i lose culture information. this is neither were you news. he w grateful minds. we've got some hot tips for your bucket list. ah, magic corner tread hotspot for food and some great cultural memorials to boot w travel off we go. well, i'll be smarter than we think. we look at the hidden wonders in the mines of pigeons and does music make us smarter. researchers have found some truly resonating insights. also in this week's d, w,

science show we face up to the phenomenon of super recognizes. welcome to to morrow to day. a lot of people have difficulty remembering faces or telling them apart. the key is their cognitive abilities. cutting edge technology can help us to correctly identify faces. as we all know, computer assisted facial recognition is now used to keep track of people in cities around the world. but some of us have similar faculties and police forces are eager to recruit the services of these super recognizes london, august 20201414 year old alice ross went for

a walk that afternoon. 6 at 4 26 pm, her image was recorded on see see, tv. and then she disappeared. the police search for alice gross was the biggest in london since the 2005 bombings. the video footage provided vital clues in the cctv capital of the world. an estimated 1000000 cameras track people as they go about their daily business. footage from these cameras is viewed in the headquarters of the london metropolitan police, also known as scotland yard. this is where the so called super recognizers work. people with particularly good recall when it comes to faces. they identify faces time and again, even partly concealed in crowds or in very grainy footage. it's

a skill that long when unrecognised and unused. to 94, i realized that the police weren't using see she tv properly than that of images just were being news like fingerprints and dna in a systematic way. so started to develop systems to gather images, to catalog them properly. and as i circulated them more and more, you realize that for every 100 identifications, some offices would, might want to. but some mood might 10 or 20. so it really stood out that those people who out real note this is how the world's 1st super recognize are unit came into being it's now led by elliot pour it, who'd also been unaware of his special talent was on he really in about 2012. the metropolitan place i said is new on a super recognize, listen, my 1st thought was, was the super recognizers. and apparently was because i was making successful

identifications. i'm from in a wanted posters of criminals. this ability turned out to be the key to solving the alice grass case. a few days after the 14 year old went missing, a woman living in the same district in london reported her partner is missing. he was already known to the police and was identified as a possible suspect. the super recognizers poured over cctv footage along the route that alice had taken to see if they could spot the man to get better just him . his way home and sure enough eliot pour it and his team spotted him. they noticed that the possible suspect kept returning to a particular spot at the riverside after palace crosses disappearance. why did you so he went back to the senior officer who's investigating a case, and he said, look, we think we've found sal cans and changing his closing. i went to the crime scene

and that was when i found her just over a month after her disappearance, the parents of 14 year old alice grass had their worst fears, confirmed the body of the young girl was found in the river. brent. at that stage, there was still no sign of the suspected killer super recognizers can also help solve other crimes. apart from murder. one of the most successful cases we've had was with the serial shoplifter. we had one super recognizers who in a separated by a couple of weeks with memory when that you have seen that guy before. i shall seen him in the, in our database and then we sell to sing for 5 times. and then we really went hunting, nazi of onset of having a database of all images of criminals and images from crime scenes. because then

we're able to go back for these on so crimes. and we had him eventually for about 40 free ah offences. facial recognition software wouldn't have helped. here it needs better footage than the detectives generally have access to agreement university in london, psychologist josh davis is studying super, recognize her powers, using tests that he's continually refining with the help of the police investigators. i once one stand the science behind this. i also think that the more we know about this, the more we understand about human memory, and maybe it's got further applications that no one's even thought about. yet. a few days ago, davis showed one of elliot ports, team members, short video clips of people that she's now be asked to identify in photos.

the test is intended to reveal how long super recognizers memory skills last davis and pour it are happy with the results. the super recognizers team leader sees the work with the university as vital because we're operating in an area of a place where that is pretty much undefined. and as you know, the experimental, it's almost piloting um, all the forces from around the world are looking our models. in the case of alice grass, the body of her suspected killer was found a few days after the discovery of her body. the 41 year old was found in the woods. he hanged himself. apparently for fear of being captured. the police are convinced that he would have been convicted. the evidence found at the crime scene was too dami. mike traces of his dna on the teenager shoes and

a cigarette stub. but the tip that led the police to the body in the 1st place came from the super recognizers. well, the super economics unit in the future i think, will expand or across the world. the 1st a murder, solve with fingerprints is about 2 miles from where you all know a 1905, no to scotland yard out. so take that out and show everybody else. so to do fingerprints. and then dna came along and, and the british police out to the same. so now we're super recognizers. this is the 3rd step. and, and so we've got to expand this because there's no reason why there are no super recognizers in germany or in, in america or anywhere else in the world. super recognizers tend to be deployed to solve crimes after they've been committed. but sometimes, for example, during big events, they can stop planned crimes, some control rooms,

they monitor events by a video link. if they identify known criminals or suspects, for example, police can intervene. but of course they can't do anything if for example, an unknown sleeper is planning an attack. so even in the cctv capital of the world, there's no such thing as total security there are animals that use tools to secure food and learn through observation. so species are known to have an impressive level of intelligence. parents have developed their own solutions for specific problems and use form intelligence to improve their efficiency. while dolphins are not dissimilar to humans, only intelligence front. and there are countless other animals where we know how

smart they are. but i'm next report deals with the species that are higher flyers than you might think. scientist and bo, whom university have known for a long time, the pigeons aren't stupid, but are in fact highly intelligent. their visual memory is phenomenal and their masters of rote learning. they can memorized 700 images and recall them with ease. this is lam pigeon. 094. she is about to prove how powerful her working memory is. to neuroscientist semi 7 chick. these are the images, the pre prism to the pigeons, the prison dental pups of items. one of them contains images with the shape, information and color information. and the one can compress this route. only colors

are great snow chip, informational color information. and at the end of the day, we want to see if the information like the amount of information to provide to this animals can effective or commitment from us. this is the main fame of hers. her pigeons tenacity, and their equity are legendary. they pack away at the monitors for hours on end, but it has to be quiet. we need to whisper shows it as simple as it's hot and miss presented to imagine. if it killed it and that it waits 6 seconds and then it beg your side it back to the answer here was wrong. so that's why have you shouted the lives and didn't provide food. but the answer regarding daniel that provide food. so the great thing is that they see stimulus, then keep it in mind for 6 seconds, and then that you according to the systems. so be it was incorrect responses. i've

got the hold already. and this is how they spend their time. it takes exec to wander days for them between these internal they're all can that come and then country opinion 094 is off to the racist. she doesn't know what give up means. all own are going to current, wants to better understand why thought processes and such different brains as pigeons and human brains function. so similarly, our own working memory is a good place to begin for a comparative experiment. then go into the fatherhood when we have to remember the color red, then inside ourselves, we secretly repeat, read, read, read, read, read. so we'll store the idea of you, but how does the pigeon memorize it with us? and what we're looking at now though, i'm still not sure we'll find it out, is could it be that a pigeon rather than using words which it obviously can instead codes these stimuli by a different movement. and it was

a little bit legal good such as doing one thing on red, the less must and another on green, 0 us more. i'd still an open question. the bottom team has been able to shown that the cerebral cortex with which we think is not only found in mammals. a new laser technique has shown that bird brains also have a structure resembling our cortex, with its typical horizontal and radial layers where complex thought takes place. you believe that because they make an extremely detailed analysis of everything they see with the vertical layer landing. they coordinate it all with the radio layers, the honest me data, just want these structures are capable of becomes visible under the microscope. but museums it, i've lizzie, here, individual nerve cells marked in dark wood into tissue and with the technology we used, you can see these dark colored cells communicating with other nerve cells mit on the mouth and saying, we can practically see who's talking with wholly to,

to meet via the recently made discovery as groundbreaking, something as complex as this was expected and mammals, but not in birds. of the instant licksey. at 1st glance, the 2 brains look so differently money, but the near you go in the more closely you look at, you can see the same basic principles throughout the beds. the closer we look, the more they look the same. that doesn't make master minds of pigeons. in the bird world alone, crows are far superior. yet pensions still possess astounding cognitive abilities. it's impressive how they recognize and contextualize pictures, and even learn if a sequence of letters forms an english word or not. pigeons are totally underrated . this miss, you missed a bit of a shame because they're running about all over the place. and it would be nice to say, wow,

a grandmaster of working memory comes to visit hilton. does that will be cool? ah! if our blood is red, why are they don't leave you? there's no such thing as to smart, right? if you had a sons related question, then as a video, text or voice message, if we answer it on the show, we'll send you a little surprise as a thank you. come on, just does scientifically, memories are generated by information they're stored in our sensory memory for a few seconds. working memory stores information for a few minutes. and our long term memory stores information for hours, at least, and usually for many years. but memory is not always reliable.

ah, the human memory is a huge archive that works like a well oiled machine. well, most of the time. but not always. sometimes there are things we just cannot retrieve while the memories land on us uninvited. ah, there is some we simply can't shake off. here are 3 classic tricks our memories play on us. oh, 1st up, the tip of the tongue phenomenon. something we've all experienced at some point. what was at acs his name again? hang on. on the tip of my tongue for fun. oh, this is what's going on upstairs. recollection of one particular person is stored

in a number of locations. their appearance individual center sounded their voice in the auditory center, and the approximate number of syllables in their name and the language center. in order to defy the person, the brain has to dig up and piece together a sufficient number of those features. and that's where it's easy to get confused. a similar sounding they might 1st pop into your head because it's available sooner . so what's the solution? one answer to turn your attention to something completely different. suddenly moves a spanner in the works and eventually the penny dropped. oh john claude van damme, of course, drink number 2, factory memory. that is and reasoning to odor. it's not just on solicited visual memories that sometimes bothers smell. i don't know that for me again. suddenly you might be haunted by a distinctly unwelcome memory. why is that?

it's pretty simple. with all our senses, smell is the only one directly connected to the brain's emotional center, the a medulla, and also to the adjacent hippocampus, the area where memories are created. therefore, odors and the recollections associated with them are particularly video memory, cues o. number 3, the e were more catchy tune memories that refused to go. i can be very annoying, like a song. you just have to sing along to the songs that you can't get out of your head tend to resurface when we're busy doing mundane tasks. and now working memory has some free capacity to stave off board amount brain browsers through its archives and pulls out a specific song in a similar style to a record player. and in our heads,

we are the he emusic we adore. although we absolutely hate this triggers the stimulus that makes us repeat the melody all there expect to ourselves. that creates a neverending loop. as you're singing, leads to you hearing mattoon internally, which in turn encourages her the singing remedy. research is recommend listening to the song one's bowl the way through to the bitter end and then bury the memory deep deep down in your brain's archive. 2 2 next tend to music and the days nights that is a superstar of classical music in his own day. and now he composed with 1000

i and those legs and said to have magical effects on this, i just listening to mozart really make you smarter. the so called mozart effect was identified by researchers in 1993. 0, they gave a group of college students a 10 minute audio sample to listen to oh, with soundtracks ranging from silent to a relaxation tape. adkins you we go to a mozart piano concerto. oh, the students were then asked to take a spatial intelligence test. oh,

oh. oh. those subjects who had been listening to mozart performed better than the other groups registering spatial i. q scores, 8 or 9 points higher. not a huge leap, but certainly jumped. and that said, the intelligence boost lasted all of 15 minutes at most, and then it disappeared. but that surprising if short lived effect triggered a media frenzy. mozart makes you smart, was in all the headlines. ah, the impact was especially great in the united states. babies born in georgia and tennessee were given a mozart cd, while kindergarten, kids in florida were treated to an hour of mozart music every day. the scientific community also seemed enthralled. researchers reenacted the original experiment, but struggle to confirm the mozart effect. it was replicated in some tests,

but not in others. oh, meanwhile, there was a suspicion that the music merely improved the mood of test subjects, giving their brain some brief stimulation. another question soon arose. does it have to be mozart? oh, as it turned out, music by other artists had the same effect, whether as sonata by schubert or a song by the 19 ninety's british band to blur i . so the notion that only mozart makes you smarter and permanently so was just a myth. but the big question remains, how does music affect the brain? oh,

or grey matter is in fact colored by practically every thing we do. that includes listening to music and even more so playing music. what ever the music, practicing and performing, leave a mark. any drummers, the neural pathways linking the 2 halves of the brain, tend to be fewer but thicker, which is perhaps why they're so good at certain swift and complex movements. surely a well trained fit brain is capable of more than a standard specimen. well, there are plenty of studies that claim playing music makes you smarter. experiments showed that people with a musical background, we're better at certain things. they might have better language memory skills, for example, or were better able to remember things they had seen movie

children in particular performed better on the memory front and intelligence tests if they had at least a year of music lessons. the problem is, even if playing and instrument goes along with higher i q test scores, it doesn't mean the one cause the other. ah, i played the violin and was an ace in physics. wouldn't he have been a science? was even if he had never learned an instrument playing music and being intelligent, may well co occur. but whether one contributes causally to the other is highly questionable. more than a 100 studies over the past 20 years have claimed there is a causal connection without sufficient evidence to back up the claim. like muscles, the brain can be given a workout. but training and one activity doesn't mean you perform better in others

. if 2 skills are very different, being good at the one is not likely to make you better if the other, practicing the piano all day is likely to make you a better pianist. but will it make you better at solving differential equations? ah hardly. ah. still practicing an instrument not only lets you play music, it can also teach you that practice does make a significant difference. that can boost your self confidence and willingness to really apply yourself. so to recapitulate, does music make you smarter? well, there's no straightforward answer, but quite apart from any possible link to intelligence, music is a treasure and a joy in its own right. whether in the form of mozart, pop or hip hop.

with for mo, from the wonderful world of science and tech, find us on the web at d, w dot com slash science and on twitter, that's all from tomorrow to day. for now, we hope you'll join us again next week for another fascinating addition of our science show. until then, but by with ah, with

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