The 7 Smartest Animals In The World | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by curiositystream so my wife and i spent this thanksgiving at home this year for obvious reasons but that just meant that we got to have our thanksgiving dinner sitting on the couch watching the westminster dog show and those poodles those poor poor poodles i don't know how they got stuck with this look but it always makes me think of barf and spaceball armor the poodles are actually one of the smartest dog breeds they just have the dumbest hairstyle yeah some dog breeds are just generally smarter than other dog breeds that's a known thing they talked about that on the on the dog show as i was watching it it always cracks me up whenever people talk about dog breeds being a certain level of smart if people who have a dog that is not considered as smart as these other dog breeds they always get really offended by it and that cracks me up you know because they think their dog is their dog is special their dog's super smart like i mean would you love your dog any less if it wasn't smart you know are you gonna be disappointed if it doesn't get into a good college like hey do you want to see the dumbest dog in the world that dog that dog right there as many of you already know this is jake jake's been with us for a while he's getting up there in the years getting kind of old getting kind of kind of skinny i love jake with every molecule of my heart and he might be the dumbest dog that's ever walked the planet aren't you for example at night i usually sit on this chair and do some work and i usually let the tv run so i close this door so i don't wake up my wife who is in bed upstairs but the dog will come down the stairs and then he'll whine at this door asking me to let him go through that door not knowing somehow after 12 years he has not figured out that you can just walk around 12 years he also doesn't understand that i can't open the door if he's standing right in front of it dude so yeah he's an idiot he's my idiot i love him but other animals are not idiots in fact some of them are so disturbingly smart that it kind of makes us have to rethink what intelligence actually is [Music] extraterrestrial beings descend on earth and ted chang's 1998 novella story of your life which was later reimagined as the movie rival they arrive in these giant pods and kind of float there and scientists are brought in from all over the place to try to figure out how to communicate with them and the process to figure out how to communicate with this alien species is extremely difficult and i think realistic because the alien's language mimics their own brains which do not work in a linear fashion for them time is cyclical or you might call it a flat circle all right all right all right and for all we know that's how millions of life forms right here on this planet see it too but we don't know because we can't communicate with them i mean it's easy to see that earth's creatures have their own communication system just open your window and listen to the birds on a sunny day or try to sleep to whale sound sometime the only intelligence we really understand is human intelligence and even that is far from complete we often evaluate a species intelligence through the prism of our own brain power and that's not really the best way to go about it in fact we're starting to understand that animals have their own kind of intelligence that might be completely unrecognizable to us so how do we define intelligence when it comes to animals well there are three aspects that most researchers look at self-awareness self-control and memory one way to measure self-awareness is with what's called the mirror test mirror self-recognition is a type of self-awareness indicator that's been used on children apes dolphins and elephants researchers place a mark like a red dot on the subject's face and then show it a mirror if the subject touches the mark on the mirror that indicates it doesn't recognize itself if it touches the mark on its own face that suggests that it has some idea of self-awareness human infants usually take between 12 and 18 months to figure out the self-awareness with a mirror test bottlenose dolphins do it in seven months other methods scientists use to measure animal intelligence include problem solving experiments tool use facial recognition and memory and brain size determining an animal smartness requires separating two very distinct things intelligence and mechanization intelligence is how information is processed and the inference is made from that mechanization is instinctual or automatic responses to specific stimuli i mean for example does an octopus changes color by choice or is it just instinctual or does it even matter as philip sopher asked on an article in the atlantic he said quote ascribing such importance to design visualization and inference is incredibly arbitrary within this context intelligence is really an indicator of how similar an animal is to humans now all that is to say that animal intelligence sometimes is exhibited in ways that we don't even recognize as intelligence according to our own understanding of it so with that in mind let's take a look at some of the smartest animals in the world based on our understanding of intelligence first up is the octopus i did a video a few months back earlier this year about cephalopods which included octopuses i'll put a link up here and down the description you should you should go check it out it's an excellent video it's one of the best written episodes i've ever done just clearly exemplary writing hands down some of the best stuff that has ever appeared on this channel that um should win a pulitzer prize why is that in the script why did jason write that into this did he write the cephalopod script hang on he did jason wrote this then oh jason he pulled a sneaky anyway in that episode i asked why octopuses are considered so intelligent well one thing that helps is that they have one of the largest brains out of any invertebrate in the world there's over 500 million neurons in the octopus 350 million of them are in their arms and this is what's so fascinating about octopus intelligence because basically every arm has a little mini brain in it so it doesn't just have a brain like we do it has more of a hierarchy of brains but just to compare their 500 million neurons to us we have like 100 billion neurons in our human brain but still hundreds of studies have shown how intelligent octopuses are we've learned they can do such things as screw a lid off a jar from the outside and inside navigate through mazes solve problems build stone defensive structures make tools out of shells and coconuts and even play one study even showed that they can tell the difference between different people researchers had two different people stand in a room with an octopus one of which acted really friendly toward the octopus and the other one acted standoffish and indifferent and when they returned to the room later on the octopus paid a lot more attention to the friendly person and kind of ignored the person who had ignored it because i guess octopuses hold grudges and octopuses are clever too one might say downright devious there's an anecdote about how fish in a lab kept going missing so the staff at this lab put up a camera to see what was going on and what they found when they watched the footage later was an octopus in a different tank got out of that tank went over to the other tank opened the lid got the fish got out of the tank closed the lid and then got back into its own tank it actually covered its own tracks and they've also been shown that they have the ability to plan ahead of time for things the coconut octopus actually carries coconut halves around with it wherever it goes before eventually getting inside of it and closing the two sides around itself for protection jennifer mather's been studying octopuses since the 1980s and she thinks that the fact that they carry these shells around with them instead of just using them when they find them is super important she told life science quote that's using the environment but it's much more important it's predicting what you're going to need for the future in taking the actions now planning for what you're going to have to do later and that along with a million other things makes octopuses super cool seriously you should go check out that video that i did jason thinks it's the best thing i've ever made next up is elephants elephants are kind of famously known for having a great memory and they have earned that reputation but it's not just being able to memorize things they also use tools they actually clean their own food and they can follow human commands and they're also incredibly social and empathetic not just to other animals but to other species as well empathy is considered a really big signal of intelligence and those who have worked with and interact with elephants often talk about how smart they are but exactly how smart are they one study conducted by researchers at the university of sussex in brighton in the uk found that elephants were able to understand language differences they can also know if it's a woman a man or a child talking and the reason they know that is because there are only certain tribes in africa that hunt elephants the researchers played recordings of the maasai who actually hunt the elephants and recordings of the conda who don't to see how differently those elephants would react to them and sure enough when they played recordings of the mass eye the elephants reacted fearful and you know created some distance moved away from it when they played recordings from the conda they didn't really react in any way so they decided to dive a little bit further into it and played different recordings of mass eye men women and children talking to see if they would react differently to those and sure enough when they heard men's voices they reacted more fearful they didn't really react the same way with the women and the children because the men are the ones that do the hunting so the elephants are not just smart enough to understand that humans could be a threat to them they actually understand the different languages that the humans are speaking and know which one of those to be afraid of with their large bodies they also have very large brains and they use these large brains in these social situations to to work together to cooperate and solve problems in one experiment for example two elephants worked together to drag ropes attached to either side of a table that held two food bowls because one elephant wasn't strong enough to pull it there's even been instances of elephants mimicking human voices researchers discovered that an elephant named kaushik in the everland zoo in south korea could actually speak six different korean words and could do it well enough for people to understand it koshik would place his trunk inside of his mouth modulating his vocal tract shape to create the sounds and that's really cool um but it's also kind of sad because apparently they think the reason why it's doing this is it's trying to communicate with people because it's it's lonely basically it didn't have any other elephants around it growing up so this is its attempt to communicate with people which is cool also just a little bit sad sad but that just kind of shows you how emotional and social these animals are which is really kind of amazing when you think about it next up is the goat today when you call something the goat it usually means greatest of all time and maybe the goat is actually the greatest of all time i mean i mean look you might be a cat person you might be a dog person but if you're a dog person you might actually be a goat person because some research has shown that goats are pretty similar to dogs when it comes to intelligence a paper published in biology letters showed that goats actually will gaze at a human to help them solve a problem if they can't figure out the solution themselves and then their responses to that person change depending on the person's behavior for example in this experiment they train goats how to open a box to get a treat that's inside and then at the end of the test the final part of the test was they made that box inaccessible they moved it up where the goats couldn't get to it and then recorded their reactions and their reaction was to look over at the people some of which were facing the goats and some of them were looking away and they found that the goats paid more attention to the people that were looking toward them so they were clearly asking for help study author christian narwha said goats gaze at humans the same way dogs do when asking for a treat that's out of their reach for example our results provide strong evidence for a complex communication directed at humans in a species that was domesticated primarily for agricultural production and show similarities with animals bred to become pets or working animals such as dogs and horses goats can also figure out how to use tools to their advantage in one study from australia they set up a contraption that made the goats have to perform multiple steps including pulling on a lever and opening up another thing with their mouth in order to get to that treat and nine out of the 12 goats figured out how to do it after four tries even more impressive ten months later they tried this again and the majority of the goats figured out how to get to the treat this shows that they have real long-term memory and can i just say uh if you ever get a chance to go to a goat farm go they're they're really cool and baby goats are the cutest thing that's ever existed i'm just saying next up is a dolphin so octopuses aren't the only water dwelling animal that's super intelligent dolphins are crazy smart they're kind of like the human equivalent in the water some people think anyway but they're also incredibly social and this is one of the reasons why they're so popular at you know aquariums but also in the wild because they seem to have fun with each other they play around they jump and they swim and they just they just have a good time and one other sign of intelligence in dolphins is that they have a really complex language that we're only beginning to understand they can use tools and learn behavioral commands from trainers female dolphins remain with their offspring for years teaching them what they need to know to survive like i said before they aced the mirror self-recognition test even earlier than humans do neuroscientist and animal expert lori moreno said quote these mammals recognize themselves in the mirror and have a sense of social identity they not only know who they are but they also have a sense of who where and what their groups are they interact and comprehend with the health and feelings of other dolphins so fast it's as if they're online with each other yeah one cool thing that might help with that that dolphins do that has always fascinated me is that they get around with echolocation but what that means is that they can actually direct a sound an echolocation sound to another dolphin that they can interpret visually so they really can almost communicate telepathically in a way yes it's done with sound waves it's not telepathy obviously but they can just transmit through sound a visual image mourinho also said that dolphins can imitate human posture is what she calls cognitively demanding and they have huge brains in fact their brain to body ratio is second only to you and me and the rest of humanity i'm not saying that just you and i have big brains although i'm sure yours is you gotta you you got a nicely sized brain dolphin brains also have a specialized type of brain cell called spindle neurons which are associated with such abilities as reasoning communicating recognizing remembering perceiving adapting problem solving and understanding another cool thing about dolphin brains that i've always appreciated is that they sleep hemispherically so basically the way dolphins sleep is they just turn off one half of their brain and the other one is still functioning so it can continue to swim and breathe and all that kind of stuff which i really wish we could do because i would be a lot more productive that way they also have a super complex limbic system far more complex than even our own and again that goes back to the whole social aspect of dolphins according to mourinho a dolphin alone is not really a dolphin being a dolphin means being embedded in a complex social network even more so than with humans and clearly they're really good with the social thing because they they seem to have a lot of fun together next up are crows have you ever seen a crow and been afraid of it no you should be you should be crows or corvids are uh ridiculously smart and will probably take over the world someday consider this example crows that live in urban areas will pick up nuts and put them out in the street waiting for a car to drive by and drive over them to crack them open for them and then eat what's been inside the shell work smarter not harder people they actually have location specific dialects and gestures they use tools they'll actually even play tricks and games on each other one study tested their intelligence by giving people and crows the same puzzle it was a toy that flowed on top of the water inside of a tall glass that was too narrow for a bird's beak or a child's hand to get into children that were younger than eight years old couldn't figure out how to get the toy out crows though dropped pebbles into the glass displacing the water so the toy would rise to the top and they could grab it corvids understand water displacement and they actually hold grudges and have ways of letting other crows know that they have a grudge against them and you better not get on a crow's bad side because not only do they hold grudges they gossip in one 2011 study some researchers wore masks while they went in and started grabbing and tagging crows basically creating a stressful and negative situation for those crows when the researchers went back to that area two weeks later some of them wore these masks and some of them didn't and the ones that wore the masks were caught at and scolded by 26 of the birds they did this again a year and a half later and this time 30 of the crows were calling and scolding at these people and then three years later they tried it again they hadn't done anything in between they hadn't been wearing these masks giving them negative or positive feedback just that one time three years later they came back some of the researchers had masks some of them didn't and this time 66 percent of the birds were scalding at them in other words the birds had somehow told other birds that weren't even there the first time about these people in the masks and and they did not like it one of the researchers of the study wrote quote later recognition of dangerous masks by lone crows that were never captured is consistent with horizontal social learning independent scolding by young crows whose parents had conditioned them to scold the dangerous mask demonstrates vertical social learning which is a fancy way of saying they were talking some serious another sign of their intelligence is that they actually hold funerals for their dead and investigate how they died researchers say they do this in order to understand the dangers around them in a study published in animal behavior in 2015 they said quote our results support previous findings that crows learn places associated with conspecific death and further demonstrate that crows can learn and remember people who appear complicit in these events but it's not all negative studies have also shown that crows can remember people who were good to them and and obviously they like those people they've also been known to like resurrect dead band members from the dead so that they can avenge their girlfriend's deaths that might have been a movie keeping with our feathered friends there's the parrot parents are good at problem solving they can also use tools and famously can mimic human speech in fact the staff at a uk wildlife center had to separate five birds from each other because they were teaching and encouraging each other to swear at the guests i'm hoping they learned different words within colonies park chief executive steve nichols told the bbc news but if they teach each other bad language and i end up with 250 swearing birds i don't know what we'll do you'll make a ton of money is what you'll do what are you kidding now we know the parrots can mimic human speech but it's starting to look like they actually kind of understand what they're saying an african grey parrot named alex is a perfect example of this he was purchased from a chicago pet store in 1977 and was trained by dr irene pepperberg a comparative psychologist at brandeis university in harvard and he was remarkable because he possessed more than 100 vocal labels for different actions colors and objects according to dr pepperberg he could identify objects by their materials he even showed math skills able to infer the connection between written numerals object sets and number vocalization and understood the concept of zero there's a reason why parrots and birds in general are so smart in 2018 researchers in canada examined 98 samples of bird brains that included parrots but also hummingbirds chickens and owls what they were looking for was large ponte nuclei which are neural circuits that move information from the cortex to the cerebellum humans and primates have large ponte nuclei and it's considered a major factor in higher level intelligence and they did not find it in the birds it turns out this area is actually really small in birds what they did have though is a large medial spiroform nucleus which is something that mammals don't have and it turns out that in birds this serves the same purpose as the large pontine nuclei according to christian gutierrez ibenez the spm is very large in parrots it's actually two to five times larger in paris than in other birds like chickens independently parrots have evolved in a large area that connects the cortex and the cerebellum similar to primates but this raises the question of why that spm is so large in parrots when it's not any bigger in say intelligent birds like crows they don't know the answer to this and this is where the next level of the research is going and last but definitely not least is the chimpanzee chimps are often called our closest animal relative and that is definitely true when we talk about intelligence like most other animals on this list they can solve problems and use tools but they can also communicate with people through sign language and remember people's names even after decades apart but one of the most intelligent things they can do is use symbols in place of objects and then combine those symbols in a sequence to convey an idea in a 2007 study researchers presented identical cognitive tests to college students adult chimps and adolescent chimps both the humans and the chimps saw the numbers on the screen for less than a second before being asked to point out where those numbers had been the humans and adult chimps performed pretty much the same but the adolescent chimps were far more accurate in remembering each number's location they basically have a type of photographic memory but the best one at this the goat if you will was a young chimpanzee named ayumu he remembered the correct order of a number series that randomly appeared for only 210 milliseconds on a touchscreen monitor that's faster than a blink probably the best sign of intelligence though is that they laugh when they're tickled i don't know if that's a sign of intelligence or not but it's cute now there's actually a lot more animals that we could include on this list but it would go on forever so here's a quick list of honorable mentions like pigeons with their ability to recognize hundreds of images even after many years have passed squirrel's cunning ability to hide food from potential thieves pig's cleverness and out-competing native species orangutans forming strong social bonds raccoon's lock-picking skills rats ability to solve mazes and their empathy cow's ability to display complex spatial memory domestic dog's ability to understand emotions in symbolic language and domestic cats disinterest and well just that their disinterest alone is proof that they're pretty dang smart there's a scene in the book weather by jenny ophel where a self-help speaker is speaking to an audience about human intelligence and the speaker says that the only reason we are at the top of the evolutionary food chain is because we decided what's important for example the speaker said that if we prioritize sense of smell then dogs would be considered more evolutionarily advanced than we are or if we thought longevity was most important then bristlecone pines would be the most important species on the planet or if we thought that sex was the most important trait then banana slugs would be the most important because they can change their sex they're hermaphroditic and they have sex about three times a day they know how to party all that's to say that intelligence has no one-size-fits-all measurement you know it all depends on circumstance and privilege it can even be said that it's impossible to determine which species is the most intelligent because we have a very myopic view of intelligence we can only gauge intelligence through the senses that we have you know other species might have thought the same thing about us that we're not as intelligent as them because we perceive the world differently than they do and today with artificial intelligence and complex algorithms there's a new kind of intelligence that you have to kind of factor in and you have to imagine that someday when artificial intelligence becomes super intelligent they'll probably look at us the same way we've looked at other animals for thousands of years but talk about yourself in the comments what animal do you think is the smartest which ones do you have or or share a story or an experience of an animal doing something spookily smart we've all got pets i'm sure we've all got a lot of cool stories about their share them in the comments i want to see them and hey if you like this topic and you find it interesting and you want to know more about super smart animals i can highly recommend the series super smart animals on curiosity stream hosted by liz bonnin and produced by the bbc this two-part series travels the world to see some of the most freakishly smart animals out there and ask what makes their intelligence possible many of them are featured in this video from the problem-solving abilities of crows and octopuses to the insane number we call a chimpanzees to the complex social and emotional dynamics of elephants this goes deep into what really defines intelligence and gives you a whole new appreciation for our animal cousins this is of course just one of thousands of documentary series you can find on curiosity stream from some of the best documentary filmmakers in around the world in subjects as wide ranging as history futurism space physics society the list goes on and on and it was created by the guys behind the discovery channel so it's kind of like what the discovery channel was meant to be and on top of all that when you sign up for curiosity stream you get access to nebula streaming service that i'm a part of along with many of your favorite youtube creators it's a place where we can do things outside the youtube ecosystem lets us try new formats and not be beholden to the algorithm so you can find all of my videos on there ad free along with nebula originals like tom scott's money series or real engineering logistics of d-day series or the original series i'm working on right now shooting it this week i'm super excited about it probably come out in about a month or so tba but yeah when you sign up for curiosity stream right now they're offering a 26 discount which gives you an entire year of curiosity stream and nebula for 14.79 for an entire year two streaming services i i don't know how better to sell this that's just a ridiculous price so yeah that sounds good to you and you've never had a chance to check out curiosity stream i would say now's the time to do it so just go to curiositystream.com joe scott link's down below big thanks to curiosity stream for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the patreons the answer files on patreon that are supporting this channel also i don't give them enough credit the members the youtube members that have signed up i want to give a shout out to them real quick murder some names here we got marty f john lane chris brown chris boomer lakshmi rose tish lance 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 534,803

Rating: 4.9488888 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, animal intelligence, intelligence, arrival, chimpanzees, parrot, crows, elephants, octopus, octopus intelligence, dolphins

Id: A84MgzOtOLA

Length: 25min 56sec (1556 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020