看到死亡的烏鴉的腦子里在想什么?

看到死亡的烏鴉的腦子里在想什么?

Crows and their relatives engage in distinctive, sometimes eerie, reactions to encountering dead animals, particularly other members of their own species. For the first time we know which parts of the brain are responsible for this, the closest we have yet come to understanding their thinking, and perhaps the origins of our own responses to the deaths of others.

烏鴉和它們的親戚在遇到死去的動物，特別是它們自己物種的其他成員時，會有一種獨特的，有時甚至是怪異的反應。這是我們第一次知道大腦的哪個部分負責這件事，這是我們迄今為止最接近理解它們的思維方式，或許也是我們對他人死亡的反應的起源。

Stephen Luntz

To find this out, Dr Kaeli Swift of the University of Washington injected crows with a radioactive sugar that gets drawn to the most active parts of the brain and showed them images of either dead crows or dead sparrows, and played them various sounds. She then anesthetized them and placed them in a PET scanner where the radioactive material indicates which parts of the brain have been most used since the injection. All the crows made full recoveries.

為了找到答案，華盛頓大學的Kaeli Swift博士給烏鴉注射了一種放射性糖，這種糖會吸引烏鴉大腦最活躍的部分，然后給它們看死烏鴉或死麻雀的圖像，并給它們播放各種聲音。然后，她對他們進行了麻醉，并將他們置于PET掃描儀中，在PET掃描儀中，放射性物質(zhì)顯示出注射后他們大腦的哪些部位使用得最多。所有的烏鴉都完全康復了。

“In response to observations of a dead crow, crows show significant activity in areas associated with higher-order decision-making, but not in areas associated with social behaviors or fear learning,” Swift reports in Behavioural Brain Research.

斯威夫特在《行為大腦研究》中寫道:“通過對一只死烏鴉的觀察，烏鴉在與高階決策相關(guān)的區(qū)域表現(xiàn)出顯著的活動，而與社會行為或恐懼學習無關(guān)。”

On her blog, Swift explains the work. She starts by pointing out crows’ reactions to the deaths of their fellows is different from most other animals, and often very complex. “Crows don’t ignore their dead, they don’t reflexively flee from their dead and they don’t just go about carrying out undertaking behaviors without a second thought.”

在她的博客上，斯威夫特解釋了這項工作。她首先指出，烏鴉對同伴死亡的反應不同于大多數(shù)其他動物，而且往往非常復雜。“烏鴉不會忽視它們的尸體，它們不會條件反射地逃離它們的尸體，它們不會不假思索地到處活動。”

Instead, on finding an unfamiliar dead crow, a live one might sound an alarm call, bringing a mob of others who make a lot of noise for 15-30 minutes before dispersing. On other occasions, that look identical to the human eye, the same crow will behave quite differently. We have no idea of the reasons for these varying reactions, but Swift has previously indicated she thinks the crows are using the death as an opportunity to learn about threats.

相反，在發(fā)現(xiàn)一只不熟悉的死烏鴉時，一只活烏鴉可能會發(fā)出警報，引來一群吵吵鬧鬧15-30分鐘后才散去。在其他情況下，看起來與人眼完全相同的烏鴉，其行為也會大不相同。我們不知道這些不同反應的原因，但斯威夫特之前曾表示，她認為烏鴉是利用死亡的機會來了解威脅。

Swift’s investigation of the funerals performed by the far more intelligent crows began even earlier. She attracted some fame thanks to the extraordinary masks she wore so she could see crows’ reactions, and for revealing that when crows witness a person handling a dead crow they treat them as a threat for weeks afterwards.

斯威夫特對聰明得多的烏鴉葬禮的調(diào)查甚至更早就開始了。她因為戴著特殊的面具來觀察烏鴉的反應而一舉成名。她還透露，當烏鴉看到一個人在處理一只死烏鴉時，它們會在幾周后將其視為威脅。

Swift has in the past shown that crows do everything from shouting at deceased members of their species to engaging in necrophilia, sometimes collectively. Even more oddly, some of this behaviour is restricted to springtime.

斯威夫特過去的研究表明，烏鴉會做任何事情，從對同類中死去的成員大喊大叫到戀尸癖，有時還會集體行為。更奇怪的是，其中一些行為僅限于春季。

If you’re puzzled as to why anyone would conduct positron emission tomography (PET) tests on birds to view their brains’ response to seeing death, we refer you to this. The haunting video of turkeys walking around a dead cat left millions asking, “What are they thinking?”

如果你不明白為什么有人會對鳥類進行正電子發(fā)射斷層掃描(PET)測試來觀察它們看到死亡時的大腦反應，我們建議你參考這個。這段火雞在死貓周圍走動的視頻讓數(shù)百萬人不禁發(fā)問:“它們在想什么?”

The scans Swift performed don’t explain the diversity of responses, but they do show that for the crows, the sight of a dead member of their species stimulates the part of the brain used in making complex decisions, rather than instinctive reactions. We don’t know what the crows are thinking, but at least we know they are thinking.

斯威夫特所做的掃描并不能解釋反應的多樣性，但它們確實表明，對于烏鴉來說，看到同類中死去的成員會刺激它們大腦中用來做復雜決定的部分，而不是本能反應。我們不知道烏鴉在想什么，但至少我們知道它們在想什么。