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Embargoed until 2 p.m. EDT
NSF PR 02-70 - September 4, 2002
Songbirds Use Mental Pointer When Playing Tunes
That spontaneous serenade from the zebra
finch is not only more rehearsed than
cellist Yo-Yo Ma's chamber music, but
the bird even keeps its "finger" on its
mental sheet music both day and night.
In a National Science Foundation (NSF)
supported study at Lucent Technology's
Bell Laboratories, researchers have discovered
that signals serving as "mental pointers"
are produced in the brains of zebra finches
while they sing, and also while they dream
about, or "rehearse," their song during
sleep.
This long-term, fundamental neural research
is helping scientists understand brain
mechanisms and, specifically, how the
brain produces signals for motor control
and learning. By studying how songbirds
learn their songs, scientists hope to
understand how humans learn to speak.
The finch's brain "circuits" are similar
to the parts of the human brain that handle
motor control and learning despite the
obvious size difference.
The findings were published Sept. 5 in the journal
Nature.
Zebra finches have only one song that lasts about a
second. At one month old, a finch first tries to sing
a song that it memorized while listening to its father
sing. While awake, it continues to practice singing
thousands of times a day. Then it also mentally rehearses
while asleep, as discovered in a different study.
The finch can repeat the song perfectly after about
two months practice.
Dr. Michale Fee of the lab's Biological Computation
Research Department found that a finch uses individual
neural signals lasting 6/1000 of a second to mark
its place as it sings. "I hate to use the 'follow
the bouncing ball' example, but that's basically what
it is," said Fee.
"Knowledge of timing cues such as those used by the
songbirds may give us insight into how humans learn
chunks of material through patterns and sequences,"
said Christopher Platt, a program director with the
National Science Foundation's neuroscience program.
"There seem to be a lot of parallels between how the
birds learn songs and how humans learn speech. This
will help the scientific community take the next steps
in figuring out the biology of learning."
The scientists next intend to study the source of these
signals.
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