Our brains are more like birds' than we thought

"For more than a century, neuroscientists believed that the brains of humans and other mammals differed from the brains of other animals, such as birds (and so were presumably better). This belief was based, in part, upon the readily evident physical structure of the neocortex, the region of the brain responsible for complex cognitive behaviors.

A new study, however, by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine finds that a comparable region in the brains of...