Researchers have succeeded in encoding musical "notes" in the brains of birds by manipulating the activity of their neurons. The birds then used these implanted "memories" to learn a new song that it had never heard before.
To achieve mastery of language, the most effective tool is repetition. So this is the technique used with human babies. They learn through a lot of practice, repetition and effort. But although language is a crucial stage in our development, certain components of its learning still remain misunderstood. How does the brain manage to encode the memories needed to imitate the sounds made by our dear parents? To try to understand it, researchers from UT Southwestern (USA) looked at songbirds. Study details are published in the journal Science .
On zebra finches, more precisely. These birds do indeed the same way as us to learn to communicate. Very early, the little ones listen to their father sing, memorize the notes, then try to repeat them. After tens of thousands of attempts, the little one finally manages to sing the same thing as his father.
The idea behind this study was:teach them a song by encoding the notes directly into their brain . To do this, the researchers activated a circuit of neurons using pulses of light . The duration of each note corresponded to the length of time the light was held. The shorter the light exposure, the shorter the note. And vice versa.
" We don't teach the bird everything it needs to know - just the duration of the syllables in its song , explains Todd Roberts, lead author of the study. The two brain regions we tested in this study are only one piece of the puzzle. Nevertheless, the discovery is remarkable because it opens up new avenues of research to identify more brain circuits that influence other aspects of vocalization, such as the pitch and order of each sound ” .
As predicted by researchers, small birds have managed to transcribe the duration of the notes. These having been encoded in their brains. In other words, they had never heard them before.
While the human brain is indeed more complex than that of the songbird, researchers nevertheless hope to one day be able to use this knowledge to target specific speech genes that are disrupted in patients with neurodevelopmental disorders.
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