Black-capped Chickadees haz mad skills

“When [a chickadee] hides a seed, it forms a memory of where the seed is, which it can later use,” says Selmaan Chettih, a postdoctoral researcher who studies these birds’ neural activity at Columbia University. 

And that memory is extraordinarily precise: chickadees can pinpoint the location of their scattered food caches down to the centimeter —and they remember which item they stashed in which spot. 

Chettih and his team were surprised to discover that Black-capped Chickadees activate unique barcodelike patterns in their brain when they hide and retrieve a food item. These neural barcodes, which have yet to be observed in any other species, may allow the birds to store and retrieve many similar memories without getting them mixed up. 


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