Crows Make Decisions Faster Than Humans — 235 Milliseconds

Read Time:9 Minute, 44 Second It is late, and you have run the same conversation in your head nine times. You still do not know what you are going to say. Somewhere in the ninth rehearsal a different question shows up: how does anybody just decide? A bird has something to say about that. Researchers in Germany have found that crows make decisions faster than humans do — about 235 milliseconds, roughly a quarter of a second, from the moment the evidence appears to the moment the bird acts on it. That number got the headlines. The detail underneath it is better, and almost nobody reported it. What Two Crows Were Actually Asked to Do The study came from the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen and was published on 22 October 2026 in the journal Science. The researchers were Philipp Schmidbauer and Professor Andreas Nieder. You can read the university’s summary of the research here. There were two carrion crows.

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