A new view into the minds of pigeons
Pigeons get a lot of flack for their tiny brains, yet scientists have long been interested in how the birds manage to find their way home even from unfamiliar places hundreds of miles away. I wrote a news article for Technology Review about a device that actually measures the brain waves of homing pigeons as they fly. It’s hard even to know how to interpret the information, but so far it looks like brain waves do change when the birds are attending to objects and when they are orienting themselves. Another cool tool for studying the longstanding puzzle of pigeon navigation.