![]() "This storage and replay could help adult birds maintain accurate copies of their songs, and help young birds to learn to sing."ĭuring undisturbed sleep, the researchers discovered, the neurons spontaneously fired the same complex song production patterns in bursts. "Our results demonstrate that individual neurons replay complex activity during sleep that they produced during waking," said Margoliash. Forming this mapping of sound and action is the process of learning," said Margoliash. Now, much to our surprise, we find this correspondence in single cells of matched sensory and motor patterns. "Previously we found that during singing, song is represented as a temporal code. "The bird is using the preceding sound to predict how to generate the next syllable." Understanding how patterns of behavior are represented in the brain has been a major problem for neurobiologists. ![]() The two patterns can be 'mapped' to each other with spike-by-spike precision," said Margoliash. "The learned song is a temporal code that uses the nerve impulse spikes of single cells in precisely matched patterns for hearing and singing. This pattern of firing during listening, like the pattern of firing necessary to produce song, actually anticipates the next song "syllable," or set of notes. ![]() When the awake bird hears its own song, these neurons do not fire in response.īut in the sleeping bird listening to a recording of its own song, the neurons do fire in the pattern identical to song production, though the bird produces no sound. While the birds are awake and singing, the neurons fire in a pattern that is unique to the note and syllable components of each bird's individual song. The researchers compared the activity of each neuron while the awake bird sang, while a sleeping bird could hear a recording of its own song, and during undisturbed sleep. The male zebra finch works hard to attract the female with his stereotyped song, and the brain structures that control singing are highly specialized for this behavior. The researchers were able to record the firing patterns of individual pre-motor brain cells of four zebra finches, a well-studied songbird native to Australia that weighs only about half an ounce. "The single-neuron recording gives us a powerful tool for the study of sleep's importance to learning," said Margoliash. The recent miniaturization of neuronal recording gear allowed Margoliash's team to study the activity of individual brain cells in birds that were relatively free to move about and behave naturally. "The zebra finch appears to store the neuronal firing pattern of song production during the day and reads it out at night, rehearsing the song and, perhaps, improvising variations. "From our data we suspect the songbird dreams of singing," said Daniel Margoliash, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, and principal investigator in the study. In the October 27 2000, issue of Science, the researchers describe how the neurons involved in song generation precisely recreate during sleep the complex activities involved in singing-though no sound is produced. ![]() Young birds learn to sing by listening to adults and then practice by listening to their own attempts. Song acquisition is often used as a model system for how humans learn speech. In a study that suggests that sleep plays a central role in the learning process, University of Chicago researchers show that sleeping songbirds replay, rehearse, and perhaps reinforce the neuronal activity patterns of song production. Singing silently during sleep helps birds learn song
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