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Songbirds' learning hub in brain offers insight into motor control by ferujkll sdff
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Songbirds' learning hub in brain offers insight into motor control |
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To accomplish this feat, the finch's brain must receive and processlarge quantities of information about its performance and use thatdata to precisely control the complex vocal actions that allow itto modify the pitch and pattern of its song. Now, scientists at UCSF have shown that a key brain structure actsas a learning hub, receiving information from other regions of thebrain and figuring out how to use that information to improve itssong, even when it's not directly controlling the action. Theseinsights may help scientists figure out new ways to treatneurological disorders that impair movement such as Huntington'sdisease and Parkinson's disease. The research is reported as an advanced online publication on May20, 2012 by the journal Nature , and will appear at a later date in the journal's print edition.
Years of research conducted in the lab of Michael Brainard, PhD, anassociate professor of physiology at UCSF, has shown that adultfinches can keep track of slight differences in the individual"syllables," or notes, they play and hear, and makemental computations that allow them to alter the pitch. For previous experiments, Brainard and his colleagues developed atraining process that induced adult finches to calibrate theirsong. They created a computer program that could recognize thepitch of every syllable the bird sang. The computer also delivereda sound the birds didn't like -- a kind of white noise -- at thevery moment they uttered a specific note. Within a few hours, thefinches learned to alter the pitch of that syllable to avoidhearing the unpleasant sound.
In the new research, the UCSF neuroscientists used their technologyto investigate how the learning process is controlled by the brain.A prevailing theory suggests that new learning is controlled by a"smart" brain structure called the basal ganglia, acluster of interconnected brain regions involved in motor controland learning. "It's the first place where the brain is putting two and twotogether," said Jonathan Charlesworth, a recent graduate ofUCSF's neuroscience PhD program and the first author of the newpaper. "If you remove the basal ganglia in a bird that hasn'tyet learned to sing, it will never learn to do so." Once a basic, frequently repeated skill such as typing, singing thesame song or shooting a basketball from the free-throw line islearned, the theory suggests, control of that activity is carriedout by the motor pathway, the part of the nervous system thattransmits signals from the brain to muscles. But for the basicroutine to change -- for a player to shoot from another spot on thebasketball court or a bird to sing at a different pitch -- thebasal ganglia must again get involved, providing feedback thatallows learning based on trial and error, the theory suggests.
What remained unclear is what makes the basal ganglia so"smart" and enables them to support such detailedtrial-and-error learning. Was it something to do with theirstructure? Or were they getting information from elsewhere? The scientists sought to answer this question by blocking theoutput of a key basal ganglia circuit while training male finchesto alter their song using the white-noise blasts. As long as thebasal ganglia were kept from sending signals to the motor pathway,the finches didn't change their tune or show signs of learning. Butwhen Brainard's team stopped blocking the basal ganglia, somethingsurprising happened: the finches immediately changed the pitch oftheir song, with no additional practice. "It's as if a golfer went to the driving range and wasterrible, hitting the ball into the trees all day and not gettingany better," said Charlesworth.
"Then, at the end of theday, you throw a switch and all of a sudden you're hitting thefairway like you're Tiger Woods." Normally, you'd expect improvement in skill performance like thisto take time as the basal ganglia evaluates information, makeschanges and gets new feedback, Brainard said. "The surprise here is that the basal ganglia can payattention, observe what other motor structures are doing and getinformation even when they aren't involved in motor control,"Brainard said. "They covertly learned how to improve skillperformance and this explains how they did it." These findings suggest that the basal ganglia's"smartness" is due in large part to the steady flow ofinformation they receive about the commands of other motorstructures. It also portrays the basal ganglia as far moreversatile than previously understood, able to learn how tocalibrate fine-motor skills by acting as a specialized hub thatreceives information from various parts of the brain and respondsto that information with new directives.
The findings also support the notion that problems in the basalganglia circuit's ability to receive information and learn from itmay help trigger the movement disorders that are symptoms ofHuntington's and Parkinson's, Brainard said. Timothy Warren, another PhD graduate working in Brainard's lab, wasthe paper's third author. Funding support for the research came from the National Institutesof Health and the National Science Foundation. I am a professional writer from Optical Drives, which contains a great deal of information about alpine air purifier , in home saunas, welcome to visit!
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