Consciousness is the strangest thing evolution ever pulled off. It’s not a trait like wings or fur, but rather something that exists solely as a product of the mind. For the longest time, we’ve treated consciousness as humanity’s private club — no entry for creatures without language or a big, folded cortex. But science is starting to catch up to nature. Across the animal kingdom, from crows solving puzzles to pigeons hesitating before ambiguous images, there are glimmers of something familiar. These minds don’t just react; they choose, they interpret, they might even reflect.
New research from Ruhr University Bochum suggests that consciousness may not be the pinnacle of human evolution at all. Instead, it may be an ancient adaptation — a flexible biological tool that other species have been refining for millions of years. Their studies propose that consciousness may have evolved earlier, more diversely, and in stranger forms than we ever imagined.
The Alarm Inside
Two research teams — one led by philosophers Albert Newen and Carlos Montemayor, the other by neurobiologist Onur Güntürkün and postdoctoral researcher Gianmarco Maldarelli — are dismantling some of the oldest assumptions about what it means to be conscious.
Newen and Montemayor propose a framework they call the ALARM theory of consciousness. It divides awareness into three distinct levels: basic arousal, general alertness, and reflexive self-consciousness. And each serves a unique survival role.
“Evolutionarily, basic arousal developed first, with the base function of putting the body in a state of ALARM in life-threatening situations so that the organism can stay alive,” said Newen.
This earliest form of consciousness, they argue, was not born in the cerebral cortex but in older brain structures like the thalamus and brainstem. It’s the mind’s emergency siren, such as the jolt of pain that warns an animal to flee or freeze.
Next came general alertness, the capacity to focus on one signal in a storm of sensory noise. “This makes it possible to learn about new correlations: first the simple, causal correlation that smoke comes from fire and shows where a fire is located,” said Montemayor.
The final step is reflexive self-consciousness — the mind’s ability to turn inward, to model itself. Humans, chimpanzees, dolphins, and even magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror. This self-awareness, Newen explained, “makes it possible for us to better integrate into society and coordinate with others.”
Together, these layers form an evolutionary ladder from simple survival to introspection. And according to Newen, even creatures with tiny brains may climb the first rungs.
The Birds That Know
That’s where Güntürkün and Maldarelli come in. Their companion paper, “Conscious Birds,” turns the avian brain into a test case for the ALARM theory.
“In this article, we start from the assumption that consciousness is not the ultimate triumph of human evolution but rather represents a more basic cognitive process, possibly shared with other animal phyla,” they write.
The team focuses on three hallmarks of consciousness — sensory experience, neural architecture, and self-awareness — and finds striking parallels between birds and mammals.
In one experiment, pigeons were shown a pattern of flashing dots that could be interpreted as moving either horizontally or vertically. The birds were trained to peck one key for horizontal motion and another for vertical motion. Even though the image on the screen never changed, their choices alternated — first one direction, then the other — revealing spontaneous shifts in what they perceived. This kind of bistable perception, where the same stimulus leads to alternating subjective experiences, has long been considered a hallmark of mammalian consciousness. The pigeons’ performance suggests that their brains, though wired differently, can produce the same kind of inner flicker between competing interpretations of reality.
That alternating perception, Maldarelli and Güntürkün note, “indicates that the avian visual system can perceive several perceptual interpretations that compete to access consciousness.”
Not Just Seeing, Perceiving
Even more striking were the experiments with crows.
The birds were trained to signal whether they had seen a faint light on a screen — sometimes by moving their heads, other times by pecking a target. The brightness of the light was adjusted so that it hovered right at the edge of visibility. Sometimes it was perceptible, sometimes it was not. While the crows made their decisions, electrodes recorded the activity of single neurons in a brain region called the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), which is the avian equivalent of our prefrontal cortex.
What the scientists found was remarkable. These neurons fired in sync with the bird’s decision about whether it had seen the light, not with the light’s actual presence or absence. In other words, the NCL wasn’t tracking the external world; it was tracking the crow’s subjective experience of it.
“The NCL activity predicted the subjective report rather than the visual input,” the authors note, calling it “the first evidence of an avian brain area linked to subjective experience.”
A Cortex Without a Cortex
How can a brain the size of a walnut host awareness without a layered neocortex? The answer may lie in its connectome, or the brain’s wiring diagram.
“The avian equivalent to the prefrontal cortex, the NCL, is immensely connected and allows the brain to integrate and flexibly process information,” said Güntürkün. “Birds thus meet many criteria of established theories of consciousness, such as the Global Neuronal Workspace theory.”
Three major models dominate current consciousness research: the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT), the Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), and the Integrated Information Theory (IIT).
Güntürkün and Maldarelli compared the avian brain against all three. They found that the first two fit remarkably well. Birds’ brains show the long-distance connections and feedback loops required by GNWT and RPT, suggesting they could sustain a “global workspace” — a network that broadcasts information across the brain to produce awareness.
By contrast, IIT’s demand for a specific kind of grid-like, cortical structure wasn’t met. Birds’ pallial tissue resembles cortex in some areas, but not enough to fulfill IIT’s mathematical conditions.
Still, the findings upend the notion that consciousness depends on mammalian anatomy. “Conscious processing is possible without a cerebral cortex,” the authors conclude.
Recognising the Self
Birds also show behaviors that hint at self-recognition, a key feature of reflexive consciousness. Even chickens and pigeons show subtler signs of self-awareness. In one experiment, roosters warned their flocks of aerial predators, but stayed silent when the “other bird” was just their reflection. Pigeons, too, react differently to mirrors than to real companions. They track the timing of their own movements as if they recognize the match.
“These findings indicate that pigeons and chickens do not treat their image as a typical conspecific,” the authors write. “They show strong signs of knowing that their mirror image is not another individual of their species.”
Consciousness Is Not New
Across these studies, one idea emerges — consciousness is not a single leap but a mosaic of adaptive functions. And some of these must be truly ancient. Newen and Montemayor’s ALARM theory suggests it began as a biological warning system and evolved toward the complex awareness we feel today. Güntürkün and Maldarelli’s work shows that this system can emerge in radically different brains.
Consciousness, it seems, doesn’t belong to any one species or brain type. It’s a flexible solution — a way for living things to predict, adapt, and endure. When a crow pauses before deciding what it saw, or a pigeon toggles between two realities, we may be watching the same ancient spark that once flickered into human awareness.
Journal references:
- Albert Newen et al, Three types of phenomenal consciousness and their functional roles: unfolding the ALARM theory of consciousness, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2024.0314
- Gianmarco Maldarelli et al, Conscious birds, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2024.0308
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