Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm Amy Barton and I'm trace <inaudible> and it's time for a brainstorm. So my youngest sent me a clip from Reddit where a guy claimed he wanted to train a pigeon, how to recognize the word gluten on food packages. So his little sister who couldn't read and as an extreme sensitivity to gluten, Oh yeah. Wouldn't accidentally eat something with gluten in it. And he was like, I want to train the bird to slap the box with its wings when it sees that word. And I read this and I was like, no way. Well, I'm actually, wow. No.
Speaker 0 00:40 Okay. We're not quite there yet, but according to a study done by dr Damian scarf and his crew of researchers from the university of Otago in New Zealand, it might be possible. That is amazing. Oh yeah. So the study they were doing was to see if pigeons could still be taught to recognize words and figure out novel words. And when I say recognize it, I don't mean like reading it like, but that you could just shave eyes that yes, that these four letters, because they were using four letter words, could they recognize it? So they have four pigeons in the study. They learned to recognize between 26 and 58 four letter words like soon what? And gray. Okay. So they've got the bird with a touchscreen and about an inch apart. You've got your four letter word below and then a big asterisk pops up above it.
Speaker 0 01:34 And if the word is spelled correctly, the pigeon pecks the word and gets a piece of food. Oh, okay. Okay. If the word is not spelled correctly or if it isn't even a word at all, if it's random letters, the bird pecks the asterisk and gets a food <inaudible> if they get it correct. Okay. These birds could tell the difference between 7,832 non words and the real words in their vocabulary. I feel like you could teach a bird to recognize gluten free food. Right. Wow. And here's the thing that's really going to blow your mind. So when shown words that were real but they hadn't seen before, those are called novel words. Okay. The pigeons did significantly better than chance in picking them. Okay. They think the bird was cuing off of the letter combination. So for example, if you know that them and they, and there is a word, so they all start with T H if you were shown another T H word like than you know, you might guess, Oh well I know that this pair always goes together.
Speaker 0 02:39 That's probably a word. Wow. And here's the thing, that's how kids learn to read is by recognizing that pattern. And a pigeon does it too. So this is a combination of like behavioral training. Like you train your dog. Yup. So you do something right, you get a reward. And just the ability for the pigeon to keep this catalog of words in its head too. You think font size would have anything to do with it? Well, I don't know that it was the same size for, you know, as it came up on the screen again and again and again. So they're not taking over the world. No. However, they might be able to tell you if your food is gluten free. I know that is wild. Isn't that crazy? Makes me so happy. I love that there's still unknown things like that out there and, and that there's people that would think that an animal could do that. To ask that question, I don't think to ask the questions. And I think from now on, if someone calls you a bird brain, you should absolutely thank you. Someday I might save your life with this bird brain protect you from that gluten. Excellent. Anytime you need another dose of random fat <inaudible>, ask your smart speaker to play brain junk podcast. You can also find us on Twitter as at my brain junk and we're on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcast. Teresa and I will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know. And I guarantee you will not be bored.
