Summary: New work explores why consciousness evolved and what bird watching can teach us about its biological purpose. The findings describe three distinct forms of awareness: basic arousal, general alertness, and reflective self-awareness, each of which provides unique adaptive advantages.
Pain and pleasure appear to serve as early warning and reinforcement systems that improve survival by helping organisms detect danger and learn new information. More advanced forms of self-awareness help humans and some animals reflect, plan, and navigate social environments more effectively.
Key facts:
Three types of awareness: basic arousal acts as an emergency alarm, general alertness allows selective focus, and reflective awareness supports self-reflection. Evolutionary sequence: basic arousal arose first, and higher-order self-awareness developed later and in parallel. Bird Insights: Birds show that different brain structures can develop similar functional solutions for conscious processing.
Source: rub
What is the evolutionary advantage of our consciousness? And what can we learn about this by watching birds? Researchers from the Ruhr University in Bochum published two articles on this topic.
Although scientific research on consciousness has enjoyed a boom in the past two decades, a central question remains unanswered: What is the function of consciousness? Why did it evolve?
The answers to these questions are crucial to understanding why some species (like ours) became conscious while others (like oaks) did not. Furthermore, observation of the bird brain shows that evolution can achieve similar functional solutions to realize consciousness despite different structures.
Working groups led by Professors Albert Newen and Onur Güntürkün from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, report their findings in a current special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B dated November 13, 2025.
Purposes of pleasure and pain?
Our conscious experience shapes our lives, often through positive pleasure: I feel the warm sun on my skin, I hear the birds singing, I enjoy the moment. However, we also often experience pain: I feel like my knee hurts when I fall down the stairs, I suffer from always being pessimistic. Why have we, as living creatures, even developed a perception that can involve positive experiences as well as pain and even unbearable suffering?
Albert Newen and Carlos Montemayor classify three types of consciousness, each with different functions: 1. basic arousal, 2. general alertness and 3. a reflective (self-)awareness.
“Evolutionarily, basic arousal developed first, whose basic function was to put the body in a state of ALARM in potentially fatal situations so that the organism could stay alive,” explains Newen.
“Pain is an extremely effective means of perceiving damage to the body and indicating the threat associated with its continuation. This often triggers a survival response, such as fleeing or freezing.”
A second step in evolution is the development of general alertness. This allows us to focus on one element in a different simultaneous flow of information. When we see smoke while someone is talking to us, we can only focus on the smoke and look for its source.
“This allows us to discover new correlations: first of all, the simple causal correlation that the smoke comes from the fire and shows where the fire is located. But the directed state of alert also allows us to identify complex scientific correlations,” says Carlos Montemayor.
Humans and some animals then develop reflective (self-)awareness. In its complex form, it means that we can reflect on ourselves, as well as our past and future. We can form an image of ourselves and incorporate it into our actions and plans.
“Reflective consciousness, in its simple forms, developed parallel to the two basic forms of consciousness,” explains Newen.
“In such cases, conscious experience is not focused on the perception of the environment, but rather on the conscious registration of aspects of oneself.”
This includes the state of one’s body, as well as perception, sensations, thoughts and actions. To use a simple example, recognizing yourself in the mirror is a form of reflective awareness.
Children develop this ability at 18 months, and some animals have been shown to do so as well, such as chimpanzees, dolphins, and magpies. Reflective conscious experiences, as their main function, allow us to better integrate into society and coordinate with others.
What birds perceive
Gianmarco Maldarelli and Onur Güntürkün show in their article that birds may possess fundamental forms of conscious perception. The researchers highlight three core areas in which birds show notable parallels to mammalian conscious experience: sensory awareness, neurobiological foundations, and explanations of self-awareness.
First, studies on sensory awareness indicate that birds not only automatically process stimuli, but experience them subjectively. When pigeons are presented with ambiguous visual stimuli, they switch between several interpretations, similar to humans.
It has also been shown that crows possess neural signals that do not reflect the physical presence of a stimulus, but rather the animal’s subjective perception. When a crow sometimes consciously perceives a stimulus and sometimes does not, certain nerve cells react precisely in accordance with this internal experience.
Second, the bird brain contains functional structures that meet the theoretical requirements of conscious processing, despite their different brain structure.
“The avian equivalent of the prefrontal cortex, the NCL, is immensely connected and allows the brain to flexibly integrate and process information,” says Güntürkün.
“The avian forebrain connectome, which presents the entirety of information flows between brain regions, shares many similarities with mammals. Therefore, birds meet many criteria of established theories of consciousness, such as the global neural workspace theory.”
Third, more recent experiments show that birds can have different types of self-perception. Although some corvid species pass the traditional mirror test, other ecologically significant versions of the tests have demonstrated other types of shyness in other bird species.
“Experiments indicate that pigeons and chickens differentiate between their reflection in the mirror and a real member of their species, and react to them depending on the context. This is a sign of basic situational self-awareness,” says Güntürkün.
The findings suggest that consciousness is an older and more widespread evolutionary phenomenon than previously assumed. Birds demonstrate that conscious processing is also possible without the cerebral cortex and that different brain structures can achieve similar functional solutions.
Key questions answered:
A: Early awareness likely served as a survival alarm system, using pain and arousal to signal urgent threats and trigger rapid action.
A: General alertness allows organisms to focus on the most relevant information, helping them learn important associations and navigate complex environments.
A: It allows for reflection, long-term planning, social coordination and the ability to understand oneself in relation to others.
Editorial notes:
This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor. Magazine article reviewed in its entirety. Additional context added by our staff.
About this consciousness research news.
Author: Albert Newen
Source: rub
Contact: Albert Newen – RUB
Image: Image is credited to Neuroscience News.
Original research: Open access.
“Three Types of Phenomenal Consciousness and Their Functional Roles: Development of the ALARM Theory of Consciousness” by Albert Newen et al. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
Open access.
“Conscious Birds” by Onur Güntürkün et al. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
Abstract
Three types of phenomenal consciousness and their functional roles: development of the theory of consciousness ALARM
The evolution of consciousness is a neglected topic that plays a surprisingly insignificant role in all major theories of consciousness. Furthermore, substantial disagreements can be observed in the dominant views on the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), which focus too much on cortical regions of the brain.
To dissolve some of the contradictions between these views and limit rival theories, we propose to distinguish three central phenomena of phenomenal consciousness: basic arousal, general alertness, and reflective (self-)awareness.
The central objective is to show that we can fruitfully distinguish specific functions for each of the three phenomena.
Basic excitement has the function of alarming the body and ensuring survival by intervening in the slow updating of homeostatic processes. General alertness fosters advanced learning and decision-making processes, enabling various new behavioral strategies to address challenges, and reflective (self-)awareness enables long-term planning directed toward the future, taking into account the mindset of oneself and other agents.
Constraining our contemporary theories of consciousness with this evolutionary and functional approach will allow the science of consciousness to advance by accounting for three specific functions of consciousness, thus informing the search for a distinct NCC.
Abstract
Conscious Birds
In this article, we assume that consciousness is not the final triumph of human evolution, but rather represents a more basic cognitive process, possibly shared with other animal phyla.
In this paper, we show that there is growing evidence that (i) birds have sensory and self-awareness, and (ii) they also have the neural architecture that may be necessary for this.
We present recent behavioral studies and neurobiological data and discuss them in relation to three main theories of consciousness: global neural workspace theory (GNWT), recurrent processing theory (RPT), and integrated information theory.
Although the findings so far do not allow for a solid conclusion, the neurophysiological and anatomical characteristics of the avian brain appear to align with the prerequisites of the GNWT and RPT for hosting consciousness.
