View Single Post
Old 04-30-2009, 10:48 AM   #1 (permalink)
lostgirl
lightform
 
lostgirl's Avatar
 
Location: Edge of the deep green sea
Dancing with the birds

This bird cracks me up.


Quote:
They wouldn't blow away the competition on "Dancing with the Stars," but it turns out that some birds got rhythm. After studying a cockatoo that grooves to the Backstreet Boys and about 1,000 YouTube videos, scientists say they've documented for the first time that some animals "dance" to a musical beat.

The results support a theory for why the human brain is wired for dancing.

In lab studies of two parrots and close review of the YouTube videos, scientists looked for signs that animals were actually feeling the beat of music they heard.

The verdict: Some parrots did, and maybe an occasional elephant. But researchers found no evidence of that for dogs and cats, despite long exposure to people and music, nor for chimps, our closest living relatives.

Why? The truly boppin' animals shared with people some ability to mimic sounds they hear, the researchers say. (Even elephants can do that). The brain circuitry for that ability lets people learn to talk, and evidently also to dance or tap their toes to music, suggests Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. He proposed the music connection in 2006.

He also led a study of Snowball that was published online Thursday by the journal Current Biology.

A separate YouTube study, also published Thursday by the journal, was led by Adena Schachner, a graduate student in psychology at Harvard. In sum, the new research "definitely gives us a bit of insight into why and how humans became able to dance," Schachner said.

A video of Snowball bobbing his head and kicking like a little Rockette to music has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube since it was posted in 2007. Patel saw it after a colleague pointed it out.

"I was very impressed," Patel said. So he collaborated with Snowball's owner in Indiana for a more formal test. That showed Snowball wasn't just mimicking the movements of somebody off-camera. And Snowball's movements followed the beat of his favorite Backstreet Boys song, "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" even when researchers sped up the tune and slowed it down.

Actually, Snowball drifted in and out of following the beat, just as a child does, Patel said. But statistical analysis of his head bobs showed they really were related to the tempo.

Schachner and colleagues, meanwhile, found that videos of Snowball passed their own tests for following a beat. They also tested an African gray parrot named Alex, whose mental abilities had been studied for many years, earning him a measure of scientific fame, but who hadn't been trained to respond to music.

"We had no idea he would do anything in response to the musical beat," Schachner said. But when the music started, "to our surprise, Alex started to dance." Analysis showed Alex's head bobbing tracked the musical beat.

(Alex died in 2007, shortly after the study. He starred in a recent book, "Alex & Me," by researcher Irene Pepperberg, a co-author of Schachner's paper).

To cast a wider net in the animal kingdom, Schachner and colleagues searched YouTube for videos of dancing animals. Out of about 1,000 such videos, they found 49 that appeared worthy of a detailed analysis; 33 videos showed convincing evidence of animals following a musical beat.

Those animals were 14 species of parrot and one species of elephant — all known to be able to mimic sounds they hear, a result that supports Patel's theory.

Schachner, who pointed out that elephants are often trained performers and that little is known about the elephant videos, said it will take further work before she's convinced that elephants really move to a beat on their own.

When researchers contacted the owners of some parrots in the videos, they were told that the birds' response to music had been a surprise, indicating a natural ability.

Still, not every parrot will dance to music, and so the brain circuitry for so-called "vocal mimicry" apparently isn't enough by itself to make an animal boogie, Schachner said.

In a Current Biology commentary, W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland said the new work topples the claim that only people can move to a musical beat.

It would make sense to study dolphins for that ability, and it's too early to rule out apes, he said.
From: Boogie birdie: Animals shown to 'dance' to music

I think this is wonderful and in time we will find more animals capable of this sort of behavior.
__________________
We're about to go through the crucible, but we'll come out the other side.
We always arise from our own ashes. Everything returns later in its changed form. - Children of Dune

Last edited by lostgirl; 04-30-2009 at 10:51 AM..
lostgirl is offline  
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360