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Life

Birds 'dream sing' by moving their vocal muscles in their sleep

By Chris Baraniuk

9 February 2018

Âé¶¹´«Ã½. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

They don’t just sing while they’re awake

Arco Images GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

Practice, they say, makes perfect. Zebra finches are such dedicated musicians that they appear to rehearse their songs during sleep.

It has been that, while zebra finches sleep, their brains spontaneously reproduce the activation patterns they make when they sing during the day. Now it seems the birds’ vocal muscles actually move in response to these neural signals.

of the University of Buenos Aires and his colleagues surgically attached electrodes to the vocal muscles of ten zebra finches. In…

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