In the natural world,
you need to be smart...
..to stay alive.
But we're only just discovering
that some animals are brighter...
..than we ever imagined.
I've never failed to be impressed by nature's sheer ingenuity.
Now brand-new science using innovative techniques
and the latest technology
is revealing some surprising brainboxes.
You can get bees to learn almost anything.
Researchers across the globe...
LAUGHTER
..are uncovering the mind-blowing tricks...
KEA CRIES
..and clever strategies that give certain species the upper hand...
It is an animal showcasing its intelligence
in front of your eyes.
..as they build their homes...
..navigate their world...
..and raise their young.
It's time to get inside the minds of nature's savviest species.
But I warn you, there's going to be a few surprises
and some controversial candidates.
But most importantly, it's going to give us an opportunity
to learn from these animal Einsteins.
And that's really exciting.
In this programme, I'll discover how nature's masterminds
measure up against human brain power,
how a crow can be smarter than a five-year-old child...
..that bees can do maths...
..and whales have culture.
But the question is, are these animal Einsteins
as intelligent as us?
Or perhaps that should be, are we as intelligent as them?
Meet Bran, an 11-year-old common raven.
Absolutely stunning.
And as one of the corvid family, the crow family,
famed for his intelligence.
And on that account, I've set him a little test.
He has a favourite S-T-O-N-E.
And when I say that word, he'll start to look for it.
So, come on, finish your treat.
Now, Bran, where's your stone?
Where's your stone?
Is it on the ground?
Is it in the tree, Bran?
It's in neither of those places.
We've actually hidden it under this branch.
There's clearly no fooling this raven.
Top work, Bran.
Bran, come on.
Come on.
Now, that was pretty clever.
Pretty smart for a bird like this.
But I've got a test for him today
that's going to really challenge his bird brain.
Bran, you just wait there for a second, please.
This is the challenge that we built for Bran today.
In order to secure the meat treat hidden at the back, here,
he's got to do a number of things -
push the heavy ball out of the way,
withdraw each one of these three sticks,
drop the latch on the door,
pull the door down using this piece of string,
reach inside, pick up another piece of string,
which is tied to the meat.
That's seven stages that he will have to complete
to get the treat.
He's been waiting in the wings.
Let's see how our avian mastermind might get on.
Come on, then, Bran.
Come on.
Right...
Straight in... Oh, the door's gone.
The door's gone.
And so are both of the sticks. Pretty smartish.
Come on.
No, get that out of the way. You're absolutely right.
Now, bear in mind, he's never seen - ouch! -
this particular challenge before.
Come on, Bran, get that string.
He's done it.
He's got the reward.
Absolutely sensational display of avian intelligence.
But I'm afraid it's my sad duty to tell him that he has a cousin,
another crow species,
who's going to steal his mastermind crown.
Sorry, Bran.
Now, let's take a trip to the tropical paradise
of New Caledonia.
900 miles from the east coast of Australia.
The New Caledonian crow is capable of solving
some seriously complex puzzles.
But what really sets them apart
is that they are smart enough to routinely use tools to do it -
something usually associated with human-like intelligence.
When the tool in their beak isn't quite long enough,
they know they must find one the correct length...
..even if that means using a third tool to get it.
There you go.
Mission accomplished.
And these clever crows are just as good at selecting tools
in the wild as they are under scientific conditions.
So how did they evolve this amazing skill
when their common corvid cousins didn't?
New Caledonian crows really are master tool users.
They never fail to impress me.
Well, Professor Christian Rutz from the University of St Andrews
believes it could be down to the remote Pacific island
that they call home.
There are two things that are unusual about that island.
The first one is the kinds of birds that would normally go
for hidden grubs, they don't exist.
So the crows are effectively filling a woodpecker niche.
But rather than using their bills, they use tools.
The second thing that is unusual is that there are no
major crow predators.
When these birds use tools,
that requires an awful lot of attention.
It forces them into a head-down body posture
where they can't pay attention to any threats in the environment.
That's very different from, say, a primate using tools.
We can make tools and still look over our shoulder
to check whether there are any predators sneaking up upon us.
But maybe we humans should be watching our backs after all,
as it takes some serious smartness to use the right tool for the job.
Time to get a human perspective on tool use,
and to help us explore that,
I've invited Elliot along to take a test.
Now, Elliot is five years and 31 days old,
and when he grows up he wants to be a tractor driver.
But his test today is to remove a sweet from that plastic tube
using a piece of wire like this.
How are you getting on, Elliot? Good.
Well, you keep trying.
There is a method of getting that sweet out.
See if you can figure that out.
He's showing remarkable diligence -
he's certainly not giving up -
but he's not getting the sweet either.
And that's because, to get it, what he actually needs to do...
..is to bend the end of the wire into a little hook like this,
and then use it to reach down inside the tube
to hook the sweet out.
Now, it's casting no aspersions on his intelligence
that he can't do this,
because only 5% of children Elliot's age
have the capacity to make that sort of tool.
And in fact, when children get to the age of eight,
only 50% of them can do it then.
I think I'm going to have to go and help him out.
See if you can get the sweet using that hook.
I think no-one deserves that sweet more than you do.
You have the sweet.
Tasty? Mm-hm.
Excellent. Thanks for your help.
It might take Elliot another few years
to master the art of making hooked tools.
But just watch this.
From just two years old,
the New Caledonian crow is already smart enough
to craft a hook to fish out its favourite food.
No, not blue bonbons...
..but the juicy grubs of the longhorn beetle.
This corvid is the only non-human species on the planet
to make a hooked tool in the wild -
so it's quite understandable that Christian is proud
of his beak-whittled sticks.
They vary in shape,
but they all have this beautiful little hook
at the end.
And actually, in the human case,
hook-making is a very recent innovation.
The oldest known fish-hooks were dated to about 23,000 years ago.
Our species went from whittling their first fish-hooks
out of seashell to constructing space shuttles
in the span of 1,000 generations.
So we may ask what these birds will come up with
in the next 1,000 generations.
Nasa had better get to work on those crow-sized spacesuits.
There are, of course, other clever animals that use tools -
albeit without hooks.
Before we knew about corvid intelligence,
there were chimps.
The first species to prove that we humans weren't quite
so special after all.
Here comes a little history lesson.
Now, let's roll back the clock to the heady days of 1960,
when the world was still in black and white.
Lift-off. The clock has started. Roger.
The United States had already launched
the first monkey astronauts into space,
with chimpanzees soon to follow.
But despite this remarkable feat of science and engineering,
we still knew very little about our closest living relative...
..the chimpanzee, and how they lived in the wild.
But in October of 1960, a monumental discovery
would give colour to our understanding
of animal and human intelligence.
Primatologist Dr Jane Goodall made history
when she was the first to observe chimpanzees breaking off a twig,
stripping away the leaves
and using it as a tool to fish for termites.
And when paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey
received her excited telegram telling him of this news,
he was moved to remark,
"We must redefine tool, redefine man,
"or accept chimpanzees as humans."
Fast forward 60 years.
We now know that hundreds of other species have an intelligence
closer to our own than previously thought.
And it's the bottlenose dolphins of Shark Bay, Western Australia,
who spend more time hunting with tools than any other animal.
These dolphins seek out marine sponges
and use them as kind of a natural crash helmet
over their sensitive snouts...
..protecting them from sharp rocks, stingrays and urchins
as they forage for food along the sea floor.
Genius.
But there's much more to being a mastermind
than simply being able to use and make tools.
If we humans are to be considered as a benchmark of brain power,
what's so smart about the goings on inside our head?
Let me give you a very basic guide to the brain.
Held within its bony shell, the skull,
and washed with protective fluids,
my brain and yours is the source of everything
that defines our humanity.
Each brain is a complex mass of nerve cells called neurons.
And in the healthy adult human brain,
there are 86 billion of them.
They are responsible for processing all the information.
The folded grooves of the cerebral cortex are packed with neurons
that pass messages to and from different areas of the brain.
Like the frontal lobe,
responsible for problem solving and planning.
You used this earlier when deciding to watch this TV programme
rather than anything else.
The occipital and parietal lobes help to make sense
of what you're seeing and sensing right now.
You will be able to recall the information I've just told you
thanks to your temporal lobe.
And when you next search for the remote control,
you're going to have to rely on your hippocampus
to remember where on earth you last put it.
The brain continues to astound and perplex us.
Every time we answer a question about how it works,
100 more are thrown up.
Across the animal kingdom,
brains are very, very different.
There's certainly no one-size-fits-all relationship
between how big the cortex is and how many neurons it has.
Take the brilliant bee -
you may not expect an insect with a tiny brain
to be a whiz at maths,
but they can actually count.
And surprisingly, they also have an amazing ability
with a football, too.
We'll get to their ball skills later...
..as we're starting them off with numbers.
Samadi Galpayage is part of a team at Queen Mary University of London
who are finding out how, despite their diminutive size,
these bees have enough brain power to count from zero to five.
Yes, that's right.
These insects can add up.
Today, Samadi is training these bees to tell the difference
between one and three yellow circles.
If the bees land on the larger number,
they are rewarded with sugary water.
If they choose the smaller number,
they will slurp up an unpalatable but quite harmless
quinine solution.
I had no idea that a human could train a bee.
Depending on the task,
bees can learn the correct and incorrect choices
within a couple of hours.
Maths is generally thought to require a high intelligence.
So how is a bee's tiny brain able to count the difference
between one and three?
They use their fingers, of course.
You can see that the bee slows down in front of the stimulus
and sort of stops in front of each yellow circle,
almost like tagging as we would with finger counting.
Using specific flight movements to scan and tag,
rather than having to understand numerical concepts,
the bees only need to use just a few of their one million neurons.
They might have 86,000 times fewer neurons than we humans have,
but a bee's brain is anything but simple.
They have evolved to maximise the amount of brain power
in a minimal space.
It's about the connections,
so it's about how efficiently this system can work -
not necessarily how many neurons there are.
A single neuron in a bee's brain can be very complex,
so there can be so many branches, it can make so many connections,
that the complexity of just that one neuron
is comparable to a fully grown oak tree.
And all of those branches can add up to make a billion connections,
passing and processing information efficiently throughout the brain.
The question is, why would bees need these mathematical skills?
Well, they could be useful for navigation.
Counting the number of landmarks they pass as they fly
from their nest to a field full of flowers and back again.
But remember I said that bees could play football?
To be considered a mini mastermind,
we need to discover if a bee's intelligence
is more than just hard-wired instinct.
So are they smart enough to be like us humans
and think outside the box?
If we really want to see how flexible a bee's brain is,
we need to give it a task that it's never encountered before
in its evolutionary history,
and that is where football comes in,
because surely, if these insects can master basic mathematics,
they could learn the intricacies of something truly exceptional,
like how to play the beautiful game.
CHEERING Yes!
You can get bees to learn almost anything.
To find out if a bee's intelligence is flexible enough
to learn to play football,
Samadi is encouraging them with the reward of a sugary treat
every time they roll the ball into the yellow circle.
Just because we don't see them doing this in the wild
doesn't mean that their brain is not capable of this.
By presenting them with these new situations,
we're pushing the limits of their brains.
Seeing a new behaviour that I haven't seen before
really excites me,
and you end up rooting for that bee.
Come on, bee! You're nearly there!
Training is complete.
It's time for the big match.
Now the bees are rewarded for getting the ball
in the back of the net.
He goes round one player,
skips past the next...
Goal!
Oh, come on! Let's see an action replay!
Superb!
So why would a bee benefit from playing football?
After all, it's a task they're unlikely
to ever encounter in nature.
It's really just as important to be able to respond
to their environment with some flexibility
because the environment is always changing.
There may be new problems that an individual isn't equipped for.
It's the difference between life and death.
In a brutal and changeable world,
those animals with a flexible intelligence
could stand a much better chance of survival.
And in the wild, some masterminds have pretty smart ways
of getting an education.
Many animals learn through a phenomenon called social learning.
Essentially, what they do is they watch their mates,
their peers, members of the same species,
solving a problem, and then they can solve it themselves.
And I'm going to demonstrate this
with a relatively simple experiment
and this very beautiful starling here - Ruby.
Basically, inside this pot, there are some mealworms,
and the lid is loosely resting on the surface.
Now, I'm going to show Ruby the mealworms inside.
She knows they're in there.
What happens when I put the lid on?
Come on, Ruby.
Now she's looking.
She's not pecking at the pot.
At this point, what Ruby needs is an expert.
What she needs is Ernie, a more mature starling.
Come on. CHRIS WHISTLES
Here he comes.
Now, Ernie, show Ruby how to get into that pot.
Oh, hello!
You see, Ernie just flipped the top off,
and she got some of the worms.
Look at him now.
He's using a technique called open-beak probing.
You see the way he prises the top up
by opening his beak.
Now, one of the benefits of social learning in the wild
is that making mistakes there can be fatal.
Learning by trial and error can be the difference between
being killed and eaten and surviving and getting a meal.
So that's why social learning can be so important.
Has Ruby learned how to do it?
That's the question.
Ernie, you need to leave the stage, please.
Ernie, go on.
Off you go.
Right, he's out of the equation.
Now the big test -
can Ruby, having watched him, get the mealworms out of the pot?
Can she copy Ernie?
Look at this.
You can see her beak opening, there.
She's just got to get it in the right place.
Come on.
Look at that!
That is a classic example of social learning.
She's watched, looked and learned how to access the mealworms,
and I think, Ruby, you've had quite enough.
Of course, there are other clever methods of learning,
and one of them is teaching.
When you think about it, we humans go to school,
perhaps to college and university, where we are taught.
But across the animal kingdom,
there are an elite group of teachers.
And perhaps the most prolific educators of all
are the meerkats.
Let's take a trip to Africa's Kalahari Desert.
Within this arid landscape,
finding food is no easy chore at the best of times.
But the meerkat has a real taste for danger.
Some of their favourite meals are scorpions.
Not only can their pincers inflict serious damage,
but their venomous sting is capable of killing an adult human...
..making them an extremely dangerous and difficult prey to catch.
And for a one-month-old meerkat, it's an almost impossible task.
That is, until they attend scorpion school.
The young pups are completely hopeless at foraging,
and interestingly, they don't even recognise what prey is.
I had one little pup who actually fell asleep
on top of the scorpion.
As a young, fresh-faced research student,
Alex Thornton was working in the field with wild meerkats.
Now a few years older and a little wiser...
..he's an associate professor at Exeter University.
If an adult brings a pup a scorpion,
then the pup will immediately go for it and try and bite it.
And so they start to learn, by being fed,
what's good to eat.
Adult meerkats start teaching pups at around four weeks old...
..with their lessons becoming increasingly difficult.
They start with the basics -
dead scorpions, which pose no threat.
Then, with each subsequent lesson, the stakes are raised.
So the adults will often catch a scorpion,
bite the sting off it,
and then present it to the pup still alive.
And so the pup has to practise its handling skills,
but without the danger of getting stung in the face.
And then, as the pups get older still,
they're given prey that's completely intact
that they have to process on their own.
The pupils are quick to learn.
But as every teacher knows,
you don't just get A-grade students.
Learning always has its ups and downs.
If you think of a teacher in primary school with very young kids,
and the kids' attention starts to wander off
and they're looking at other stuff,
the same happens with these little meerkat pups.
So, if the pup isn't paying attention to the prey item,
then the adults will often nudge it repeatedly with their nose
or with their paw.
After a few months of lessons,
the students take what they've learned and go it alone.
Then, one day, they'll become the master
and teach a new generation of young pups themselves.
Meerkats may be one of the few species
to pass on their knowledge in these one-on-one interactions.
But we humans are able to pass on what we know
through the concept of culture.
That's the ability to move ideas across generations
to strangers that we've never met,
even those who are living long after we've died.
Think of the wheel.
We don't need to reinvent it with every generation.
We can accumulate knowledge...
NEWSREADER: Good luck, Captain!
..and ratchet up our collective accomplishments as we go.
The concept of culture has traditionally been considered
a major dividing line.
But there's evidence that some animals
have rich, humanlike cultures of sorts, too.
And their ideas can spread far and wide.
CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS
To me, watching humpback whales bubble feeding
easily rivals the very best prima ballerina...
..making them the culture vultures of the sea.
Within this highly synchronised routine,
humpbacks work together...
..blowing columns of bubbles to corral their prey
before scooping it up in their huge mouths.
But it's not their flair and precision
that makes it cultural.
It's the fact that novel ways of hunting
spread to other pods.
Back in the 1980s,
the bubble feeding choreography along America's North Atlantic coast
was about to take on some fresh new steps.
One single humpback came up with a new move.
Slapping its tail hard on the water's surface
before returning to the more traditional bubble feeding routine.
More than just a stylistic flourish,
it was a clever new way of stunning and corralling its prey.
And lobtail feeding, as it became known,
quickly became a new trend.
At the last count, more than 240 humpbacks
from different pods were working this sequence into their routine
across the North Atlantic.
Humpbacks don't let any performance get tired, though.
It's time for a solo.
Making a big splash in the waters around southeast Alaska in 2019
is pectoral herding.
In this never before seen feeding behaviour,
a single humpback first blows a bubble net,
then uses its flippers to create a second barrier
before making its lunge.
It's early days,
and so far just two whales have been spotted using this method.
We'll just have to wait and see how this innovative new take
on the classic catches on.
Bravo. CHEERING
Humans have one advantage over animals, though,
when it comes to spreading culture and advancing our accomplishments
to the point of exploring the moon.
We can pass on our ideas through writing or pictures.
Instead, animal masterminds need to rely on another tool -
their memories.
For many animals, having a good memory
can mean the difference between life and death.
And some even put our own human minds to shame.
How's your memory?
At 59, I suppose I've got senior moments looming.
Forget where your glasses are?
No, not yet.
Car keys? In a bowl on the side table.
But it does make me engender an enormous amount of respect
for those animals that show a prowess
when it comes to their memory.
Now, in this barrow, there are 6,000 acorns.
They've been counted by acorn counting professionals.
And this is the 6,000th acorn.
And, you know, there's a species of North American bird,
the scrub jay, which can cache up to this number of acorns
across its territory every single autumn.
Look at that! They just keep coming.
Yes, it's another of those clever corvids again.
For the scrub jay, survival depends on how well they can remember
where they stashed their food.
And they achieve this thanks to their impressive hippocampus.
Remember that part of the brain from earlier?
This caching king has one of the largest
hippocampus to body size ratios of any corvid...
..using it to recall what type of food they hid,
where they hid it and how long ago.
Impressively, they can even work out that
if a perishable item like a waxworm has been buried for too long,
it will have gone rotten and they won't bother retrieving it.
As a dazzling display of long-term spatial memory,
the scrub jay is hard to rival.
But when it comes to short-term photographic recall,
there is one memory mastermind that makes a monkey out of us.
Scientists in Japan have been investigating the workings
of the chimpanzee mind
and showing up the limitations of our own.
You see, there's a game the chimps like to play.
The numbers one to nine are randomly scattered
on a computer touch screen and then masked.
Astonishingly, in the blink of an eye,
the chimps can remember the position of each number
and then locate them again in the right order.
If they get it correct, they're rewarded with a tasty treat.
OK, let's see how well your working memory
compares to that of chimps.
You'll only have half a second to remember the position
of the nine numbers.
Are you ready?
Go.
I warned you it would be quick!
How did you do?
No, me neither.
Let's try it again.
Ready.
Go.
Almost impossible.
Well, for us humans, that is.
Given that chimps share nearly 99% of their DNA with us humans...
..why would their brains have evolved
such vastly superior working memories?
Well, one explanation could be that when competing for food in the wild,
they have to make very quick spatial decisions,
such as the exact positions of ripe fruit in a tree.
There is a suggestion that early humans
also had a photographic memory,
but we lost it to make room in our brain
for other memory-related abilities, such as language.
Now, to really understand what it takes
to be a memory mastermind,
we must go much, much deeper.
Brand-new science has uncovered an unusual animal
that possesses a mind capable of travelling through time itself.
That Time Lord is the colourful cuttlefish.
Brace yourselves.
Things are going to get trippy.
Cuttlefish are known for their kaleidoscopic camouflage.
Their skin is like a living video screen,
changing colour in less than a second to attract mates
and mesmerise prey.
But it's what happens to this colourful body
when the cuttlefish rests that's got some scientists
very excited about their memories.
It's been recently discovered that cuttlefish cycle through
their colours and patterns while they snooze,
in a way that's very different to when they're awake.
It's only when you speed up this scientific footage
that you get to see what I mean.
Some experts believe it resembles
rapid eye movement - or REM - sleep...
..which in humans is linked to dreaming
and the way our brains process emotional memories.
It's tantalizing to imagine what this invertebrate could possibly
be dreaming about.
I suspect it could be their food.
Because a new study in 2020 discovered that fine dining
is certainly what European cuttlefish think about
when they're planning for the future.
So now I'm giving some shrimp to the cuttlefish inside the tank.
They automatically react because they really
prefer shrimp over crab.
Although these cuttlefish are just a few weeks old,
they already have a healthy appetite,
a sophisticated brain and a powerful memory.
And like Pauline Billard from the Universite de Caen in France,
they know exactly how to manage their diet for later.
The ability to plan ahead is very complex.
It involves the capacity to imagine the future.
For instance, if I know that I'm going to have a big dinner tonight
because some friends are coming for dinner,
I won't eat too much at lunch
because I want to save my appetite for later.
And these cuttlefish are quite the foodies themselves.
And what they're saving themselves for is shrimp.
So, when they know they are going to have their preferred meal
for dinner, they stop eating their lunch.
And when they are not sure, they keep eating their lunch.
Every day, they adapt to these changes.
When the cuttlefish were reliably given their favourite shrimp
every night, they ate less crab at lunchtime.
But when shrimp was given at random,
the cuttlefish didn't risk going hungry.
To recall what was previously on the menu
and then plan whether to leave room for their preferred meal or not...
..gives an insight into the cuttlefish's consciousness.
You see, using their perception of the past
to remember which food they ate, where and when they ate it,
cuttlefish have shown the first evidence that an invertebrate
has an episodic-like memory.
Episodic memory is the capacity to remember
personally experienced events.
To retrieve episodic-like memory,
you have to ask yourself, "What did I see?
"What did I feel before?"
For instance, like, I remember that last Christmas
I went to my parents' hometown
and that we played music in a joyful atmosphere.
A meal to remember.
Tres joyeux.
The "when" part of episodic memory is particularly difficult.
In human terms, it's the last type of memory to develop.
Children sometimes have difficulty to tell the difference
between time.
An invertebrate that can do that is truly amazing.
And that means, for cuttlefish,
retrieving the what, where and when they encounter their favourite food
helps them draw up a complete foraging masterplan.
But if an animal is smart enough to be aware of the past and the future,
for me this begs the question,
could they, like us humans, also be aware of themselves?
When we look in the mirror and we see a smudge on our faces,
we instinctively rub it off.
And that's because, when we look in the mirror,
we know that we're looking at ourselves.
I'm not looking at another human male.
I'm looking at Chris.
And that's because I've passed the mirror test,
and only a relatively unique guild of animals have ever done that -
dolphins, elephants, the great apes, magpies,
and of course, humans.
Well, up until now, that is.
New research conducted in 2019 has shown
that the beautiful little bluestreak cleaner wrasse
has now also passed the mirror test,
making it one of the very first species of fish
to achieve this benchmark of brainpower.
Only the manta ray, the fish with the largest brain,
has also passed this test of self-awareness.
Which, perhaps surprisingly, is carried out in much the same way
as it is with land-based animals.
After being presented with a mirror,
the cleaner wrasse first fought their reflection,
thinking it was another fish.
But then, something astonishing happened.
After being marked with a coloured gel on their stomachs,
an area they could only see by looking in the mirror,
the wrasse started scraping themselves on the floor
of their tank in an attempt to remove the mark.
The fish had realised that what they were seeing in the mirror
was in fact themselves,
meaning they had passed the mirror test.
Recognising there's a difference between oneself and others
is known as theory of mind.
So why would this small fish have needed to evolve the ability
to put itself in another's shoes?
Well, it could be because, when it comes to business,
they're seriously savvy.
In their natural environments within the coral reefs
of the tropics, cleaner wrasse are usually found setting up shop
at cleaning stations -
eating parasites that live on the skin of larger fish
known as their clients.
But in the hustle and bustle of the underwater world,
competition can be fierce.
So, to ensure loyalty, the wrasse can distinguish
between more than 100 individual clients.
And if the cleaner previously mistreated a valuable customer -
a big fish with lots of parasites, for example -
the wrasse will even offer an apology
in the form of a more pleasant cleaning
with an added fin massage.
Now, that is some service.
The wrasse clearly have a brilliant brain for business,
albeit one that weighs just a tenth of a gram.
So for such a small-brained fish to be able to pass the mirror test
when we humans only develop this ability around 18 months of age
is a pretty controversial discovery.
But there's another big controversy surrounding this 50-year-old
test of brain power...
..and it isn't down to who's passed it...
..but to which animals have failed,
including many species we all recognise as being smart -
such as horses, cuttlefish, monkeys,
cats and even dogs.
We're giving Sid and Nancy, my poodles,
a crack at the mirror test.
And look,
Nancy for sure is undoubtedly looking at her reflection.
The question is, does she know that that's Nancy,
or is she just thinking,
"Look, there's another dog,"
or perhaps, "There's another poodle"?
But we're making life difficult for them, I think, you know.
Because dogs like this don't live in a visual world like we do.
Sid and Nancy live in a world of smell.
They've got perhaps 300 million smell sensors in their noses,
whereas I only have about six million.
And that part of their brain
which is given over to analysing smell
is 40 times greater than mine.
So perhaps if we really wanted to test their cognition
to see if they do have a sense of self,
we didn't ought to be testing it visually.
Perhaps we should give them a form of olfactory mirror test
where they can use their noses.
If you visited Colorado in the early 2000s,
you might have seen something rather peculiar.
For five long winters,
people saw a man out on frosty mornings
scooping up yellow snow and then moving the pee around.
That man was Marc Bekoff,
a biologist who wanted to transform how theory of mind -
that's the way we understand ourselves and others -
should be measured.
Bekoff broke the ice with the idea that animals should be judged
against their own sensory abilities,
not just the ones we humans are good with.
So, in the case of dogs, that's their sense of smell.
Fast forward to New York City nearly two decades later,
and Professor Alexandra Horowitz,
who worked on these early yellow snow studies,
is now quite literally taking the proverbial
at Columbia University.
I think it's vital to investigate theory of mind in animals.
And that's because we really value it in human cognition.
So to see how dogs would measure up in a fairer mirror test,
Alexandra presented dogs with different kinds of smells.
OK, what's this?
One was their own smell.
And this actually was urine that their owners had very kindly
collected for me.
One was the smell of other dogs.
And then I also added a smell to their own smell.
It was actually the smell of anise that I used.
So would the dog spend more time investigating their own pee
after it had been altered with aniseed,
the smell equivalent of the red dot on the forehead?
What I found is that dogs showed,
just as they had in Marc Bekoff's study,
very little interest in their own smell.
They showed more interest in the smell of others,
and they showed the most interest in their own smell
that had been changed.
The dogs were showing that they did indeed recognise
their altered smell reflection.
So is this proof that dogs have a sense of self?
I don't think my result is the final answer.
Do dogs have complete self-awareness?
Do they have a theory of mind like we do?
I don't think it shows it definitively.
But more and more research studies are starting to converge
on the idea that dogs' metacognitive ability is much closer to ours
than previously thought.
Given a level playing field,
dogs may well show a sense of self-awareness
similar to us humans.
Quite right.
But sorry, Sid and Nancy,
there are other limits to your intelligence.
Just because an animal mastermind is skilled in one area -
for example, using tools or remembering where they put things -
doesn't mean they can apply that thinking to another situation.
Until now, the idea of being able to combine different types
of reasoning together, what's known as domain-general intelligence,
has been a dividing line between the brains of the great apes
and us humans from every other species on the planet.
As I said, though, that was up until now.
To find out which animal has just been added
to this very short list of true masterminds,
you're going to need to indulge me a little...
..as first, we must take a detour
into the world of poker and playing the probabilities.
Let's say I have two bowls of chips,
and in this one I've got 90 black chips and 10 red.
In the other bowl, I've got 50 black chips and 50 red.
If I were to dip my hand into the first bowl,
which coloured chip do you think that I'm more likely to withdraw?
Without looking.
Well, black, of course.
Because there's a far greater proportion of black chips
in that bowl than there is in the second bowl,
where 50% of them are black and 50% are red.
Now, this might seem like pretty simple statistics to you,
but in fact, across the animal kingdom,
we're not the only species with a grip
on the understanding of probability.
And for that reason, I personally wouldn't play poker
with a parrot.
Let's take a trip to New Zealand's South Island
to meet the kea.
KEA CRIES
This cocky mountain parrot has a reputation
for being a bit of a troublemaker.
To survive this harsh alpine environment,
kea are fearless and destructive in their search for food -
constantly sticking their beaks into new things.
But what humans could see as mindless vandalism
has much more to do with how remarkably intelligent
and ingenious the kea is.
Every day is a challenge when you work with kea.
You never know what the day is going to bring
because they just constantly outsmart us.
Most animals will stop playing as they get older
and become adults.
Kea, however - they play throughout their entire lives.
Kea may well be rowdy fun lovers that refuse to grow up,
but in 2020, Amalia Bastos from the University of Auckland
wanted to find out if this spirited species
was smarter than anyone expected.
Could they be statistical masterminds?
Come here.
We first trained them on understanding that
a black token was rewarding.
So, if they bring it in, they can exchange it for food.
And if they bring us an orange token,
they get nothing for that.
After watching Amalia take tokens from two jars,
one with many more black tokens than the other,
and without being able to see what was in each hand,
the kea were able to consistently predict
which hand they thought had the prized black token in.
Very impressive.
But there's more.
Now, the most observant of you would have clocked
Amalia's snazzy sunglasses.
And I can tell you they're not being worn simply
as a fashion statement.
No, no, no.
You see, when it comes to poker,
you don't just need to be good with probabilities.
You need to be good at reading the social cues
of the other players.
Amalia was actually wearing the sunglasses
to disguise any subconscious cues, such as where she was looking.
And it's when the shades came off that she was able to find out
just what true masterminds these parrots really are.
So what we wanted to see is whether kea could understand
that a person can have a preference
and they might sample in a biased way,
and whether they could then use that information
to predict where they think the black token is going to be.
The kea were asked to pick between two researchers
who were selecting the tokens.
One of whom they'd previously watched always take black tokens,
even when black tokens were in the minority.
And what Amalia found was simply remarkable.
So they actually preferred to choose from the person
who had previously been looking into the jars
because they assumed that their preference
for black tokens would hold.
We were very surprised by these results.
We were actually not expecting the kea to do this.
Because this requires a whole suite of skills
that you might not expect to see in a bird.
It was surprising because the keas was showing signs
of domain-general intelligence.
That's the ability to combine
very different types of information together,
such as physical as well as social, to make a single judgment.
If you're playing a game of poker,
you're not only thinking about the cards that might be available
and the probability that your opponent has one of those cards,
but you also might be looking at their facial expressions
and checking if you think they might be bluffing.
You're then combining these two sorts of information together
to make a judgment on whether you should play your hand or not.
So it's intelligence that works as a network.
And now, for the first time, a bird, the kea,
has joined the ranks of humans and chimpanzees in displaying signs
of domain-general intelligence.
Like I said, never play poker with a parrot.
What a bird. What a rebel.
What a true animal Einstein.
When it comes to animal masterminds, the more we look,
the more we discover they aren't so different
from human masterminds after all.
They make tools...
..learn new things...
..have culture...
..powerful memories...
..and perhaps the thing that we believe truly makes us human,
a sense of self.
We like to think of ourselves as a highly intelligent species.
But as we've just seen, there are plenty more
scattered across the animal kingdom -
including creatures like Bran,
who's undoubtedly got a brilliant brain.
You know, I think at this point in time,
we may be underestimating all of those other species' intelligence
because we're always thinking about it from a human perspective.
If we could just start to think outside of our box, think anew,
I'm sure we'd find there were a lot more clever creatures out there.
Next time, I'll be looking into animal communication...
CHIMP HOOTS
..exploring the clever ways animals get their message across...
DOLPHIN SQUEAKS
..and the new scientific discoveries that are revolutionising
the way we understand their world.