The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

To navigate, a bird also needs something akin to a map to determine its position at the start of its journey—and where that space is in relation to where it’s going so it can head in the right direction. Do birds have such a thing? A map inside the mind? The idea goes back to the 1940s, when Edward Tolman, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, first proposed that mammals might possess a “cognitive map” of their spatial environment. Tolman observed that rats in special mazes were able to figure out new, more direct routes or shortcuts to destinations that held a food reward. “In the course of learning,” said Tolman, “something like a field map of the environment gets established in the rat’s brain,” indicating routes, paths, blind alleys, and environmental relationships, which the rats may later call on. (Those who pursued Tolman’s vein of cognitive map research were affectionately known as Tolmaniacs.) Tolman proposed that humans, too, build such cognitive maps, and bravely suggested that these maps help us navigate not only space but the social and emotional relationships in “that great God-given maze that is our human world.” A narrow-minded map can lead one to devalue others and in the end to “desperately dangerous hates of outsiders” ranging in expression “from discrimination against minorities to world conflagrations,” Tolman wrote. The solution? Create broader cognitive maps in the mind that encompass bigger geographical boundaries and a wider soc...