Practice improving skills in singing birds

Learning complex skills like playing an instrument can take years to master. Last year, MIT neuroscientists reported that by studying the songs of tiny birds, they were able to recognize how separate brain paths contribute to 'trial and error'. 'at different stages in life.

Currently, researchers have gained new knowledge about specific mechanisms after this ability to learn. In the article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences magazine on July 6, scientists reported that when the manhunt regulates the song, its brain contains progress in a brain path before transfer learned information to other motor neurons for long-term memory.

This study gives more insight into the complex functioning of the basal ganglia, the brain structure plays an important role in learning and forming habits in humans. Lymphadenopathy is also associated with disorders such as Parkinson's disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder and opium addiction.

The author Michael Fee, a researcher at McGovern's Brain Research Institute at MIT, said: 'Birds provide a suitable system to study the basic mechanisms of the contribution of the basal ganglia to the possibility. ability to learn. Our results reinforce the idea that the basal ganglia is the entry point of new information obtained and affects our actions'.

Small manholes learn to sing by imitating their father, the song of the adult birds contains many syllables in a sequence. Like the babble of children, the first little birds only emit sounds that are unorganized, but after exercising thousands of times they can also fluently perform the same syllables and melodies. like his father. The motor nerve pathway is responsible for making the song, but another nerve pathway is needed to learn how to imitate the father bird. This nerve pathway, called the anterior brain nerve pathway (AFP), is similar to the basal ganglia in humans.

Author Aaron Andalman, a graduate student at Fee's lab, said: 'For this study, we want to know how these two nerve pathways work together when the bird is learning to sing. So we trained the birds in another melody and disabled the AFP line. '

To train the birds, the researchers controlled their song and produced a sound whenever the bird sang a syllable at a lower pitch than usual.

Fee explains: 'The bird heard this unexpected sound, thought it made a mistake, and gradually changed the pitch of the syllable to avoid repeating the error. After many days, we can train a bird to change up or down the pitch of a syllable. '

On a fixed day, after four hours of bird training raising the pitch of the song, the researchers temporarily disabled the AFP pathway with a drug (tetrodotoxin from puffer fish).The pitch of the song immediately drops to the beginning of the training session - this shows that the changes they have just learned are in the AFP nerve pathway.

However, the researchers found that after 24 hours, the brain transmitted new information learned from AFP to motor neurons. The motor nerve pathway contains all changes in pitch elevation from previous training sessions.

Fee compares this effect with edits in a document that are stored in the computer's temporary memory and then saved on the hard drive. It is the accumulation of changes in the motor pathway that leads to new skill development.

NIH and Friends of McGovern Institute funded the research