The mind of the parakeets reveals the secrets and techniques of human speech | Science | EUROtoday

Several species of birds are capable of imitate human speech. Some singing birds, corvids and parrots additionally produce vocalizations with which they impart. But how they succeed and in the event that they do it just like people it was a thriller. Now, a examine with parakeets revealed in Nature He has begun to disclose it: they’ve a sequence of neurons particularly devoted to activating their vocal organ, Siringe. Some are so particular that they’re liable for singing singing or producing kind of acute calls. They do it with part of their completely different mind, however in any other case, the mechanism is identical because the human.

“The parrots, such as the Australian parakeets that appear in this study, stand out for their incredible vocal capacity. They can imitate various sounds of the environment, including speech,” Michael Long, a senior creator of the analysis and trainer on the New York University School of Medicine. “We discovered that there was a representation of vocal sounds in the part of the brain analogous to a key center of speech production in humans. This is the first non -human species in which it has been observed vocal motor map”, Adds Dr. Long.

Their discovery goes additional: by spectral evaluation, they verified that there was a correlation between the kind of vocalization and the sample of mind exercise. Thus, a gorgojeo with a sure, kind of acute tone was accompanied by the shot of some neurons, however not others. In people, the a part of the motor cortex devoted to speech encodes the tone, the frequency of vocalization. In the parakeets this a part of your mind modulates the tone due to its management of the stress of the syringe partitions. For Zetian Yang, first creator of the investigation, there’s a correlation between the kind of sound that produces a parakeet and the kind of neurons which might be activated. Asked by different species associated to the parakeets, Yang acknowledges that it has not been investigated, however believes that “parrots with similar vocal abilities could share the same neuronal organization.”

People can communicate, sing, scream or whisper due to a sequence of neurons from the motor area of the cerebral cortex that delay their endings to the mind trunk, a real freeway that connects the mind with the spinal wire and all the remainder of the nervous system. Here, these endings attain the ambiguous nucleus, in command of controlling the musculature of the mouth, the pharynx and, what pursuits right here, the larynx, the human vocal organ. The mind anatomy of the birds is completely different, in addition to the vowel. They should not have vocal strings, they produce their songs with the syringe and the vibrations of their partitions. But research with disabled parakeets had proven that their potential to vocalize resided in a counterpart of the cerebral cortex in mammals, known as anterior core of the Arcopalio (AAC). Here, its electrical stimulation, innervated the syringe, returning the power to sing.

On that foundation, neurologists of the Langone Medical Center of the University of New York (United States) positioned tiny implants within the head of a number of parakeets. They registered greater than a thousand trills and dozens of calls from 4 males (these of the picture) in varied periods. They noticed simply as sure AAC neurons have been activated and as their endings reached the syringe by the mind stem. To verify that the origin of this exercise was not one other, additionally they recorded it whereas listening to the trill of different specimens or in instances of silence. They additionally noticed how they reused the identical neuronal units after they reproduced very comparable sounds.

Joshua Neunuebel, neuroscientist on the University of Delaware (United States) writes a remark additionally in Nature on the scope of the examine with these parakeets. First bear in mind the variations between the completely different species: “Humans have unparalleled vocal flexibility for speech, parrots stand out in imitation and zebra pinzones [usados como grupo de control en el estudio] They produce stereotyped songs with fixed syllables. ”Even so, they preserve what they’ve in frequent. Despite anatomical variations,“ the fundamental neuronal organization from the previous brain, through the brain trunk, to the vocal organ is maintained, which demonstrates how similar architectures have been adapted throughout the evolution to produce unique vocal behaviors ”.

Understand human speech

That thought of ​​evolutionary convergence from a special level was demonstrated by the current publication of a number of works on the mind of mammals, birds and reptiles. Fernando García Moreno, researcher Ikerbasque of the Achucarro Basque Center for Neuroscience and the primary creator of two of those research, this course of stands out: “Loros can imitate our way of speaking, but their brains control the vocalization with cerebral parts other human brain ”.

For García Moreno, the similarity of vocal circuits is stunning even though the mind protagonists are completely different. His works, revealed in ScienceThey discovered that neurons and circuits in hierarchically excessive mind areas developed independently in mammals and birds, however converging in comparable capabilities. This examine, he provides, “shows that even evolving independently, speech physiology is very similar in the two groups of species, therefore, the biological foundation of speech can be understood equally in parakeets and humans.” “Studying these little parrots could help better understand vocal production in humans, both in normal speech and in related disorders,” he provides.

That is among the ultimate concepts that the authors of the examine of the parakeets contribute: to help us to raised perceive human speech and people issues that stop a few of talking. The different is the dream of understanding what they are saying of their trills. In the longer term, says Dr. Long, “we would like to use advanced automatic learning methods to translate the sounds emitted by parakeets into objects or actions.” “We are interested in cognitive processes that allow them to access specific sounds; these processes are similar to those that allow us to think about a word, and these calculations fail in communication disorders such as aphasia,” he ends.