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Deep Time and the Evolution of Cognition

Lecture by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Onur Güntürkün at the GGN Summer Event

Wann

09.07.2024 von 15:00 bis 16:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)

Wo

Aula, Universitätshauptgebäude, Ludwigstraße 23, 35390 Gießen

Name des Kontakts

Telefon des Kontakts

0641 99 18300

Termin zum Kalender hinzufügen

iCal

 

We cordially invite you to the public lecture 'Deep Time and the Evolution of Cognition' by Communicator Award winner Prof Dr Onur Güntürkün.

 

Deep Time and the Evolution of Cognition

Great apes like chimpanzees are smart and have a large neocortex. In comparison, birds like corvids and parrots have much smaller brains and no neocortex. This should cast a dim prospect on their cognitive abilities. But studies of the last two decades revealed that there is not a single cognitive ability of chimpanzees (brain weight 400g) that was not also demonstrated in corvids and parrots (brain weights 3-25g). How is that possible?

This question keeps me awake because it challenges core assumptions on the neural fundaments of complex cognition. Meanwhile I realized that I must travel back into the deep time of vertebrate evolution to find answers. This talk is about this journey.

 

The lines of birds and mammals separated about 324 million years ago and thereafter both taxa independently evolved the metabolically costly ability to maintain a favorable body temperature (endothermy). To secure the drastically increased energy demands, both birds and mammals increased their brain weights by a factor of 10 and their neuron numbers by a factor 20. They became smart. But in the end, their brains still look very different. I will show that these seemingly different brains independently evolved similar mental algorithms that can only be realized with comparable neural implementations. At first site, it looks as if evolution lacks creativity to come up with different kinds of complex cognitions in different brains. I’m convinced that this is not the case. Instead, evolution just faces a severe limitation of degrees of freedom to wire vertebrate brains for cognitive operations. Therefore, it utilizes again and again a small and identifiable set of “hard-to-replace” mechanisms. These insights could pave the way to understand which neural features really matters for complex cognition.

 

Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Onur Güntürkün

Onur Güntürkün studied psychology in Bochum from 1975 to 1980, obtaining his doctorate in 1984. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) and the University of California at San Diego (USA). From 1988 to 1993, Onur Güntürkün was a research assistant at the University of Konstanz, where he obtaines his habilitation in psychology in 1991. Since 1993, he has been a professor in biopsychology at the Faculty of Psychology at the Ruhr University Bochum.