MIT work with songbirds could aid study of humans’ timing
As anyone who watched the Olympics can appreciate, timing matters when it comes to complex sequential actions. It can make a difference between a perfect handspring and a fall, for instance. But what controls that timing? MIT scientists are closing in on the brain regions responsible, thanks to some technical advances and some help from songbirds.
“All our movements, from talking and walking to acrobatics or piano playing, are sequential behaviors,” explained Michale Fee, an investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “But we haven’t had the necessary tools to understand how timing is generated within the brain.”
Now Fee and colleagues report in the Nov. 13 issue of Nature a new method for altering the speed of brain activity. And using that technique, “we think we have found the clock that controls the timing of the bird’s song,” Fee said.
The zebra finch’s song is widely studied as a model for understanding how the brain produces complex behavior sequences. Each song lasts about one second, and contains multiple syllables in a highly stereotypic sequence. Two brain regions — the High Vocal Center (HVC) and the robust nucleus of the arcopallium (RA) — are known to be important for singing, because deactivating either region prevents song production. But uncovering the clock mechanism required a more subtle method.