Emily Mackevicius comes to work in the early morning because that’s when her birds are most likely to sing. A graduate student in the lab of McGovern Investigator Michale Fee, she is studying zebra finches, songbirds that learn to sing by copying their fathers. Bird song involves a complex and precisely timed set of movements, and Mackevicius, who plays the cello in her spare time, likens it to musical performance. “With every phrase you have to learn a sequence of finger movements and bowing movements, and put it all together with exact timing. The birds are doing something very similar with their vocal muscles.”
Young zebra finches learn to produce the precisely timed movements required for singing. Photo: Justin Knight
A typical zebra finch song lasts about one second, and consists of several syllables, produced at a rate similar to the syllables in human speech. Each song syllable involves a precisely timed sequence of muscle commands, and understanding how the bird’s brain generates this sequence is a central goal for Fee’s lab. Birds learn it naturally without any need for training, making it an ideal model for understanding the complex action sequences that represent the fundamental “building blocks” of behavior.
Some years ago Fee and colleagues made a surprising discovery that has shaped their thinking ever since. Within a part of the bird brain called HVC, they found neurons that fire a single short burst of pulses at exactly the same point on every repetition of the song. Each burst
lasts about a hundredth of a second, and different neurons fire at different times within the song. With about 20,000 neurons in HVC, it was easy to imagine that there would be specific neurons active at every point in the song, meaning that each time point could be represented by the activity of a handful of individual neurons.