Life is just a theory
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Singing the Dinner Bell!
Okay, this wave of “animals communicating in crazy ways” is getting a bit overwhelming. Just when I think I’ve heard about the coolest adaptations of animal “language”, I find something better. We’ve seen a whale mimicking human speech, an elephant (sort of) speaking Korean, and now this story about birds and secretly coded dinner passwords…
The bird world is full of cuckoldry. That’s a crude word for the biological phenomenon called “brood parasitism”, where birds like cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. The invaders are cared for by unsuspecting bird parents, who are apparently not smart enough to see that one of these things is very clearly not like the other.
Finding food for screaming kids takes a lot of work, and it’s to a bird’s evolutionary advantage if they can focus on feeding their own offspring. The superb fairy wren (which is now so aptly named it’s not funny) developed a trick to solve that problem.
They sing a song to their young. While they are still in their eggs. And after they hatch, the chicks have to incorporate that song into their feeding chirps to get the goods! It’s almost too awesome to be true!
But it’s real science. Check out more over at Nature News, with a link there to the research paper and some of the bird songs. Very cool!
Nov
8th, 2012
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reblogged: mindwideweb
Researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center and the University of Illinois – Chicago used an artificial 13-word language, Brocanto2, to describe a computer game. While the artificial language’s small vocabulary allowed subjects to learn it fairly quickly, its grammar was relatively sophisticated, mimicking the rules of Romance languages while diverging from the participants’ native English grammar. Next, the researchers separated 41 adults, who spoke only English, into two groups at random. One would study Brocanto2 through explicit, and the other through implicit, training. To standardize the brain scans, the participants all had to be right handed. […]
While both groups achieved similar proficiency in the artificial language, their brains weren’t as evenly matched. Only the brains in the immersion training group processed language like native speakers’ brains would. And even after five months of zero exposure to Brocanto2, the brain patterns in both groups only became more similar to those of native speakers.
—Immersion in a foreign language rewires your brain - especially when you take time off (via mindwideweb)
Hee hee, I will never get over the novelty of seeing myself quoted. Grinning ear to ear right now.
Apr
3rd, 2012
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Immersion in a foreign language rewires your brain – especially when you take time off
Latest @io9:
By the time you reach adulthood, learning a foreign language is a struggle – even after you memorize grammar and vocabulary, there’s no guarantee that you’ll understand a fast-talking native speaker, and when you stop studying for even a month, you seem to forget everything you’d learned.
Children’s brains, on the other hand, are hard-wired to let them pick up languages with ease. Plus, a new study finds that even adult brains can re-wire themselves to mimic the brain patterns of native speakers – and this effect is amplified if they study by immersing themselves in a foreign language, rather than sitting in a classroom. And when they were not exposed to the new language for five months, their native-speaker brain patterns actually got stronger.
Apr
2nd, 2012
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