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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Zebra finches offer insight into aspects of human learning and adaptation
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:00:59
	Publish Date:		2016-06-23 19:00:00
	Description:		Birdsong is like a dialect – birds in one area may sing a different tune than those elsewhere. But at the level of physiology, it gets much more complicated. Researcher Hamish Mehaffey and his team at the University of California, San Francisco took a look at how two parts of a zebra finch brain not only enable song learning but interact to allow a bird to change its song. "So you can put electrodes in the pathways and then record in the area where they interact and look at the strengths of those inputs, after different patterns of stimulation. So what we did was we took the patterns of stimulation that we knew that the birds used when they were singing, and used those as, kind of, templates in order to probe what the mechanism might be." Mehaffey compares such a disturbance to a stroke, which can disturb a person’s language area. "The interesting part was that there was always some balance between these two pathways. If something happens to it, the bird will sing a horrible, messed-up song." These regions are analogous to parts of the human brain and are implicated for aspects of learning and adaptation.
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