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Bird Brains and Barcodes: Unveiling the Memory Secrets of Chickadees
STEM Snacks
Steve Burgess
April 18, 2024
casualSTEM delivers brief and informative summaries of the latest science news every Saturday. Full of jokes, silly polls, and a cartoon!
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Chickadee Memoree
Even birds track their inventory. Black-capped chickadee memory works similar to human bar code scanners.
Brain probes inserted into 5 chickadees
Food caches get their own neural combination
Acting as an index connecting inputs to unique memories
Indexing explains the lack of “place cell” activation in chickadees, aka how you’ll remember where you learned about this 😉. Further research will help us understand how memory works across species. If only my password memory was this good.
AI (yai yai)
ChatGPT tries stand-up comedy. How do you think it did?
Brain probes in chickadees help them track where they stored food. It's basically 'Find My iPhone' but for seeds.
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