Birds are indeed interesting creatures—and they may have more connections to human cognition than previously thought.
In addition to self-recognition, some birds like Cockatoos may have a “sense of rhythm [that] help[s] explain how the [human] brain relates to music”: Snowball’s Chance.
Two things struck me about this story: one is that Snowball, the dancing Cockatoo, had become Internet famous on YouTube well before these researchers discovered him! The second is that a friend in my department, Micah Bregman, was one of the researchers on this study!
[from SignOnSanDiego: Snowball's Chance by Adam Loberstein]
Moving rhythmically to a musical beat is a behavior found in every human culture, but it is not commonly seen in other animals, according to Patel. “It is a remarkable fact that despite decades of research in psychology and neuroscience in which animals have been trained to do elaborate tasks, there is not a single report of an animal that was trained to tap, peck or move in synchronicity with an auditory beat,” he wrote in a 2006 journal article.
Patel theorized that only certain types of brains can achieve musical beat perception and synchronization – those that are capable of complex vocal learning.
According to that hypothesis, nonhuman primates, our closest relatives, are likely to be incapable of moving in time to music, while species that exhibit vocal learning – songbirds, parrots or dolphins, for instance – would be better candidates to display this type of synchronized movement.
Patel and John Iversen, an associate fellow at The Neurosciences Institute who is an expert on rhythm processing, designed a set of experiments in which recordings of Snowball’s favorite song were played at 11 different tempos, and the bird’s response was videotaped.
Then Patel and Iversen, along with Micah Bregman, a graduate student in cognitive science at the University of California San Diego, and Joanne Jao, a UCSD undergrad, analyzed the videos to see if Snowball truly stayed with the beat.
“The bottom line is that he does,” Patel said. “He’s not as good as an adult, but we think he’s a bit like a human child. He has his own preferences – he likes to dance to faster tempos, not so much the slower ones. That’s actually something you see in children as well.”
“One thing that I think is quite interesting is that this connection between music and movement is very powerful in humans, and not well understood,” he said.
Patel noted that the neurologist Oliver Sacks, in his book “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain,” writes about how music “can sometimes help people with Parkinson’s disease to move, and to keep moving as long as the music is on and has a good beat.”
Added Patel, “We don’t understand why that works, but there’s clearly a connection between their auditory system and their motor system.”
He’s closer to understanding, though, thanks to Snowball.
