Brains of songbirds are tuned into love

If Cupid wanted to make songbirds fall in love, he’d better aim at their brains. That’s because songbirds, which form lifelong mating pairs, have brain systems perfectly tuned to fit together.

Take finches. A male learns his father’s song, and performs it to attract a mate. He sings: “Chirp, chirp – my brain is healthy, and my body is strong. That’s something you’re into, right?”

A female finch also learns her father’s song, but she doesn’t perform. She’s the critic. She analyses every detail of a potential mate’s song, and decides if she wants to keep him around.

Researchers looking into finch brains say that each sex uses what’s called its sound control system to convert sound waves into social messages and then use them to find mates. While these systems are well-developed and finely tuned in both sexes of songbirds, the wiring is different.

Read on 

Despite their small brains, ravens and crows may be just as clever as chimps, research suggests

Study shows how these birds parallel great apes in motor self-regulation

Date: April 26, 2016

Source: Lund University

A study led by researchers at Lund University in Sweden suggests that ravens can be as clever as chimpanzees, despite having much smaller brains, indicating that rather than the size of the brain, the neuronal density and the structure of the birds' brains play an important role in terms of their intelligence.

"Absolute brain size is not the whole story. We found that corvid birds performed as well as great apes, despite having much smaller brains," says Can Kabadayi, doctoral student in Cognitive Science.

Intelligence is difficult to test, but one aspect of being clever is inhibitory control, and the ability to override animal impulses and choose a more rational behaviour. Researchers at Duke University, USA, conducted a large-scale study in 2014, where they compared the inhibitory control of 36 different animal species, mainly primates and apes. The team used the established cylinder test, where food is placed in a transparent tube with openings on both sides. The challenge for the animal is to retrieve the food using the side openings, instead of trying to reach for it directly. To succeed, the animal has to show constraint and choose a more efficient strategy for obtaining the food.

The large-scale study concluded that great apes performed the best, and that absolute brain size appeared to be key when it comes to intelligence. However, they didn't conduct the cylinder test on corvid birds.

Can Kabadayi, together with researchers from the University of Oxford, UK and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, therefore had ravens, jackdaws and New Caledonian crows perform the same cylinder test to better understand their inhibitory control.

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Penguin brains not changed by loss of flight

Date: March 1, 2016

Source: University of Texas at Austin

Losing the ability to fly gave ancient penguins their unique locomotion style. But leaving the sky behind didn't cause major changes in their brain structure, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin suggest after examining the skull of the oldest known penguin fossil.

The findings were published in the Journal of Anatomy in February.

"What this seems to indicate is that becoming larger, losing flight and becoming a wing-propelled diver does not necessarily change the [brain] anatomy quickly," said James Proffitt, a graduate student at the university's Jackson School of Geosciences who led the research. "The way the modern penguin brain looks doesn't show up until millions and millions of years later."

Proffitt conducted the research with Julia Clarke, a professor in the Jackson School's Department of Geological Sciences, and Paul Scofield, the senior curator of Natural History at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, where the skull fossil is from.

The skull is from a penguin that lived in New Zealand over 60 million years ago during the Paleocene epoch. According to Proffitt, it likely lived much like penguins today. But while today's penguins have been diving instead of flying for tens of millions of years, the change was relatively new for the ancient penguin.

"It's the oldest [penguin] following pretty closely after the loss of flight and the evolution of flightless wing-propelled diving that we know of," Proffitt said.

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Why parrots are great vocal imitators Regions of bird's brain likely duplicated at least 29 million years ago

Date:  June 24, 2015

Source: Duke University

Summary: Scientists have uncovered key structural differences in parrot brains that may help explain why this group of bird species can mimic speech and songs so well. These brain structures went unrecognized in studies published in the past 34 years. The results may lend insight into the neural mechanisms of human speech.

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Plumes in the sleeping avian brain

Date:

March 5, 2014

Source:

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Summary:

Researchers have gained deeper insight into the sleeping avian brain. They found complex 3-D plumes of brain activity propagating through the brain that clearly differed from the two-dimensional activity found in mammals. These findings show that the layered neuronal organization of the neocortex is not required for waves to propagate, and raise the intriguing possibility that the 3-D plumes of activity perform computations not found in mammals.

Continued

Three-dimensional scans of skulls of early bird brains show they happened before birds

PARIS (AFP).- New evidence has emerged that puts a dent into the reputation of the famous "first bird" -- Archaeopteryx, a feathered descendant of the dinosaurs, which lived around 150 million years ago. 

Three-dimensional scans of skulls of early birds and dinosaurs suggests that at least a few species of dinos that were contemporaries of Archaeopteryx had brains with the likely neurological wiring for flight, according to a paper published on Wednesday. 

"Archaeopteryx has always been set up as a uniquely transitional species between feathered dinosaurs and modern birds, a halfway point," said Amy Balanoff of the American Museum of Natural History. "But by studying the cranial volume of closely-related dinosaurs, we learned that Archaeopteryx might not have been so special." 

Writing in the journal Nature, Balanoff's team used computed tomographic (CT) scans to get a high-resolution image of brain size and regions in a dozen existing and extinct species. Compared to reptiles, birds have large brains in relation to their body size -- a phenomenon called "hyperinflation" which provides them with the superior vision and coordination needed to flight. But the comparison turned up some bad news for Archaeopteryx. 

Several other non-avian dinos that were sampled, including the feathery oviraptosaur and bird-like troodontid, had in fact larger brains relative to body size than Archaeopteryx did. 

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Bird brains can crack nut trading game with self-control: study

OSLO (Reuters) - Cockatoos can delay eating nuts in order to win tastier ones, a surprise sign that birds can exercise self-control, a trait usually seen as the preserve of animals with larger brains, a study showed on Wednesday.

Scientists gave Goffin cockatoos, a mainly white species from Indonesia, a nut while showing them a more attractive one just out of reach. If the birds did not nibble the first nut for up to 80 seconds, they learnt they would get the second instead.

"Imagine placing a cookie directly into a toddler's mouth and telling him/her that he/she will only receive a piece of chocolate if the cookie is not nibbled for over a minute," said lead author Alice Auersperg at the University of Vienna.

"Only few, typically large-brained animals have been shown to be able to inhibit the consumption of an immediate food reward in anticipation of a bigger one for more than one minute," the University said in a statement.

The birds were given pecan nuts, and all 14 of those studied waited for up to 80 seconds to win a more attractive cashew nut, according to the findings in the journal Biology Letters.

A video showed one bird, Muppet, waiting 40 seconds while strutting agitatedly around a table top with the first nut in its beak before exchanging it for a second.

(http://youtu.be/c86EYtmllhc)

Self-control in human infants was studied in the 1970s in the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. Under that test, children were given a marshmallow and told that they would get a second if they did not eat the first for several minutes.

Continued

Songbirds’ Brains Coordinate Singing With Intricate Timing

Feb. 27, 2013 — As a bird sings, some neurons in its brain prepare to make the next sounds while others are synchronized with the current notes—a coordination of physical actions and brain activity that is needed to produce complex movements, new research at the University of Chicago shows.

In an article in the current issue of Nature, neuroscientist Daniel Margoliash and colleagues show, for the first time, how the brain is organized to govern skilled performance—a finding that may lead to new ways of understanding human speech production.

The new study shows that birds’ physical movements actually are made up of a multitude of smaller actions. “It is amazing that such small units of movements are encoded, and so precisely, at the level of the forebrain,” said Margoliash, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy and psychology at UChicago.

“This work provides new insight into how the physics of producing vocal signals are represented in the brain to control vocalizations,” said Howard Nusbaum, a professor of psychology at UChicago and an expert on speech.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130227134336.htm