235 milliseconds: a crow decides faster than you can blink — twice as fast as us

Two carrion crows at the University of Tübingen have quietly out-thought the stopwatch. In work published in Science, Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder found the birds made visual decisions in an average of 235 milliseconds, with nearly perfect accuracy when the signal was clear — about twice as fast as humans and monkeys in comparable tests. Brain signals in a region called the nidopallium caudolaterale — the crow equivalent of our thinking cortex — had already split toward a decision just 70 milliseconds after the image appeared. Bird brains are built completely differently from ours, with no layered cortex; they arrived at speed by another road entirely.