"We're not teaching the bird everything it needs to know – just the duration of syllables in its song," says Roberts. The team found that pathways between the NIf (nucleus interfacialis) and HVC (high vocal centre) brain regions, both previously linked to sensory and motor functions, were crucial in both forming the 'memories' of a song and then learning to sing it. Scientists often make use of zebra finches in studies though, because their vocal development is similar to humans in a lot of ways. Of course going from birdsong to human speech is a big leap, and a lot more research is going to be needed here. "The findings enabled us to implant these memories into the birds and guide the learning of their song." "This is the first time we have confirmed brain regions that encode behavioural-goal memories – those memories that guide us when we want to imitate anything from speech to learning the piano," says neuroscientist Todd Roberts, from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre. What prompted the research is not a need to create a new songbook for neighbourhood birds, but to understand how language is learnt – how young birds and perhaps young babies pick up language from their parents.įurther down the line we might one day be able to understand how to fix problems in language development using the same techniques used here. In this case, new melodies were successfully introduced without any parental input, so the birds were essentially mimicking tunes they'd never heard before. The zebra finches involved in the experiment usually learn songs from their fathers and other adult birds, memorising the notes and practising tens of thousands of times to get it right. The study could teach us more not just about birdsong, but also how vocal learning and language development happens in the human brain as well. The amount of time the neurons were kept active corresponded to the length of the notes in the song the birds learned. Using the process of optogenetics, where light is used to control living tissue, the team was able to activate certain neuron circuits in the birds and get them to memorise new tunes.
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