Are you smarter than a rabbit?
You probably feel that you are. But in what way, exactly? Neuroscientists Laurel Carney and colleagues report that the rabbit brain is curiously inefficient – and hypothesize that the human brain is better: Suboptimal Use of Neural Information in a Mammalian Auditory System
Carney et al found that rabbits are not very good at hearing a certain feature of sounds, called amplitude modulation. Rabbits trained to tell the difference between modulated and unmodulated sounds (earning a tasty food pellet for correct answers) could only succeed when the degree of modulation is quite high. Humans can detect much weaker modulation.
By itself, this might just mean that rabbits’ ears aren’t as good at picking up these stimuli than ours. But Carney et al crucially found that the rabbits’ brain does in fact encode the information needed to perform as well as humans.
Using recording electrodes, ...
