JULY 8,
2019
by Cell Press
A
sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball garnered YouTube fame and headlines a
decade ago for his uncanny ability to dance to the beat of the Backstreet Boys.
Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on July 8 are back with
new evidence that Snowball isn't limited in his dance moves. Despite a lack of
dance training, new videos show that Snowball responds to music with diverse
and spontaneous movements using various parts of his body.
The
finding is more than an entertaining novelty act. It suggests that dancing
to musicisn't an arbitrary product
of human culture but a response to music that arises when certain cognitive and
neural capacities come together in animal brains, the researchers say.
"What's
most interesting to us is the sheer diversity of his movements to music,"
says senior author Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist at Tufts University and
Harvard University, noting that Snowball developed those moves—much richer than
the head bobbing and foot lifting they'd studied before—without any training.
Patel's
earlier study, also published in Current Biology (DOI:
10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038), confirmed that Snowball could move to the beat.
That was notable in part because dancing is a natural ability in humans that's absent
in other primates. Soon after that study, Snowball's owner and an author on the
new paper, Irena Schulz, noticed that Snowball was making movements to music
she hadn't seen before.
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