Researchers Implant Memories in Zebra Finch Brains

Juvenile birds learn the length of the sounds in a song from a false memory introduced via optogenetics, instead of from real interactions with a tutor bird.

Oct 3, 2019
ABBY OLENA

Animals learn by imitating behaviors, such as when a baby mimics her mother’s speaking voice or a young male zebra finch copies the mating song of an older male tutor, often his father. In a study published today in Science, researchers identified the neural circuit that a finch uses to learn the duration of the syllables of a song and then manipulated this pathway with optogenetics to create a false memory that juvenile birds used to develop their courtship song.

“In order to learn from observation, you have to create a memory of someone doing something right and then use this sensory information to guide your motor system to learn to perform the behavior. We really don’t know where and how these memories are formed,” says Dina Lipkind, a biologist at York College who did not participate in the study. The authors “addressed the first step of the process, which is how you form the memory that will later guide [you] towards performing this behavior.”

“Our original goals were actually much more modest,” says Todd Roberts, a neuroscientist at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Initially, Wenchan Zhao, a graduate student in his lab, set out to test whether or not disrupting neural activity while a young finch interacted with a tutor could block the bird’s ability to form a memory of the interchange. She used light to manipulate cells genetically engineered to be sensitive to illumination in a brain circuit previously implicated in song learning in juvenile birds.

Zhao turned the cells on by shining a light into the birds’ brains while they spent time with their tutors and, as a control experiment, when the birds were alone. Then she noticed that the songs that the so-called control birds developed were unusual—different from the songs of birds that had never met a tutor but also unlike the songs of those that interacted with an older bird.




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