JMA-PSOS

Quirks and Quarks covered how chickadees form “bar codes” in their hippocampi when they store and retrieve seeds from their caches. They first employ these place cells (I.e. geospatial indexes) and then for a brief second they fire a unique pattern the scientists called “bar codes” (i.e. hashes) unique for each cache. The scientists posit that other animals including humans use similar techniques.