[Music] the raven a grim ungainly ghastly gaunt ominous bird of your at least according to Edgar alen po I'd like to convince you today that it's also an interesting an Innovative and most importantly an incredibly intelligent animal I'm a cognitive biologist and I study what goes around in the head of an animal its intelligence and I'm particularly interested in social cognition how do they see their social world how do they see their specifics and how do they act with them do they cooperate with them for example and what does that tell us about ourselves what does it tell us about the evolution of human hyper operativeness that that has led for example us to build such great cities where we work together where we live together that has led us to build an International Space Station to study the evolution of behavior is very difficult because Behavior doesn't leave any fossils to nonetheless give it a try we ref to comparisons We compare our Behavior to that of other animals and our number one go-to animal is of course the chimpanzee our closest living relative and so did I I had the privilege and the pleasure to work with aram's famous chimpanze population at burosu and through endless hours of observation and presenting them with several behavioral tasks we could show that these animals have personalities just like us and moreover they choose their friends based on these personalities they choose friends that are similar to them just as us um so we concluded that most probably our common ancestor that lived about 4 to 13 million years ago must have already had this they also chose their friends based on their personality but there we come to a problem because if you want to know why these individuals did so we're lost because we know very little about these species of about this common ancestor we don't know nothing about its ecology or its social environment to answer the why question we have to broaden our scope and look at for example The Raven our common ancestor lived 320 million years ago and if we find similar behavior in a raven and in a human we can be pretty sure that it evolved twice both in the Raven and in the human because if the common ancestor already had it then all descendants uh of that common ancestor must have had it and if we take a look at specific highly cognitive capacities we generally find find that most of other animals don't have this so then we can compare not only the human and the Raven with regard to that specific cognitive capacity but we can also have a look at in which social or ecological environment do these two species live the human and the Raven and if we find similarities there we might find an answer why that needed the evolution of intelligence but why then specifically The Raven why not look at another bird species well the Raven is often associated with death but it's also in many cultures and folklore associated with intelligence and just to give you an example the nor god Odin had two Ravens on his shoulders hugan and moonin and these names roughly translate to thought and mind and if you look up on the internet if you just go to YouTube you can find ample examples of intelligent behavior of Ravens and playful Behavior etc etc recently also neuroscientists uh started backing up our hunches about Raven intelligence and to illustrate that I want you to have a look at these two skulls there they are uh this is on the left a skull of a longtailed maag and on the right the skull of a raven the longtailed maag is about 5.5 times as heavy as the Raven and actually it weighs 5 1/2 kilo and the Raven one if we look at the brain mass we see that the difference becomes smaller it's the long makak has only a three times as big brain as the Raven but if we look at what is in that brain what is the brain packing is it just empty space or is there actual neurons in there and if we count those neurons we see that the long makak only has one and a half times as many neurons as the Raven has and if we're then going to have a look at where the magic happens which is for us humans the Vortex and for a raven the pallum then we see that the Raven this small Raven well it's a big bird but if you compare it to a longtail ma it's relatively small has more neurons there than that longtail Ma and it's not that I want to say that neural count equals intelligence but I think we can agree that you need a little bit of a brain to be intelligent um to study their intelligence we study their behavior we give them tasks to solve and see whether they can or cannot solve these tasks and to do so we keep them in our lab which is not as sterile as you might think and there we keep uh we have these birds and we have personal relationships with these Birds because that allows us to test them in the paradigms we want to test them as you can see here and if you look very carefully they're trying to steal food from my jacket but so so they're not always that nice um but we don't only study them in the lab we also study them in the field in a valley in the Austrian alpes in the gro alal where a combination of wing and leg marks allows us to recognize about 200 of these Ravens and there we can see how they use this intelligence in their daily life so in the lab we could show that Ravens can spontaneously cooperate in what is called the loose string Paradigm what you see over here you see there is a platform and what you probably cannot see because it's very little on this platform are two pieces of cheese again mythology meets the truth because indeed Ravens love cheese so the platform however is Out Of Reach for the Ravens so they need to get it into reach and my colleague is now going to put in some um some strings and only when they pull these strings simultaneously they will pull the platform towards them because if they if only one Ren pulls the string it's left with a string in the beak rather than with a piece of cheese and as you can see they really quickly solve this task it's very easy for them but what you can also see is that the Raven on the right actually cheated because it stole the piece of cheat cheese of the Raven on the left and it's not something only you see the Ravens themselves see that too and they act upon it if they're being cheated upon they will not cooperate with that individual in the next trial if you give them the choice with whom they can cooperate if they could choose between two individuals with whom to cooperate they will always first go for their friend and from the wild we know that these friendships these Cooperative friendships are very important for Ravens Ravens are in the wild are constantly bickering and fighting about stuff like you can see here but the chanes to win such a fight increases drastically when you have a friend around but it's not just important to have a friend it's also to know who are the friends of your enemies because you don't want to pick a fight with somebody who has 10 friends around him and the Ravens no this back in the lab we could show that Ravens actually have mental representations just like we have about the relationships of others so who's befriended with whom who outranks whom etc etc and back in the in the field we could show that they use such information politically that is Ravens build such relationships Just Like Us by being nice to each other they spend time with each other and they caress each other and for Ravens that is called preing as you see here and that's an obvious Behavior we can see it but Ravens can see it too Ravens that already have a strong relationship and are at the top of the hierarchy they monitor other Ravens and as soon as they see that some two birds try and make it Alliance they come in between they prevent them from building this Alliance and becoming future competitors and it's this political behavior that is so much in common to our political behavior that has led us to think that has led to the evolution of intelligence because just like as humans Ravens live in complex social environments in which there is a constant struggle for power and only if you think strategically you can get ahead of the rest that is not to say that politics always equals intelligence but as I mentioned before but as I mentioned before we should not always compare ourselves to monkeys because to truly understand the evolution of intelligence we have to broaden our Horizons and look at much more this ly related species thank you very much [Applause]