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Singing Mice and Brain Chemistry
Shirlockc writes "The Public Library of Science has a research article on how male mice actually sing in the presence of females. They actually posted some of the audios adjusted for human ears as these songs are ultrasonic. The authors are comparing these warbles to bird songs. The songs are quite complex so do the mice learn them and/or improve on them? This can be a potential model for investigating how brain chemistry works during learning."
This should not be a surprise. Mice are truly the smartest most intelligent species to inhabit the Earth, followed by dolphins, then humans.
My singing attracted the ladies.. :-(
- Aetheral Research -
DJ Rat is recording his new mixed tape, which should be released early next Spring. The FCC; however, is not so thrilled, because the mixed tape "is one of the dirtiest fowlest things I have ever heard" said an FCC spokesman. "But it wasn't a suprise I guess, you know- he is a rat after all".
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
That's copyright infringemnt! Those mice songs are rip off from our records! ;P
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Are they sure it wasn't the mouse equivalent of "Hey baby, are you a parking ticket? Cause you have 'fine' written all over you!"
CHEEEEEESE-ings, nothing more than cheeeeese-ings
Trying to forget my CHEEEESE-ings for you
CHEEEEEEESE-ings,
Woah woah woah CHEEEEEESE-ings,
Woah woah woah CHEEEEEESE-ings,
OK, that's enough, I'm now annoying even myself.
They are merely reciting all of the different types of cheese they have eaten in their lifetime.
Reminds me of Charles de Gaulle, the famous French leader:
"How can you govern a country that has 246 different kinds of cheese?"
M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E!
Hey there, hi there, ho there, you're as welcome as can be.
M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E!
Mickey Mouse! (Donald Duck!) Mickey Mouse! (Donald Duck!)
Forever let us hold his banner high, high, HIGH, HIGH!!
Come along and sing the song and join the jamboree.
M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E!
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Is it perhaps Dire Straits? After all, there is probably a shortage of Fuolornis Fire Dragons (read ch22 too) in the lab environment.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Maybe to get help in the female department, you can try developing some social skills.
This isn't "dumb research". It actually helps understand things like language development in humans, learning processes in animals and such, since songs (birdsong included) are quite complex.
I've been emitting high-pitched squeals whenever attractive women come near me for years. Why does nobody call it a "song" then? ;(
Don't be ignorant. Examining the behavior of animals that can be thoroughly experimented on is integral to neurological and psychological research. Unless you're about to volunteer yourself for the kind of stuff we can do to lab rats, I suggest you pipe down.
Grasshopper mice are known to howl and hunt for meat. They are the wolves of the mouse world.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Watched male and female humans in their late teens to mid 20's when they really want a "piece of the action"?
Its almost amusing! Like watching the waggle dance of a bee or something.
Seriously, if your in that age group, do whatever your hormones tell you to do. But for us outside of that, you guys and gals are really funny.
And yes, I've "been there done that". It seemed right at the time (hormones again). But humans when they are at their most "animal-like" are pretty funny. Fights can be a part of it, but those are funny too all to themselves.
42
and already has recording mice patented and copyrighted. They are seeking to pass legislation through congress that will allow them to plug all of the analog holes these mice may have, unless the mice are genetically altered and the alteration is not open source.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Now we just need to work on reverse-engineering their secret ultrasonic communications so that we can find out what they plan to do with us.
11*43+456^2
Though the article makes a brief reference to insects' mating vocalizations, it really doesn't capture the image of a male fruit fly running after a female with his wings out as he frantically "sings" to her. In doing a quick search for the genes responsible for producing the correct song in D. melanogaster I stumbled across this appropriately named gene.
"It's hard to bargle nawdle zouss
With all these marbles in my mouth"
Has anyone tried playing the original (ultrasonic) tracks in a room where there are cats?
I am wondering if the cats would react?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
That's just so damned cute though!
"I'm seriously wondering where we manage to get so much money from in order to just waste it on dumb research."
This is why unimaginative people wouldn't be good scientists. From the writeup:
"This can be a potential model for investigating how brain chemistry works during learning."
The study isn't about putting on an all-mouse musical, it's about animal behavior, which has all sorts of other applications. Just because you can't imagine what those might be doesn't make it useless research.
I always wondered why there were so many female mice following Mariah Carey around. Those ain't vocal harmonics she's ripping, rather she's singing mouse love songs!
Mind you, if noisy environments where you can't hear yourself think are inherently repellent, I guess all the nightclubs should have gone out of business years ago...
to the Hamster Dance.
A saying about how the "world will beat a path to your door" comes to mind. Why haven't I heard more about how this phenomenon might be used for rodent control? Surely the sounds could be either digitized and played back, or ... even better ... a heuristic process could listen to the male's response to a pheromone bait-trap, and then the 'gizmo' would warble back ...
Am I the only one who is thinking this?
Big money here. Rodents cause many millions of dollars of damage to grains stores annually.
Ever heard of diminishing returns? Apparently not. Ever heard of serendipity? Didn't think so. I'm glad there's people out there whose curiosity pushes them to investigate things that seem trivial and obvious, because no one knows where the next big breakthrough will come from.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
What are we going to do tonight pinky?
We're going to do what we do every night...
1..2..1..2..3..4...
"New York, New York...."
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
Shame! None of you spotted the obvious Christmas beat-up. We're sure to see the return of those 'Chipmunk'-like music album gimicks in time for the festive season! Who said the RIAA and Music Industry couldn't get back at you?! ;-)
How hard did they squeeze these mice before they started singing? And who did they rat out? Or would that be mouse out?
And finally, who is going to get in trouble for using torture methods to get these mice to sing?
Scientists around the world are baffled at the conclusion of this experiment. Unable to reproduce many of the results that the pair of scientists claimed to have achieved in their own laboratory mice, a panel of prominent behavioral research scientists has been assembled to test the verity of these peculiar findings. In the transcript of the trial, the originators of this experiment claim their mouse's song went something like this:
Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal,
Send me a kiss by wire, baby my heart's on fire!
If you refuse me, honey you'll lose me, then you'll be alone,
Oh baby, telephone, and tell me I'm your own!
David Attenborough, noted naturalist, remarked upon the discovery of a rare night-singing tree mouse found in the Sheba Islands in the south Pacific. The musendrophilus has a very haunting song. Also their webbed paws are highly prized by the natives for the creation of their musical instruments.
It is unknown if they are related to the rare "tree squeaks" that live in the treetops and squeak every time the wind rustles their home's boughs.
[copyvio]
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that the ghosts of Salvatore Phillip "Sonny" Bono and Walter Elias Disney aren't out to get you.
Which makes it that much more important for us to geneticly enhance ourselves to trigger our ears to regrow in such a fashion to hear the range those evil mice are conversing in. Ha! They thought they had us fooled!
1. Fund some obscure research department
2. Have them teach mice to sing.
3. Publish results to world, touting the musical abilities of mice.
4. Make micro-nano iPods to affix to the mice.
5. PROFIT!!!
It can't be any harder than governing a country with 246 different flavors of religious leader, or 246 different flavors of insipid pop band, or 256 different words for snow, or 246 different genres of perverted comic books, or...
Et tu, DeGaulle? My god, the French really are a nation of pathetic, whiny, defeatists.
"The cheeses! Their variety is... how you say? Too much! Rule such a people? C'est impossible! Better anarchy and suffering than such a doomed ideal!"
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Does the sound trail up or down when the mouse trap snaps around their necks?
I am curious, which version of the book did you read? It appears that they released a movie edition which lacks 99% of the humor (and entertainment) of the originals. I certainly can see why reading that would leave a bad taste in your mouth, but I find it hard to beleive the same would be true of the original.
1. Whistle 2. ? 3. Cheese 4. Sex!
Smile.
Yup.
We must not forget that ironically, many of the greatest discoveries in history were either failures or accidents. (The transistor - failed attempt at creating the first FETs, the telephone - a lucky short in the presence of a strong magnet, buckyballs - a forgotten test tube during one night's clean-up, breathable liquids - a rogue mouse that fell in a beaker, etc.)
Well, you see, if we funded that particular avenue of research any more, well, they'd be able to hire people who don't really want to do it. You know, people in it just for the money. Usually, these kinds of people do not the best researchers make. Plus, if you only attempt to research highly known unknowns, you don't know what you might miss.
Sig
You don't think it's "so long, and thanks for all the cheese", do you?
Rats! The Vogons are getting close!
how male mice actually sing in the presence of females
And here all along I thought it was the other way around...
I challange someone to make a music remix out of this!
one passage came back: "Developers, developers, developers!" Another translated to "Come on, come on, get up, get up, give it up for meeeee!" It must be noted that the female mice at this point were paying attention but seemed quite uncomfortable and ready to bolt.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
With this news we should be able to program small robots to seek out the singers and kill them. Or draw female mice to a killer robot with a fake male mouse song.
Phillip
The study isn't about putting on an all-mouse musical.
Great idea!
Just...gotta make sure 'Mice' isn't playing anywhere near where 'Cats' might be playing.
I think the /. geeks "get" HHGTTG because they are quite a sarcastic, smartass bunch, more likley to get a kick from humiliating someone intellectually. And that's the sort of mind set most Bristish have.
PS. I'm an Aussie.
Perhaps I shouldn't've bothered translating it, becuase you didn't get the joke even in English. Of course the cheese doesn't affect how you rule a country.
And no, you can't come back and say your post was a joke too. It can't be a joke. It's a strong personal attack. Et on a battu le cheval mort way too much for jokes about French inferiority to retain any humor today.
Maybe the French are a nation of pathetic, whiny defeatists, but at least they're pathetic, whiny defeatists with a sense of humor.
So why do the male mice sing to the females, eh? I mean, it's not like they need sound to find each other or tell the pitchers from the catchers -- they can sniff each other out in the total dark, et cetera.
/. and hoping horny girls mod you +5, Insightful Interesting Funny Yes Yes Oh Yes Take Me Now You Utter Stud.
Why would natural selection push male mice to develop this talent?
I sure don't know, but just for amusement I'll propose something along the lines of the OP's comment: suppose we argue an important characteristic of mice is that they are damn clever for their size. Seems likely they're a lot smarter, for example, than snakes or lizards or even birds of equivalent mass. Maybe they need smarts to succeed at a lifetime of scampering and hiding and thieving bits of food from larger predators.
If this is so, maybe it makes sense that the smartest males want to advertise their intelligence, and females are interested in listening to those ads, so that they can pick out good genes for the pups.
Now, clearly it takes brains to learn a complex song, spice it up with a couple of individual flourishes, and memorize it. So maybe what these mice fellas are doing by singing is advertising how smart they are. And maybe the girl mice by listening in are evaluating the sexy braininess of boy mice as it's expressed in their composition.
It would be, in essence, the auditory equivalent of posting clever comments on
Ah British humor...
"That man is in a dress!"
*commence uproarous laughter*
(BTW, I quite liked H2G2)
There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.
funny thing is, he could do all that, and end up healthier than the rest of us.
the test was done after exposing the mice to urine swabs of females. i'm not sure i would be singing if i was sniffing urine.
Geez Louise,
Just don't mate the fuckers with the ones that we have got drinking red wine or white wine (don't ask, well not unless you'd like a dissertation on why the Australian Wine Board funded us to study the effect of red wine versus white wine versus water and high fat content mouse chow on murine atherosclerosis).
Pissed singing mice, just totally sick (in the nicest possible way, I think, maybe).
Deeply disturbing
Jokes are probably the thing least likely to retain their meaning and value after translation. You'd probably have been better off just posting it in the original French.
Why would I claim my post was a joke? Your funny got lost in translation. Clearly, all of my mean-spiritid distaste for French foreign and domestic policy came through quite clearly. But hey, if it gives the cake, I take the body out.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Is alcohol a hormone? If so, then I'm guilty.
You're in brisbane. Come visit IMB at St Lucia, or QIMR in Herston, or CICR at Greenslopes and you can see what research is really about... these things take time!
Eirinn
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
OK I'm not sure if it's just that it's high pitched, but my I've never seen my cat react to a sound like he did for this. He was all interested and looking around. Wonder if he understands what it means better than I do?
Anyone else with pets care to share observations?
Or maybe (just maybe), it's about fishing for a government grant to continue to have a job and get paid.
As for these songs...ya what the fuck ever. I mean seriously! If these mice can sing a song, I want to hear the same song repeated over and over without error and maintain complexity. Otherwise, it's just random squeeking and chirping.
Calling this music is like calling my grunting-like-an-ape in the mornings music.
Life is not for the lazy.
All I could think of when i read this was R. Kelly.
"I want to piss on you.. I really do..."
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
Mice singers have groupies! And they don't even play guitar. That freaks me out, man.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Look at the URL. It was an April Fool's joke.
I am curious, which version of the book did you read? It appears that they released a movie edition which lacks 99% of the humor (and entertainment) of the originals. I certainly can see why reading that would leave a bad taste in your mouth, but I find it hard to beleive the same would be true of the original.
Go to a public library. They ought to have the full "triology" of books (there's actually like 5 or 6 books).
the test was done after exposing the mice to urine swabs of females.
I wonder if the mice were actually singing or crying in disgust?
Creativity uninhibited www.kreeti.com
We've already seen singing mice before.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
I feel like singing:
Hickory, dickory, dock!
The mouse ran up the clock;
The clock struck one,
And down he run,
Hickory, dickory, dock!
Creativity uninhibited www.kreeti.com
You know, the humor in books is generally hard to understand as there's no laughtrack in books ;-)
So they altered their brain chemistry to make them imitate singing? Sounds like what they did with Christina Aguilera.
This is funny, even for non-Americans... Well, if it is the right person who is on the receiving end...
Considering that they eat their own feces, I don't they'd be disgusted.
Yet again, the Americans are claiming credit for "discovering" something that has been known about for decades in other countries. Anybody who grew up watching Bagpuss on the TV in the UK could have told you that mice can sing.
"Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired" ~Jules Renard
What made the research ground breaking was the fact that nobody had before considered that there may be such rich information to be found in mouse sqeaks at frequencies inaudible to us, in the range of from 30 KHz to almost 100KHz. But the author failed to prove, or to mention a citation, proving that mice can actually hear and descriminate sounds in that frequency range. Was this already so well proven previously that it didn't even need mention, or is this a major flaw in his research?
Cats etc don't hear "ultrasound" as a distinct thing. They hear what is for them perfectly normal noise that happens to be high-pitched. But they'll as likely recognise an unusually low-pitched mouse call as you would recognise an unusually low pitched meow or bark.
Except that even the cards with the 192kSample/sec DACs won't reproduce much above 20 kHz. Remember, in a proper design you have to follow the DAC with a reconstruction filter as your signal will have spectral aliases every Fs. The idea of running a 192 kSample/second rate is to allow the reconstruction filter to gradually roll off from 20kHz to the Nyquist frequency of 96kHz, rather than the rather sharp roll-off from 20kHz to 22.05 kHz you see in 44.1kSample/sec gear. You also avoid the sin(x)/x roll-off in the reconstructed audio, as the roll-off in a 96kHz Nyquist frequency system is still pretty flat at 20kHz.
However, if you wanted to experiment with this, you could try to find an old (and I do mean old) Zenith remote control from the 1970's - they used ultrasound rather than IR as modern gear does, at about a 30kHz frequency. You could then drive that speaker from a DAC on the printer port, possibly with a simple timer chip to create the sample clock so that the computer "thinks" it is seeing a normal printer on the interface (that way you can avoid a great deal of the latency issues, especially if you use a printer port with a hardware FIFO.) You could eliminate the reconstruction filter as the transducer will do most of your filtering for you. Failing that, here are some transducers that will Git 'R Done.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Video evidence here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/classic/clangers/ (realplayer, sadly)
You certainly do get riled up easily. :)
Anyone else here think that this was a hardware review of an advanced audio mouse?
I guess all those dollar store ultrasonic rodent prevention gadgets might actually have some merit.. unless there output translates to "come infest my house" in mice speak... who knew!
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Speaking of which, the best slapstick routine I ever saw was The Custard Pies sketch by Monty Python.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
I agree with you on HHGTTG being hilarious (I literally LOLed through the book) but not on jumping to assume that the grandparent being an American is the sole reason for him not getting British humor. Making generalizations based on country of origin is prejudge.
P.S. I'm Mexican, a very different culture by the way, and didn't find HHGTTG funny until I read it in it's original language(English). I think that HHGTTG's humor is mainly in the writing style, is so subtle that it gets completely lost in translation.
16,777,216 comments ought to be enough for any forum!
So, there's this doctor in town who always likes to relax after work with his favorite beverage, a hazelnut martini. Well, one day, as the doctor comes in, the bartender realizes he's all out of the ingredients for a hazelnut martini, so he mixes up something similar and serves it. The doctor takes a sip, frowns, and says, "This tastes odd. Is this a hazelnut martini?" The bartender replies, "No, it's a hickory daiquiri, Doc."
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
As someone who works in the lab that just released this paper (but who was not an author), it's interesting to read the discussion about whether this counts as "dumb research" that shouldn't be funded.
A little background: whether or not these mouse vocalizations count as "song" is in no way the primary focus of our lab. Our work actually focuses on using the pheromone-detection system of mice (aka the accessory olfactory system) as a (relatively) simple model system in which questions about pattern recognition and memory formation can be asked. The idea isn't that how mice recognize other mice and what they do next is intrinsically interesting, but rather that questions of how mammalian brains put together circuitry that can recognize and remember patterns in incoming sensory information is both intrinsically interesting and in the long run highly pertinent to many areas of medical research (ranging from exploring the causes of autism to developing treatments for Alzheimer's) - and that this system happens to be one of the most accessible systems in which these phenomenon can be studied.
This paper was actually a complete tangent to this primary focus, which came about when my boss and a coworker were trying to use these vocalizations as a behavioral indicator of whether a male mouse thinks it is or is not detecting the presence of a female (something that can help us understand the rest of our lab's data). As long as they were recording the vocalizations, however, they figured they might as well look at them a bit - and were startled to discover how complex they were. Thinking that this it was possible that knowing about this complexity could prove useful to other researchers who study stuff more related to this kind of thing (for example, the study of how birdsong develops is proving to be really fruitful right now - but if you could do this kind of work in an animal where genetic modification is becoming routine, the pace could be improved even more), they submitted a paper that contained primarily an analysis of the original point of the research but with an additional section analyzing the vocalizations. It was the journal itself that suggested that it made more sense to publish the analysis of the vocalizations as a separate paper.
We in the lab have all been rather taken aback by the press coverage of this story. Seeing as it was in many ways a tangent to the main purpose of the lab (and not actually a part of ANY grant, just to answer the implied question in a comment a bit further down), it's a bit startling to see it become a popular story. It's really somewhat frustrating to realize just how much a science story's media coverage is determined by the "cuteness" of the story - in this case, the popularity of the story seems to be due primarily to the fact that 1) all of the words involved are easy to understand (everyone knows what mice are, and knows what singing is...), 2) people like to hear about things that have to do with mating and/or relationships and/or pheromones, and 3) the mental picture of mice singing songs is cute.
Partly because of this, we've been wondering a bit what the impact of this coverage will be on the public's perception of the utility of science funding. I absolutely believe that funding of basic science is in the long run the best way to promote major advances with real utility - the discovery of DNA through an offshoot of what seemed to be obscure molecular work and its current centrality to the majority of medical research is one of the best examples - and I certainly wouldn't be working the hours I work for the pay I receive if I didn't believe in what I was doing. But even in the 4-5 years I've been at this institution the decrease in the availability of funds for basic research has been obvious, and I worry a lot about the extent to which this concept is communicated to the public & what failures in this realm will mean for future funding of basic research.
If anything, this recent experience of how the media covers science has made me
You're sneaky for a troll. You almost seem to be worth arguing with. And you should probably spend less time writing long posts, becuase your fingers might get tired.
I agree this is an important caution to bear in mind. It's a variant of what I call "The Sherlock Holmes" rule:
Just because you have an explanation doesn't mean you have the explanation.
I call it the SH rule because, when you read "Sherlock Holmes" stories, you always read about these brilliant, very long chains of logic by which Holmes figures out stuff that buffaloed Lestrade of the Yard. Holmes is always right, of course (ha ha, that buffoon Lestrade), even though his logic chain is so long that its existence was entirely overlooked by everyone else, and we need Watson to exclaim "But how did you do it Holmes?" so that we can get a paragraph or so explaining it.
But there's a good reason why Holmes is fictional. In real life, very long chains of logic quite often lead to the wrong answer. Not because there's something wrong with the logic, mind you, but because there is some other chain of logic leading from a different cause to the same effect, a chain which was overlooked.
Short chains of deduction ("If I drop the vase, it will fall and break") very often admit of only one possible chain of explanation, and even when there is more than one possible explanation, it's usually easy to list and study them all, to figure out which is right. But the longer and longer the logic chain gets, the more possible explanations there are, and the easier it gets to overlook a possibility or fifty.
Which is why I'm an empiricist. An ounce of dumb measurement is worth a pound of brilliant theory any day.
in a related news story, unlike humans, for whom 4/4 and other power of 2 metres are the most common, mainstream music in the mice community is almost invariably in (2+4)/4. this is because, while humans, because of their anatomy, march in a duple rhythm (giving rise to 2/x metre which can be grouped in pairs to form 4/x), mice spend some time on 4 legs, and some time on 2--thus (2+4)/4. :^]
I called you (I'm talking to the same guy, right?) a troll because you went out of your way to post a long winded explanation of how your typo was as correct as anything is. What is that but an invitation to argue?
? I'm not telling you you're wrong, I'm just commenting on your motivation.
Why do people want to mate with more physically "attractive" people?
I agree with your reasoning. But I've also heard an alternative, wilder hypothesis which is intriguing. It begins by asking what, precisely, do we mean by "beauty?" Suppose arguendo we say "beauty" is just a measure of how close you are to some certain ideal; in other words, beauty is the inverse of how far you are from the species mean. The more "unique" you are, the uglier you are.
So then the question is: why be so intent on picking someone who looks like the species mean? Your argument (it means the genes are healthy) is one possibility, but it really only explains those who have actual deformities, e.g. cleft palate as you say. But what about people who just have a big schnoz, or flappy ears, or little piggy (but perfectly useful) eyes, men with hair coming out their ears or women with asymmetric teats? Why would we select against people who are perfectly healthy in every respect but who just look different?
Well, we know we have shared the planet with at least one other species of hominid (H. neanderthalenis). Maybe there were others! If so, consider: the most dangerous competitor you could have would be a separate species (so you can't interbreed) which is so similar that they occupy a very similar ecological niche. That means they eat the same things, like the same shady spots of real estate, and need the same materials to make their tools and huts. Possibly they even carry diseases that can infect you easily. Foreigners like this are a terrible threat, because they want to consume the same resources you need to survive, but they can't contribute anything to your gene pool, and they can't even mingle their genes with yours so you become one big happy family.
Under these conditions there might indeed be a strong selection against people whose sexual attraction wasn't specific enough. That is, if, as a young Cro-Magnon male, you routinely got as turned on by hot Neanderthal* chicks as you did by girls of your own species, you might well have a much lower reproductive success. Those who bred successfully (and became our ancestors) were then those whose sexual preferences were so narrow that they could easily distinguish between the two species, and get it on with one but be left completely cold by the other.
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* "Neanderthal" is just a stand-in for an unknown competitor species with who we are not cross-fertile.