11.09, Thursday 9 Jun 2022 Link to this postIt turns out that chickens use their eyes quite differently. (I’ve been skimming paper abstracts.)The left eye distinguishes between strangers and friends – and more generally is a novelty detector.The right eye categorises and figures out what action to take.(So a chicken looking only with its right eye is poor at telling novelty.)Chickens, having eyes on the sides of their heads, look with only one eye at a time.If I wasn’t sitting here baking in the heat I would be thinking about the general lesson here – that these two ways of seeing make up the totality of how to see the world. One a process that looks for metaphors and stereotypes; the second a novelty switch. Organisations and bureaucracies need these two ways of seeing. Machines and software too.Anyway. The avian brain. Did dinosaurs specialise their eyes too?Here’s the abstract.Vallortigara, G., & Andrew, R. J. (1994). Differential involvement of right and left hemisphere in individual recognition in the domestic chick. Behavioural processes, 33(1-2), 41–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/0376-6357(94)90059-0

Idle thoughts sitting by the pool in the hot sun (Interconnected)