0:00:00.559,0:00:05.580 For over half a century, neuroscientists have been gaining insight into the human brain 0:00:05.580,0:00:11.039 by studying songbirds. That’s because like humans, songbirds are able to learn very complex 0:00:11.039,0:00:14.139 vocalization. We’re interested both from a basic point 0:00:14.139,0:00:18.609 of view of understanding how it is that we do this very complex thing that’s very important 0:00:18.609,0:00:22.900 for all aspects of our life and we’re also ultimately interested in understanding learning 0:00:22.900,0:00:28.509 from a perspective of being able to create tools that enable rehabilitation or repair 0:00:28.509,0:00:32.630 in cases where learning has essentially gone awry or where there’s been damage to the 0:00:32.630,0:00:37.850 brain that prevents normal functioning. Jonathan Charlesworth works in Michael Brainard’s 0:00:37.850,0:00:43.370 lab at the University of California, San Francisco. He has been using a simple, automated computer 0:00:43.370,0:00:48.570 system to figure out how songbirds learn to perfect and maintain their song and hopes 0:00:48.570,0:00:53.030 to gain better insight into how the brain changes during the learning process. 0:00:53.030,0:00:57.420 So, the general goal of this research was to improve our understanding of how the nervous 0:00:57.420,0:01:04.420 system learns from signals of success or failure. In his experiment, the computer program emitted 0:01:04.780,0:01:09.479 an unpleasant sound while songbirds sang, which caused them to learn to change their 0:01:09.479,0:01:15.390 tune. They did so by remembering every slight change in pitch of a single syllable sung 0:01:15.390,0:01:20.259 about 500 times a day. The general result here means that the brain 0:01:20.259,0:01:25.060 keeps track of behavior in a more detailed way than we thought before. If you’re trying 0:01:25.060,0:01:31.130 to teach somebody something, a fine motor skill like playing the piano or speech, or 0:01:31.130,0:01:35.710 you’re trying to re-teach them something, like they originally knew how to do it but 0:01:35.710,0:01:41.850 now they’ve become unable to through some sort of injury or illness. You don’t have 0:01:41.850,0:01:47.840 to give feedback signals that are extremely complicated. You don’t have to tell them 0:01:47.840,0:01:53.170 exactly what they’re doing wrong. You just have to tell them whether this was good or 0:01:53.170,0:01:58.020 bad and the brain can do most of the rest of the work. 0:01:58.020,0:02:04.270 Our results suggest that if the principle we’ve studied in the songbird apply to humans, 0:02:04.270,0:02:08.380 learning might be greatly facilitated by taking advantage of this very narrow time window 0:02:08.380,0:02:13.959 after we try out a vocal gesture to provide feedback about whether it’s been successful 0:02:13.959,0:02:18.500 or not. And we think that by studying some of these very general principles in a simpler 0:02:18.500,0:02:23.120 system, we can gain knowledge that’s quite relevant to understanding much more broadly 0:02:23.120,0:02:30.120 how learning works and how rehabilitation might be best carried out.