How similar or different are the brains brain areas controlling uh speech and language and say a songbird and a , and a young c human child . Yeah .
And then uh jumping many years later , you know , I started to dig down into these uh brain circuits to discover that these brain circuits had parallel functions with the brain circuits for humans , even though they're by a different name like brocas and laryngo motor cortex . And most recently , we discovered not only the actual circuitry and the connectivity are similar , but the underlying genes that are expressed in these brain regions in a specialized way , different from the rest of the brain are also similar between humans and songbirds and parrots . So all the way down to the genes .
And not only that , we are discovering that mutations in these genes that cause speech deficits in humans , like in Fox P two . if you put those same mutations or similar type of deficits in these vocal learning birds , you get similar deficits . So convergence of the behavior is associated with similar genetic disorders of the behavior .
Uh If a nonhuman primate or um you know , or let's say a chicken becomes deaf , uh their vocalizations don't deteriorate very little , at least . Uh while this happens in the vocal learning birds . So there were all these behavioral parallels that came along with a package .
There is something genetically influencing our vocal communication on top of what we learn culturally . And so there's this balance between the genetic control of speech or a song in these birds and the learned uh cultural control . And so , so yes , if you were to take , um you know , um I mean , in this case , we , we actually tried this at Rockefeller later on take a zebra finch and raise it with a canary .
