Principal Investigator Michale Fee
Professor Fee also wants to understand how the song is learned in the first place. Just as human babies babble before they can speak, a young bird learns to sing by trial and error, experimenting with a variety of sounds and selecting those that most closely resemble the memory of its father’s song. Fee hopes to determine where the brain stores its memory of the father’s song; how it compares this memory with its own attempts to produce a copy; and how it reinforces the connections that produce good copies while eliminating those that do not.
The answers could have implications far beyond the field of bird song. Most learned behavior involves trial and error, and this in turn requires variability on which learning can operate. How the brain sets the right balance between too much and too little variability, and how that balance is disrupted by disease, are some of the questions that Fee expects to tackle in the future. The parts of the bird’s brain that control song learning are closely related to human circuits that are disrupted in brain disorders such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease. Fee hopes that the lessons learned from bird song will provide new clues to the causes and possible treatment of these disorders.