Dec. 27, 2012 — A bird listening to
birdsong may experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to
music, suggests a new study on white-throated sparrows, published in Frontiers
of Evolutionary Neuroscience.
"We found that the same neural reward
system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to
male birdsong, and in people listening to music that they like," says
Sarah Earp, who led the research as an undergraduate at Emory University.
For male birds listening to another male's song,
it was a different story: They had an amygdala response that looks similar to
that of people when they hear discordant, unpleasant music.
The study, co-authored by Emory neuroscientist
Donna Maney, is the first to compare neural responses of listeners in the
long-standing debate over whether birdsong is music.
"Scientists since the time of Darwin have
wondered whether birdsong and music may serve similar purposes, or have the
same evolutionary precursors," Earp notes. "But most attempts to
compare the two have focused on the qualities of the sound themselves, such as
melody and rhythm."
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