The crows were trained to peck at the screen or move their heads if the two images matched one another, and to remain still if they did not match. In each trial, a grey screen containing zero to four black dots popped up in front of the crows this "sample" image was followed by a "test" image containing either the same or a different number of dots. In the new study, published June 2 in The Journal of Neuroscience, the team ran experiments with two male carrion crows ( Corvus corone), during which the birds sat on a wooden perch and interacted with a computer monitor in front of them. The birds' brain activity patterns also support the idea that zero falls before "1" on crows' mental number line, so to speak. And now, by peering into the brains of crows, Nieder and his colleagues have discovered that the birds' nerve cells, or neurons, encode "zero" as they do other numbers. thinking that is detached from empirical reality," Nieder said. Zero represents that emptiness, the absence of apples, and "that obviously requires very abstract thinking. Related: The 12 weirdest animal discoveries "The special thing about zero is that it doesn't fit into a routine of counting real objects, as with the actual integers." In other words, someone can count three apples placed in a basket - one, two, three - but when the basket is empty, there are no apples to count. "If you ask mathematicians, most of them will probably tell you that the discovery of zero was a mind-blowing achievement," said Andreas Nieder, a professor of animal physiology in the Institute of Neurobiology at University of Tübingen in Germany.
That idea may sound obvious, but following the conception of zero as a numerical value, the field of mathematics underwent a dramatic transformation.
The concept of "none," or the absence of any quantity, likely emerged earlier, but this differs from using zero as a distinct "quantity," in and of itself. For instance, the notion of multiplying 8 by 0, or adding 0 to 10, didn't emerge until then. The concept of zero, as used in a number system, fully developed in human society around the fifth century A.D., or potentially a few centuries earlier, Live Science previously reported. Image of black crow with beak pointed toward computer monitor monitor displays a grey circle with four dots on itĬrows may be bird-brains, but the feathered creatures can understand the highly abstract concept of zero, new research suggests.
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