Songbirds Use Mental Pointer When Playing Tunes


That spontaneous serenade from the zebra finch is not only more rehearsed than a cellist, but the bird even keeps its "finger" on its mental sheet music both day and night. It has been discovered that signals serving as "mental pointers" are produced in the brains of zebra finches while they sing, and also while they dream about, or "rehearse," their song during sleep. The finch's brain "circuits" are similar to the parts of the human brain thathandle motor control and learning despite the obvious size difference.

Zebra finches have only one song that lasts about a second. At one month old, a finch first tries to
sing a song that it memorized while listening to its father sing. While awake, it continues to practice
singing thousands of times a day. Then it also mentally rehearses while asleep. The finch can repeat
the song perfectly after about two months practice. A finch uses individual neural signals
lasting 6/1000 of a second to mark its place as it sings.

"Knowledge of timing cues such as those used by the songbirds may give us insight into how humans learn chunks of material through patterns and sequences. This will help the scientific community take the next steps in figuring out the biology of learning." The scientists next intend to study the source of these signals. Could it be light?

 

New ways to Clean our earth with Sound and Light.
A gas bubble excited by ultrasound turns a tiny fraction of the sound energy into light.
This phenomenon, called Sonoluminescence..


For the first time, measured the chemical reactions and light emission from a single water bubble excited by sound waves. Ultrasound applied to a liquid causes the formation, growth, compression and collapse of microscopic bubbles. These small oscillations can cause intense heat and pressure, similar to the conditions produced on a large scale by explosions or shock waves.This can cause emission of short flashes of light.Less than one millionth of the sound energy is converted into light.

A thousand times more energy goes into the formation of atoms, molecular fragments and ions. The largest part of the sonic energy is converted into mechanical energy, causing shock waves and motion in the liquid surrounding the gas bubble.

"Cavitation, which drives the implosive collapse of these bubbles,
creates temperatures resembling those at the surface of the sun and pressures like
those at the bottom of the ocean," "This phenomenon offers a means of concentrating
the diffuse energy of sound into a chemically useful form."

Possible applications include making catalysts to clean fuels, removing sulfur from gasoline, and enhancing the chemical reactions used to make pharmaceuticals. The process has already been used to make new chemical catalysts for industrial use and biomedical agents for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

 

 
 

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