Researcher Makoto Yanagihara and Associate Professor Yoko Sugiyama (Yazaki) of the Neuromechanism Research Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) said that when Kinkacho listens to the song of a parent bird when it is a young bird, the nerve cell that specifically bears this song. Announced that it has been found to appear in the cerebral auditory area of the young bird's brain.It is said that this is a discovery that leads to the elucidation of the mechanism by which the memory of verbal vocalization is formed during language development during human development.
Human infants listen to the words spoken by the adults around them and develop their language by imitating them.From memorizing the words you hear to uttering them, the mechanism in the brain of the process of memorizing the words is still unknown.In this study, we aimed to elucidate the mechanism by which a parent's song is memorized in the brain by song learning, using a kind of songbird, the zebra finch, which learns songs in the same way that humans develop language.
This study focuses on the zebra finch's cerebral auditory cortex.Electrodes were implanted in the brain and the action potentials of individual nerve cells were measured.As a result, the nerve cells of the young bird who had never heard the song responded to various songs, but after listening to the parent's song, we found a nerve cell that strongly responded only to the parent's song.For the first time, this showed physiological evidence that listening to a parent's song causes the appearance of nerve cells in the auditory cortex that are responsible for the memory of the song.Furthermore, when neurotransmission was examined by drug administration, it was suggested that the memory formation of parental songs was related to the rearrangement of inhibitory neural circuits in the auditory cortex by learning.
This study revealed that nerve cells responsible for the memory of songs heard in Songbird appear.In the future, it will lead to elucidation of the whole picture of memory formation and the mechanism of learning from that memory.
