ZEBRA finches are such keen musicians, they appear to rehearse songs during sleep.
We knew that while birds sleep, their brains make the activation patterns they show when they sing. Now it seems their vocal muscles move in response.
A team including Gabriel Mindlin at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina fitted electrodes to the vocal muscles of 10 sleeping zebra finches. They saw twitching, like during singing (PeerJ, doi.org/ckb9). In a second study, the team found they could trigger these movements simply by playing songs to sleeping birds (bioRxiv, doi.org/ckcp).
The movements may help with learning, …