Birds Singing In Slow Motion Help Reveal Brain Locations Responsible For Timing

As anyone who watched the Olympics can appreciate, timing matters when it comes to complex sequential actions. It can make a difference between a perfect handspring and a fall, for instance. But what controls that timing? MIT scientists are closing in on the brain regions responsible, thanks to some technical advances and some help from songbirds. Fee's group devised a technique to slow down different parts of the brain. They took advantage of the fact that all biological processes are influenced by temperature. Just as molasses run slower in January, neurons function more slowly when they are cooled down. The authors constructed a tiny Peltier cooling apparatus based on a device similar to those used in portable electronic beverage coolers. Then they used this device to produce a small cooling effect that could be localized to precise parts of the brain. Cooling the RA brain region had almost no effect on the bird's song. But cooling HVC produced a dramatic effect. The song slowed in proportion to the degree of cooling, with the biggest temperature change (a 10 degrees Celsius reduction) causing the song to stretch out by around 30 percent. Not only did the overall duration of the song increase, so did each individual syllable, so the overall rhythmic structure was preserved without changing the sounds within the song.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081117134339.htm