What Birdsong says about motivation

JUST a few weeks after their hatching, the male zebra pinsons for babies begin to babble, spending much of the day testing their vocal agreements. Dad helps, singing to his newborns during feedings, so that babies can internalize his air, the same chicketing chorus shared by all male zebra pinsons.

Soon, these tiny Australian birds begin to repeat the song itself, repeating it up to 10,000 times a day, without any clear reward other than their growing perfection of the melody.

The meticulous dedication of baby birds to the mastery of their song led the neuroscientist of Duke Richard Mooney University and his colleague from Duke John Pearson to wonder if birds could help us better understand the nature of autonomous learning. In humans, language and musical expression are considered to be self -edited – spontaneous, adaptive and intrinsically enhanced.

Dopamine was still high when birds sang, whatever the quality of the song.

In a study recently published in NatureScientists followed brain signals and dopamine levels, a neurotransmitter involved in the reward and movement, in the brain of five male baby pinsons while they sang. They also measured the quality of the songs for each interpretation that the birds sang, in terms of pitch and vigor, as well as the quality of the performance of the songs compared to the age of the bird. What they found is that dopamine levels in the brain of baby birds correspond closely to the performance of song birds, suggesting that it plays a central role in the learning process.

Scientists have long since known that learning that is propelled by external rewards, such as notes, praise or sweet treats, is motivated by dopamine – which represents the differences between the expected and experienced rewards. But even if they suspected that autonomous learning is also guided by dopamine, it had been difficult to test this hypothesis so far.

“It is difficult to study self -edited behavior in animals,” explains Pearson, whose research combines neurobiology with biostatis. “There are few examples of very important learned behaviors that involve the necessary degree of competence,” he says. To carry out a successful experience, they also had to work with an animal that would repeat a behavior in a consistent manner several times. Baby Zebra Finches is suitable for the bill.

In the study, scientists found that the more mature the interpretation of the bird in relation to their age, the more dopamine is released in central gray nuclei, a group of nuclei in the neocortex involved in movement control as well as reward and cognition. When the birds allowed less good compared to their age, dopamine levels have dropped. And when scientists blocked the release of dopamine, the performance of birds compared to their age has also decreased. Dopamine was still high above the basic levels when birds sang, whatever the quality of the songs, noted the scientists, which suggests that this can help reward the spontaneous cricket.

To experience, the researchers relied on optogenetics, which allowed them to measure the release of dopamine precisely to follow it against behavior. They injected bird birds with a genetically modified dopamine receiver, which shines when struck with laser light. “When the bird begins to sing, we can see this enormous increase in glow, which means that dopamine has been released,” said study author John Pearson, a neurobiologist at Duke University.

Vikram Gadagkar, a neuroscientist from Columbia University who was not involved in the study, says that the results are strong and echo those of a study he wrote, also in Naturealmost at the same time. His Columbia team was able to show that the release of the Dopamine Guide to specific behaviors for learning songs, such as pitch adjustments.

The results of the two studies could give the scientists an overview not only of autonomous learning, but also of Parkinson’s disease, the obsessive compulsive disorder and the disorder of substance consumption, which all seem to be motivated by a defective intrinsic award system, explains Gadagkar. “This study directly connects dopamine to learning and performance of natural behavior that could in the future provide information on how to process this type of disease,” he said.

As for baby zebra bones, the intrinsic reward is the song itself. In the laboratory and in nature, even when no other bird is there to listen, they continue to practice their song until they can sound it correctly.

Main photo: Lucia Kohutova / Shutterstock

• Sara Novak

  Published on May 23, 2025

  Sara Novak is a scientific writer based in South Carolina. She is a contributory writer to Discover Magazine And his work also appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, National Geographic, New Scientist, And Medscape.