Washington, March 20: Scientists claim to be gaining insight into how the human brain functions with the help of a little singing bird, which may lead to a better understanding of human speech production and speech disorders.
A team at Penn State University, led by Dezhe Jin, is looking at how songbirds transmit impulses through nerve cells in the brain to produce a complex behavior, such as singing.
“We are not only interested in birds. We are ultimately interested in studying how the human brain works and better understanding ourselves,” Jin said.
While many animals communicate vocally, songbirds are among the few that learn their communication sounds in a manner similar to humans. Although human and bird brains are different, researchers believe that both the speech and song learning processes involve similar neural mechanisms.
“It is very hard to do human experiments. So, to conduct these experiments, we use the songbird. Songbirds are much simpler than humans, and have fewer neurons,” Jin said.
Alexay Kozhevnikov, assistant professor of physics, works with Jin to conduct recordings of brain activity that occurs in songbirds during singing. In this way, the bird’s brain acts as a lab for understanding neural networking.
Because the major brain components involved in song production are well documented, Jin uses them as a framework for designing computational models. He can test these models against the neural recordings, and eventually determine how the interconnection of these networks leads to syllable production and syntax.
—PTI