Science behind ‘Polly want a cracker’ could guide future treatment design for speech disorders

A new study has shown how Parakate’s brain helps to imitate human words. For the first time, recording as a mental activity of the paracet, a research team from the NYUGrasman School of Medicine found that their brains only manufacture samples as soon as they appear in humans.

Appeared Online in the journal NatureThis study maps the activity of a group of nerve cells in the brain of the birds, called the central nucleus of the previous arcper (AAC), which is known to strictly affect the muscles in its vocal organs. Different groups of AAC cells were found to produce voices of adjacent and heads.

When the pyrics sing, some cells are mobilized on specific pitches, such as pressing the keys on the piano, whose new pattern is similar to the organization behind human speech.

Based on their searches, researchers suggest that humans and Perkets – which are still studied so far are like any other animal.

In NYU Langon Health, “One of the important ways to develop new treatments for speech -related diseases is to find an animal model that is about to find new treatments for speech -related mental processes. “

“The brain process exposed to the parakets can help to explain the mechanism behind a communication disorder that affects millions of Americans.” These include Aproxia (a problem of speech movements) and Afsia (difficulty in producing language), which may result in trauma due to stroke.

The mystery of humans and Parcats

Researchers say that the “incredibly flexible” language is manufactured through fragile patterns in the human brain. To determine if the pattern is unique to humans or not, the research team made the first recording of the brain in Budrager’s AAC, a type of small parrot that could imitate hundreds of human words.

A part of the study’s results was focused on the contradiction between Buderiger’s brain and zebra fancing, which is a song bird species known to produce complex sounds. Although the two species have imitated sounds using mental dedicated regions as well as special vocal organs, only parrots can produce human words.

Zebra Finch needs more than 100,000 practice trials to learn a tough song, which experiences confirms that her brain sets a fixed pattern of activity through a trial and error working process. On the contrary, the parakett – like humans, can quickly adopt their sound behavior.

This study has found that using their internal “vocal keyboard”, they learn to reuse flexiblely and creatively use motor commands to achieve different sounds.

Going forward, the research team plans to study the top functions of the brain, which decides that “which piano kes is suppressed” by the coming signals to the AAC. Uncovering these processes can highlight the highest academic abilities in humans as well as the strategies that further strengthen the artificial intelligence model behind chat boats (large language models).

“Our results confirm that AAC neurons are systematically representing the vocal pitch and showing precise control over it, the system has shown abnormal common joint with human brain activity,” said Zetian Yang, a post documentary scholar in Dr. Long’s lab.

“So this work sets this paracage as an important new model to investigate the speech motor control.”