Birdsong

• Autor: Mooney, Richard
• É parte de: Current biology, 2022-10, Vol.32 (20), p.R1090-R1094
• Notas: ObjectType-Article-1
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• Descrição: Have your ever felt as happy as a lark, feathered your nest or taken someone under your wing? As we watch birds, we cannot help but be struck by their uncannily familiar behaviors — singing, nest building, caring for their young — to name just a few. Songbirds — the oscine suborder of perching birds that constitute roughly half (∼4,000) of all known avian species — are noted for the songs that males and sometimes both sexes in this group sing to court mates and defend territory from rivals. Birdsongs contain several to many acoustically distinct syllables, typically organized into a stereotyped phrase, and span the same audio bandwidth that we exploit for speech and music, making them easy for us to hear and appreciate. Consequently, eavesdropping humans long ago detected the most striking parallel between songbirds and humans: juvenile songbirds learn to sing in a manner similar to a child learning to speak. Most mammals and birds vocalize during courtship, but songbirds are one of the few that learn their courtship songs. In this primer, Richard Mooney focuses on birdsong learning and the neural circuits that mediate singing and song learning, emphasizing parallels to human speech learning and the evolution of song learning and song circuits.
  
• Editor: Elsevier Inc
  
• Idioma: Inglês