For a very long time, we assumed we understood the shape of human capability. We drew the boundaries: here’s what we can do, here’s what we can’t. Here is what makes us different from animals. Here is what is uniquely ours. We were so confident in those boundaries that we stopped looking closely at what lay outside them.

Three pieces of research changed that conversation this week. Not dramatically. Not with a press conference or a policy announcement. Quietly, in the way science usually moves, in journals and university papers that most people never read. But the implications aren’t quiet at all.

You can listen to the full segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew below:

A pigeon navigates using its liver. Not its brain. Not its eyes. Its liver. Parrots aren’t mimicking your name when you walk in the door. They are calling for you specifically, recognising you as an individual and using your name as a social tool. And mammals, including us, didn’t lose the ability to regenerate tissue. The switch was turned off. A Chinese research team just turned it back on in a mouse.

Put those three things together and something shifts.

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The Liver Compass

The research on pigeon navigation came out last month from the University of Bonn. The researcher, Clivia Lisowski, wasn’t studying what I expected when I first read the summary. She was studying immune cells.

Inside the pigeon’s liver, there are cells called macrophages. Their job is to destroy old, used red blood cells. It’s ordinary cellular housekeeping, and we have the same cells in our own bodies doing the same work. But when the macrophage destroys the old red blood cell in a pigeon’s liver, it leaves iron behind. That iron becomes superparamagnetic. The nanoparticles align with the Earth’s magnetic field when the bird is in flight.

Those macrophages sit right next to nerve fibres. So the magnetic signal travels directly from the liver to the brain. As the bird flies, the signal gets sharper or duller depending on whether it is approaching or moving away from its destination. The brain reads the signal and adjusts course.

It isn’t GPS. It isn’t radar. It isn’t even located where we thought navigation would be. It’s in the liver.

Phil and I talked about this on RTHK Radio 3 Tuesday morning, and the question that kept coming up was the same one I kept asking myself: we have those macrophages too. We have the iron accumulation. We have the nerve fibres. Is something similar happening in us, and we just haven’t noticed?

The research points toward something researchers have been quietly discussing for years. That we may have an alternate processing system located not in the brain but somewhere in the torso, connected to what we loosely call gut feeling. That the signals that eventually reach our conscious brain may start somewhere else entirely. The liver, the stomach, the enteric nervous system. We’ve always known this system exists. We’ve just attributed it to metaphor rather than mechanism.

What the pigeon liver tells us is that the mechanism is real. And it didn’t originate in the brain.

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What We Have Always Known About Gut Feeling Turns Out to Be Literally True

I want to sit with this for a moment, because it matters more than it looks.

There is an enormous amount of research now on what is sometimes called the gut-brain axis. The notion that our digestive system isn’t simply a pipe but an active signalling system with its own intelligence, connected to the brain but not subordinate to it. This research has been building for twenty years. Most people in leadership roles have never heard of it, because it sits in gastroenterology papers rather than management literature.

But every leader I’ve ever worked with knows what a gut feeling is. They know the experience of something not sitting right, of a decision that looks good on paper but doesn’t feel right, of an instinct that turned out to be correct long before the data confirmed it. We’ve always called it intuition. We’ve often dismissed it as irrational, because we couldn’t locate it in the analytical frameworks we trusted.

The pigeon’s liver suggests we should think again. When the signal runs from the liver to the brain, when the brain doesn’t originate the direction but receives it, that isn’t an irrational process. It’s a distributed one. The intelligence isn’t located where we thought it was.

This connects directly to what I’ve been writing about in the context of HUMAND and AI decision-making: the question of which decisions should be made by humans, which by machines, and which by some combination of the two. We tend to answer that question by looking at speed, scale, and accuracy. We give machines the work where those three things dominate. We keep humans for the work where judgment and context matter.

But what we have consistently underestimated is the sophistication of the human processing system itself. The gut feeling isn’t noise. It is a signal. And if it is being produced by a distributed biological system that reaches from the liver to the brain, it is processing more information than a spreadsheet can hold.

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The Name Your Parrot Calls You

The second research came out in April from the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, led by Christine Dahlin. They studied 889 companion parrots. What they found isn’t what most parrot owners assume.

When your parrot calls your name as you walk in the door, most people assume it’s been trained. That it’s learned a cue: when Morris appears, say Morris. It’s operant conditioning. It’s clever, but it isn’t complicated. That’s the comfortable explanation.

The research says it isn’t that. In the majority of cases they studied, parrots weren’t responding to the cue of a person appearing. They were using the name in the person’s absence. Calling for someone who wasn’t in the room. Calling for other animals in the household. Using names as a referential tool, not just a conditioned response.

Some parrots also used their own name to attract attention. Which, as the researchers note, is something humans typically don’t bother to do. We assume others know who we are.

Elephants address each other with specific name-like calls in the wild. Bottlenose dolphins use learned vocal labels to identify specific individuals. The 2024 study on elephant naming was covered extensively when it came out. Less covered was what it implied. If elephants evolved the same social tool as humans, in completely different evolutionary conditions, the tool isn’t uniquely human. It’s a solution to a problem. The problem is: how do you manage complex social relationships?

The answer, across multiple species, turns out to be the same. You name people.

The assumption that language and naming are what separate us from other animals has been a cornerstone of human identity for a long time. I explored similar territory three weeks ago when we talked about Neanderthal DNA and what it revealed about the shared roots of human language. If you haven’t read that one, it is worth starting there. The headline finding was that Neanderthals may have had better genetic hardware for language than modern humans. Now we add parrots and elephants and dolphins, all of whom arrived at the same naming solution independently.

The question this raises for me isn’t zoological. It is strategic. We have built entire models of human uniqueness, human value, human irreplaceability around the assumption that cognition and communication are ours alone. What happens to those models when the evidence keeps shifting the line?

Not because humans aren’t special. But because we may have been wrong about which qualities make us special.

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The Switch That Was Turned Off, Not Removed

The third story is the one I’ve been watching build for the longest. The research is hotting up, and the implications are closer than most institutions are ready for.

A research team, publishing in the journal Science, compared regenerating mammals (species like rabbits, goats and African spiny mice that can regrow tissue after injury) with non-regenerating mammals like laboratory mice and rats. The question they were asking: what is the biological difference?

What they found surprised them. Both groups start the repair process the same way. They both form what’s called a blastema: a mass of cells that revert to a stem-like state, ready to redifferentiate into whatever tissue is needed. The regenerating and non-regenerating species begin the same process.

The difference is what happens next. Non-regenerating species, the ones that can’t regrow the tissue, can’t sustain the blastema. The process starts and then stops.

The team traced this to a gene called Aldh1a2. It produces an enzyme that makes retinoic acid, a known regeneration factor. In rabbits, active genetic enhancers switch Aldh1a2 on after an injury. In mice and rats, the DNA for those enhancers exists. But mutations accumulated over evolutionary time have made them non-functional. The switch is still there. It just no longer works.

Then they did something remarkable. They inserted a single rabbit enhancer into mouse DNA. The mouse began regenerating like a rabbit.

The switch exists in us too. We have the gene. We have the enhancers. They are mostly non-functional. We evolved our way out of regeneration not because the capability was removed but because the ear we developed required it. Our ear, complex and highly differentiated, trades on the same developmental pathway that regeneration uses. As the ear became more sophisticated over millennia, the regeneration pathway was progressively constrained. You can’t fully optimise both from the same genetic infrastructure, so evolution made a trade.

We got a better ear. We lost the ability to regrow what we damage.

I’ve been thinking about unintended consequences for a long time. The moon mission produced fifty-seven technologies we now take for granted, none of which were the mission’s stated purpose. Evolutionary trade-offs are the original version of unintended consequences: you optimise for one thing and forfeit another, often without realising the exchange has happened.

The regeneration finding is a second-order consequence of becoming human that we never tracked. We assumed we couldn’t regenerate because the capability had been deleted from our biology. It wasn’t deleted. It was traded for something we wanted more, at a time when we had no say in the decision.

I’ve been following regenerative medicine research for years. Long enough to watch a field shift from biological curiosity to clinical trajectory. That shift is happening now.

A while back, I was in a conversation with someone who works in dental research. One of those exchanges at the edge of an event, or alongside something else entirely, where a person says something that recalibrates your thinking. What they told me was this: people working in this field believe that in the foreseeable future it will be possible to regrow adult teeth.

Not implants. Not prosthetics. Regrowth.

Sharks replace their teeth continuously throughout their lives. Humans regenerate twice, from baby to adult, and then stop. We know the body can do this. The question has always been why the process stops and whether the stop can be changed.

This research says: yes, in principle. Not this year. Not in ten years. But in the foreseeable future, the same gene editing that has already cured sickle cell disease, that has already produced insulin-producing cells for Type 1 diabetes patients, is pointing toward tissue regeneration as a practical therapeutic goal. The machinery is there. It just needs to be switched back on.

The ripple effects are substantial. Healthcare planning, aged care modelling and insurance pricing all rest on the assumption that human tissue degrades at the rates we’ve observed. If that assumption starts to move, the systems built on top of it need to move too. Not when the therapy arrives. Before.

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The Pattern Underneath All Three

Phil framed Tuesday’s conversation with a line that I want to return to: studying animals is teaching us what we might still be capable of.

That’s the thread. Not that animals are better than us. Not that humans aren’t extraordinary. But that we’ve been systematically underestimating what our biology actually contains, because we drew the map of human capability based on what we could observe and what we had tested. We assumed absence of evidence was evidence of absence.

The pigeon’s liver suggests we have a navigational and sensing system we barely understand. The parrot research suggests that naming, recognising, and maintaining social identity aren’t human inventions but shared solutions to shared problems. And the regeneration switch suggests that the limitation we thought was structural is actually a policy setting that can, in principle, be changed.

This matters for how we think about the future of medicine. It matters for how we think about artificial intelligence and what, exactly, we mean when we say human judgment can’t be replicated. And it matters for how we think about preparation.

I’ve been writing this year about what I call Immediate Futures: the things that are already arriving and need attention now, not in some distant scenario. Gene editing is an Immediate Future. It isn’t speculative. CRISPR-based cures are already in patients. The regeneration research is two or three decades behind the sickle cell work, but it is travelling the same road.

What I find useful about the pigeon and the parrot research is that they arrive without a technology agenda. Nobody is selling anything. They aren’t about AI or gene therapy or biotechnology. They’re about observation. A researcher noticed something about where pigeons carry their navigation system and kept pulling on the thread. A researcher counted 889 parrots and recorded what they said when no one had prompted them.

Good foresight begins with observation. Not with prediction. Not with scenario planning software. With someone paying close enough attention to something that most people walked past without looking.

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Three Things Worth Taking Seriously

First: gut feeling. Not as a substitute for analysis, but alongside it. The research on distributed biological intelligence suggests that what you experience as intuition is a real signal, processed through real biological systems, reflecting real accumulated pattern-matching from your experience. The brain receives that signal; it doesn’t generate it from nothing. Organisations that systematically dismiss gut feeling in favour of pure data optimisation are discarding half of a processing system they don’t fully understand yet.

Second: stop treating human capability as a fixed and known quantity when it comes to decisions about what to automate and what to preserve. The assumptions underlying most AI adoption decisions are that we know what humans are good at and where the ceiling is. This week’s research suggests we have been mapping that ceiling from the inside of a room we have never fully explored. The question isn’t only what machines can do better than humans but what humans are capable of that we haven’t yet properly measured.

Third: if you work in healthcare, aged care, insurance, or superannuation, the early-stage science in regenerative medicine belongs in your scenario planning now. The ripple effects of tissue regeneration as a therapeutic reality are significant enough that they belong in your scenario planning now. Not because it arrives tomorrow but because the decisions made in those sectors over the next ten to fifteen years will lock in infrastructure, investment, and coverage models that will either be compatible with that future or incompatible with it.

The line between what was assumed to be fixed and what turns out to be a variable keeps moving. The organisations that stay ahead of that line are the ones that read the early signals and start adjusting before the change becomes impossible to ignore.

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If this is landing close to home for your organisation, I work with leadership teams and boards on exactly these kinds of decisions, what the signals mean, what the ripple effects are, and what to do before the moment becomes a crisis. Get in touch.

You can also subscribe to my Immediate Futures briefing, a short, weekly read on the signals worth paying attention to, written for leaders who want to stay ahead of what is already arriving.

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Choose Forward.

#AnimalCognition #HumanBiology #RegenerativeMedicine #ImmediateFutures #MorrisMisel #ScienceSignals #FutureOfHealth #RTHK #MorningBrew #WhatMakesUsHuman #Foresight #RippleEffects #ChooseForward

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Full Segment Transcript — RTHK Radio 3, The Brew, 30 June 2026 ▼ Click to expand

Morris Misel speaking with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew

Phil Whelan introduces Morris Misel (referred to as “Morris Miselowski”, the show’s long-standing usage).

What we’re going to talk about today is basically some really cool discoveries, research, et cetera. That is to do with genetics and stuff to do with animals, and of course birds. And how they’re helping humans, if they did but know it.

The reason being is that we’re discovering so much. I love these conversations because it really talks about things that many of us may have just taken for granted. We thought that birds, animals had a one-way process, a one-way thought. What we grew up with was the sum total of knowledge we have of them. And the more in-depth we get with our understanding of animals, birds, mammals and whatever else, the more we learn how fascinatingly incredible they are.

On pigeon navigation:

Pigeons and most birds can fly around the world. They have no GPS, they have no radar. They get from A to B and they land on the same nest they lived in eight or twelve months ago, then fly back to exactly where they started. That’s a phenomenal thing. And we were never really sure about why they were able to do that.

There’s new research, literally just came out last month, from the University of Bonn. And it says it has nothing to do with their brains. Nothing to do with their eyes, which are the two things we thought might explain it. What this researcher says is that they use none of that. They use their liver.

What she talks about is the notion of immune cells called macrophages. They live in the liver. Their purpose is to destroy old, used red blood cells. Now, we as humans have them too. What happens is that when they do that, they leave the iron behind. And it becomes superparamagnetic, is what this researcher has claimed. So what happens is these nanoparticles, left after these macrophages have done their job, sit next to the nerve fibres in the liver. As the bird flies, the magnetic signal in the liver is sharper or duller depending on whether they’re approaching or moving away from where they need to be. It feels through the liver, which then sends it to the brain, and tells it where to fly.

On what this means for humans:

We have these same cells in our bodies doing the same things. Now we’re not going to fly somewhere, that’s for sure. But it has long been spoken about the fact that there is a strong belief in research that we have an alternate brain. Not the same way as our brain that we think with in our mind, but we have an alternate organ in our body, which isn’t yet well known. And it lives somewhere around the liver and the stomach. You know, when we think about it, we’ll often say we have a gut reaction to something. That’s where this comes from.

We’ve always thought it came from our brain. What a lot of researchers have said is, yes, that’s where it ends up. So the signals from this other brain that might exist in our liver or in our stomach, really, at the end of the day, this all travels up to our brain. Our brain decodes it. But that’s not where it starts and finishes. That’s the big difference. And this pigeon case proves, in this research at least, the fact that it’s not a cognitive thing. It doesn’t start in their brain, it starts physically in their body, and then travels to the brain, which sends out a signal that tells them what they’re able to do.

On parrots using names:

This research came out in April this year, from the University of Pittsburgh. What this one says, you know, we’re all used to Polly want a cracker and all that kind of stuff. When we talk about parrots, we’re quite used to them mimicking words, and we think they’re very clever because they’re mimicking words. And we say that we have taught them something and they have practised it. What this research says, and again there are years of research behind this, is that in fact for a vast majority of parrots, that’s not true. They’re not mimicking what they were told. They’re actually recognising the human or the other animal in the household, and using their name as a social tool, not as a conditioned response.

It talks about elephants also addressing each other by name-like calls. Dolphins are very similar. Monkeys are similar. So what we’re suggesting here of course is that all these species aren’t as unclever as we might think. They’re actually quite clever. This is an example of where they’re actually using their mind to recognise who’s walking in the room and calling them by name, not just mimicry.

At the crux of this for me, one of the reasons that we have complex social lives is because we can recognise people and we can call them by name. If people didn’t have different names, we’d think everybody was exactly the same person. So our lives would be really, really different. We’re talking about very personalised recognising identity here. And that’s what they’re saying, the fact that parrots do this, dolphins do this, elephants do this. What animals have been seen now to do is to recognise their species and see them as different.

On mammal regeneration:

If you have a look at some species of animals, predominantly mammals, if they lose something like a tooth or a tail or a leg, if you go to a gecko, a lizard, they are able to regrow that part again. Sharks always have teeth. Even when they wear them down or bite them through, they will regrow the same tooth over and over throughout their life.

So it’s been long thought about, if that’s true of mammals, why isn’t it true of humans? Why can’t humans regrow? Because we do to an extent, we have baby teeth and then adult teeth. We regrow our skin all the time. So there are things about humans which do regrow. But why aren’t we able to regrow an arm, a leg, an organ when it falters or fails?

This research piece talks about the notion that rabbits, goats, some spiny mice, lots of animals on this planet have the ability to do it and they have the same basic genetic build-up as we did, not exactly of course, but the same basics. What they found is a key gene, Aldh1a2, that produces an enzyme. And it’s that enzyme that allows animals that do regenerate to start the regeneration process. And what they found is that in humans, that enzyme exists. But it starts the process without us knowing it, and then it never, ever, ever goes beyond starting it. So it lies dormant.

One of the reasons they’ve said that humans can’t do it, why we lost this ability hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, is this: the human ear is really complex. It’s got a very different architecture to nearly every other ear of any other mammal or animal on this planet. Because it’s so complex, the trade-off has been that we don’t regrow it. The body just stops. And researchers say that maybe one day, somewhere down the track, we might be able to re-trigger this. Remember, we didn’t know about DNA before. All of those things seemed incredible. They say that one day, somewhere down the track, we should be able to figure out the key to regrow these organs and body parts, and that will again be a totally different world if that comes about.

Note: The show’s production team identified the book Phil mentioned, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, as being by neurologist Oliver Sacks.

This post is based on my segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew, 30 June 2026.