What songbirds can teach us about the human brain
Tracy Larson, University of Virginia assistant professor of biology: We can find cases where animals just do things better than we do.
In the case of birds, they show this extreme ability to regenerate parts of their brain.
In my lab, we study adult neurogenesis, which is the birth of new neurons in the adult brain.
In humans with depression, there’s a depression of neurogenesis. So, we started asking, how does depression manifest itself in the brain?
We can’t ask a songbird, how are you feeling today? But we can go in and ask, how is the bird singing?
Birds will kind of hop from brushy patch to brushy patch. And so, the question is, do we put nets here and here?
During the breeding season of a songbird, the region of the brain that controls the birds singing behavior can actually double in neuron number over the course of a week.
As the birds transition back out of their breeding season, neurons die off, and that coincides with a decrease in their desire to sing – a decrease in the motivation to sing their song.
And this lack of motivation is really reminiscent of depression in humans.
If we can understand the mechanisms of degeneration in regeneration in birds, we can address this neural loss in humans and maybe even regrow lost parts of the human brain.
Then you can imagine applying those mechanisms for traumatic brain injury, stroke, any neurological disorder.
We can find new ways to understand our human existence by looking just at the world around us.
