Birds use 'barcodes' to find places to hide food

A barcode appears in the Chickadee's brain, helping them always find the exact place where food is hidden .

Like squirrels, Chickadees have a habit of hiding their food. However, the fact that they can find exactly where their food is hidden has been a mystery to science for a long time.

A study published on March 29 in the journal Cell revealed the secret about this bird. It turns out that to find a place to hide food, the Chickadee must rely on a specific set of neurons located in the memory center of the brain to generate a brief burst of activity.

The memory recording that takes place in Chickadee birds is what researchers call a "barcoding" system in the brain. (Photo: Getty).

The way this works is similar to when we use barcodes to encode and decode information. For Chickadee birds, they can retrieve information from memories through each stage, thereby simulating specific events in the past.

Selmaan Chettih, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, says this type of memory is challenging to study in animals. "You can't ask a mouse what memories it formed today ," Chettih shared. "It was an amazing and extremely complex research journey."

To study the memory of Chickadee birds, Chettih and his colleagues built a special complex to recreate areas where food could be hidden, including 128 artificial storage areas.

The research team then inserted small probes into the brains of five Chickadee birds to monitor the brain's electrical activity of each nerve cell, then compared that activity with detailed location records. the mind and body behavior of birds.

Thanks to that, they discovered that every time the Chickadee finds food in the place where it stores it, a brain wave appears, and they are expressed as a barcode. 

There, Chickadee neurons encode the presence and absence of food particles in the buffer, forming a connection between three different patterns of neural activity, including: encoding information, location coding and particle type coding.

"When you remember some specific event that happened in the past, that episodic memory cannot be separated from where the event took place, or when that event happened ," said Kazumasa Tanaka, scientist neurology at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, explained.

That is also the method that scientists rely on to decode the mystery of the Chickadee bird.

Selmaan Chettih believes that studying memory "barcodes" in Chickadee birds can bring us more new knowledge about how the brain and memory work.