In the first experiment of its kind, scientists employed high-resolution imaging to examine the brains of juvenile songbirds right after they heard an adult tutors' song for the first time. Specifically, they wanted to see what happened to the connections between nerve cells, or synapses, in a part of the brain where the motor commands for song are thought to originate.
"We expected to see the building of new spines and loss of old spines accelerate when the juvenile heard a tutor's song for the first time," said senior author Richard Mooney, PhD, a Duke professor of neurobiology. "Instead, we saw exactly the opposite: hearing a tutor song rapidly stabilized previously dynamic synapses."
