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Bird Brains Explain How Humans Learn to Talk
eaglebtc writes "A team of neuroscientists at MIT have made tremendous progress in understanding how birds learn to sing: a part of the brain called the basal ganglia is primarily responsible for controlling the learning of movement and the production of speech. This circuitry is also present in humans, and it is the same way that a baby's random babbling eventually becomes the proficient speech of adults. It is hoped that this research can provide further insights into Parkinson's Disease, an inherited genetic condition that causes rapid breakdown of motor control and speech production. The full research study is available as a downloadable PDF."
Does this explain the propensity of birds in trees near parking lots to mimic the random yuppie's car alarm?
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Open Source Sysadmin
I have a bird brain, but I'm too chicken to admit it.
Be relentless!
Their basal ganglia are starting to depolarize!
...it is the same way that a baby's random babbling eventually becomes the proficient speech of adults.
Proficient speech? Have you heard the way people talk? Sometimes I'm surprised they can dress themselves in the morning.
Bird brain people talk all the time
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
for smart-making
You can't handle the truth.
Considering our common ancestor was so far back, what's more likely: parallel and independent development of speech in more recent years, or a singular development WAY back in the day? If the case is the latter, we should expect to find this evolutionary trait in quite a few species out there.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
This circuitry is also present in humans, and it is the same way that a baby's random babbling eventually becomes the proficient speech of adults.
and here folks, we can see that this circuitry can also be reactivated in "adults", when the baby babbling comes back in grown-ups under certain conditions, such as posting on Slashdot.
However, under these circumstances, it tends to become a mass-babbling, where several adults mumble the same things over and over, such as "forsty piss", "gnaa", "soviet russia," or "yoda doll".
An interesting subject for pedopsychiatrists to be sure...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Wow, a 5.0 MB link from the main page of Slashdot! Here's a mirror of the PDF documents if the original site goes down.
Now if they learned how to make people shut up, that would be worth something!!!
Parkinson's Disease, an inherited genetic condition
While there's some genetic risk factors, it's not know what causes parkinsons disease. According to wikipedia having a parent with Parkinsons increases your lifetime risk of getting it from 2% to 6%.
AccountKiller
I wonder if this research supports or refutes the conclusions made by MIT's most famous linguist, Noam Chomsky, regarding language acquisition and development.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
This circuitry is also present in humans, and it is the same way that a baby's random babbling eventually becomes the proficient speech of adults.
Does it also explain why that said adults immediately regress back to random babbling the minute they're confronted with a keyboard and a net connection?
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
The parrot and cockatoo species of birds offer some amazing insight into the likely evolution of intelligence and social interaction outside the human/mammal pathway.
To start with, birds in general have their origins traced back to dinosaur-era reptiles. That's a pretty huge developmental shift between humanity and bird.
Yet, many species of birds can not only learn to speak human words, but they can learn context and how to use those words to manipulate people and other creatures. The birds in my parents pet store have learned more than just how to act in order to get treats, but how to manipulate people and other animals for seemingly the sheer pleasures and social interaction of it. It's hard to think of such use of intelligence as a base condition of animals that were ancestors of both mammals and dinosaurs - it seems more likely that intelligence itself is an independantly developed extension of logic.
As a smaller-scale example, Cockatoos are a more ancient species of bird than modern parrots. They also develop intelligence of many sorts, though of a more social nature. They can learn to speak words and immitate, but use the manipulation of those words on a more purely social level than parrots. It's somewhat amazing that such a mobile and diverse set of species as birds can each acquire different uses for language and intelligence - perhaps if it weren't for the necissary limitations of flight (weight, head-body aspect ratio), the intelligent species of our planet would have been birds, not mammals.
This is no hard evidence, but it also seems to make the possibility of intelligent life outside our known observed environments seem less unlikely too - especially if it can develop in so seemingly independant circumstances, despite a somewhat shared environment.
Ryan Fenton
Some linguistics & psycholinguistics (e.g Norm Chompsky and Steve Pinker) argue the human brain is unique in that it is able to quickly master the complex grammar present in all human languages.
In fact there is even a mathematical proof that seems to indicate that human languages should be technically unlearn-able (google: EM Gold language grammar - "Language identification in the limit"). IIRC - the synopsis being that, human languages are at least as sophisticated as context free languages (and can to some degree be modeled by context free languages) and the grammar of context free languages should not be learnable from the sort of linguistic input available to a child.
So...anyhow, I'm not so sure if studying how birds learn a sequence of sounds really gets at the more interesting aspects of human language acquisition. I mean it's probably interesting in terms of how animals, and even people, learn to produce simple sequences of sounds.
But, for human language? Or, at least for the interesting, i.e. uniquely human, parts of it? For that you probably need to either study people, or possibly very similar animals like other primates.
When a baby babbles randomly, he's learning. When I do it, I'm drunk. Why is there one standard for the baby, another for me?
And here me thinking that brains couldn't talk, you learn something every day!
And I bet 50 quatloons they glow different colours.
Didn't they already find out that birds could talk?. This language stuff is already for the snakes...err, I mean birds.
Best death? What, die from a naked lady avalanche?
I've heard that linguistically speaking, the speech that Pentacostals utter when they speak in Tongues, resembles the babbling of baby talk. If we could get a cooperative Pentacostal to take a PET scan while speaking in tongues, we could identify which area of the brain is active during this phenomenon. I suspect that this will correspond to the same bit of circuitry this research identifies.
Disclaimer: Even if we find a neurobiological basis for this religious phenomenon, it will neither confirm nor deny God is involved. Faith will merely assert that that deity is using this mechanism. I'm not Pentacostal, but I don't think speaking in tongues is "of the devil," either.
I think you're listening to the wrong end of the bird.
From what I've seen, he has learned many phrases and words over the years, and is able to successfully use them in correct conversational context. For example, if you insult him, he will reply with a stinging "Cat!" He also asks "what's that?" when he sees a new item in a room, and laughs at jokes in movies.
What relates to this article, however, is his habit of creating random vocalizations. Often he will speak in a chaotic combination of "human-like" noises and settle on a couple that pique his fancy. A few days ago he was angry with me and started his mumblings while on my girlfriend's shoulder. He leaned closer to her ear and after a couple seconds he said something that closely resembled "Bosco bites people, Bosco bites people, Bosco bites (my name)." It was quite eerie.
My other random though was the possible connections this has to creativity. Is this the section of the brain that humans use while composing random, new music? What about scat singers who sing random combinations of sounds?
6x9=42
...when reached for comment, said that this research didn't ammount to squawk.
I keep Cockatoos. I never intended to have such large birds as pets, and would most certainly not encourage it. I landed up with them as a "gift" as the previous owner found them too difficult.
I would put their overall intelligence at around the 4 or 5 year human. With the addition that they are the most expert lock pickers.
Imagine if you will the tantrums of a 4/5 year old, add that the 4/5 year can fly, has a set of tools like a combination hammer, ice-pick, file, and nut cracker, and absolutely knows which items dotted about are the most valuable to destroy.
Often one of them imitates the phone ringing as I am about to leave the house. I could swear the blessed things are all sharing the joke.
I am often left pondering: who here is the pet?
threadeds blog
Here is the link to the article (In spanish) no a too much tecnical review: http://old.clarin.com/diario/2003/01/09/s-02601.ht m and google translated for those who doesn't speak spanish: http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fold .clarin.com%2Fdiario%2F2003%2F01%2F09%2Fs-02601.ht m&langpair=es%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8.
>Linux is not user-friendly.
It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.
Well, just wanted to say I think you're right, but IMHO we need to see the bigger picture than just "human speech == intelligence."
Honestly, most species have evolved some kinds of intelligence, far beyond what many humans credit them with. IMHO the parrots are a more interesting case because they can actually articulate human words, but I wouldn't discount the intelligence of animals who lack a suitable larynx for that. Everything you describe, except for actually articulating words, can be observed in at least half the mammal species I can think of.
In some cases it's not even just learning by imitation.
E.g., cats not only can learn, but are actively taught by their mother. If you've ever had a cat with kittens, you've probably noticed how she talks to them for hours. (And likely got annoyed when she does it at 4 AM.)
And if you take a kitten from his/her mom very early, he/she'll grow up to be a bit of a retarded cat. So all that meowing at night wasn't just socializing.
This isn't necessarily to say "cats are smart", but rather that most species evolved towards some kind of "smart". Natural selection favours adaptability, and adapting by learning is the most efficient kind.
Sharing information with other members of the species, i.e. _some_ form of speech (even if it means meowing, barking or chirping) was also a very immediate survival advantage. E.g., for most species of animals it's a very real advantage to be able to tell your cubs "hide!" or "come here, I brought you dinner" and the like.
In the cats' case, it's obviously a language that can transmit behaviour information to the kitten. Probably not as complex or as capable of abstraction as human language, but complex enough to tell that kitten how to act in certain circumstances, or what its priorities should be. (E.g., "wash yourself often". Cats taken very early from their mother do it less often than ones who got taught.) I.e., it might be more complex than a parrot's learning to say "hi" and "goodbye".
So basically, yeah, I'd guess that life anywhere, in any conditions, would probably tend to evolve towards some kind of intelligence and communication capabilities.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There are many good human speech models out there (e.g. DIVA from http://speechlab.bu.edu ). The bird brain research is interesting but one can take the comparison between birds and humans only so far. For example, it is quite well known that sound localization mechanisms in bird and mammalian brains are entirely different.
Parkinson's Disease, an inherited genetic condition that causes rapid breakdown of motor control and speech production.
It is not an inherited genetic condition. There may be genetic factors. Nor does it cause rapid breakdown. The disease is a slow breakdown over many years. And a person can have a normal lifespan. It is treatable. My grandfather had Parkinson's. He lived to be 90. He had a shuffle walk and didn't have serious tremors like other sufferers.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"