and medicine to the legal system and even national security, laying bare the immense implications of our latest and most intimate scientific revolution.
Author: Bernd HeinrichBird Brains
Author: Budd TitlowPublisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0762797703
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Book Description
Through a hundred short vignettes accompanied by stunning avian portraits, Bird Brains takes a look at the antics, behaviors, and idiosyncrasies of wild birds from the viewpoint of a professional wildlife biologist and award-winning wildlife photographer. Titlow understands the often wild and wacky lives of birders--those who are always ready and willing to drop everything at a moment’s notice and "twitch off" to some exotic locations just to add another checkmark to their life lists. His engaging stories, complemented by vivid images, provide a fascinating compendium of wild bird lore perfectly suited to the 65-million-plus birders across the United States.
