Magic and the Bird Mind with Dr. Nicola Clayton (podcast)

This episode of Many Minds podcast — a project by the Templeton World Charity Foundation-supported Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute — features Dr. Nicola Clayton, Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Psychology department at the University of Cambridge, and her research into corvids — birds that are members of the crow family, including ravens, jays, magpies, jackdaws and choughs.

Host cognitive scientist, podcaster, and writer Kensy Cooperrider introduces the episode:

“To be a good magician, you have to be a good psychologist. If you want to pull off a really good magic trick, you need to know your audience—what they are likely to attend to or gloss over, what shortcuts they take, what predictions they tend to make. Which all raises a question: Could you get to know a new audience, a very different audience, by seeing which tricks they fall for and which they don’t? Could we use magic as a scientific tool, in other words, as a window into minds that may be quite unlike our own?

My guest today is Dr. Nicola Clayton. Nicky is Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Psychology department at the University of Cambridge. She is this year’s winner of the prestigious ASAB medal, awarded by Association for the Study of Animal Behavior. Nicky is perhaps best known for her research on birds — corvids in particular — and how they show evidence of sophisticated cognitive abilities like memory, planning, mental time travel, and even understanding of other minds. Recently, Nicky and her colleagues have been up to something new: showing magic tricks to birds, as a way of probing their impressive mental capacities.

Corvids protect their caches from would-be thieves using tactics that, curiously, resemble some of those used by human magicians.

Here, Nicky and I talk about why magic is a useful tool for psychologists. We discuss her pioneering earlier work on corvids and, in particular, on how they hide or 'cache' vast amounts of food. We talk about how corvids protect their caches from would-be thieves using tactics that, curiously, resemble some of those used by human magicians. We dive into some recent studies from Nicky’s lab that involved showing classic magic tricks to Eurasian jays. And, finally, we get a tiny taste of what might be coming up in this line of research.”

Play the full episode with the above player.

Learn more about Templeton World Charity Foundation's Diverse Intelligences initiative.

Templeton World Charity Foundation's Diverse Intelligences is a multiyear, global effort to understand a world alive with brilliance in many forms. Its mission is to promote open-minded, forward-looking inquiry in animal, human, and machine intelligences. We collaborate with leading experts and emerging scholars from around the globe, developing high-caliber projects that advance our comprehension of the constellation of intelligences.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI), made possible through a grant from TWCF to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The Many Minds podcast is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from assistant producer Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Artwork is by Ben Oldroyd.