For the birds: The soundscape of avian dreams and a bird-eye camera

Listening to avian dreams When birds dream, they dream in song. Or at least that's what Gabriel Mindlin's recent study of dozing great kiskadees suggests. And he's devised a way to listen in ( Chaos 2024, DOI: 10.1063/5.0194301 ). Previous studies have shown that neurons in bird brains do fire during their slumber, teasing that our feathered friends might be dreaming. Unfortunately, interpreting how that neural activity is linked to behavior is difficult. "We don't know the language of neurons so don't know how the pattern of activity is translated to generate the sound," Mindlin tells Newscripts. Luckily, singing is a physical endeavor as well as a mental one. When a bird sings, it modulates its tune with a combination of air flow and muscle contractions, all triggered by electrical impulses. In his lab at the University of Buenos Aires, Mindlin surgically places electrodes in the bird's voice box to