Snowball, a dancing cockatoo, proves to some scientists that humans are not the only species that are capable of moving to the beat of music. This video of a cockatoo listening to and following the beat of “Everybody” by the Backstreet boys was discovered on YouTube.
A neurobiologist name Aniruddh Patel was amazed when he discovered this dancing bird on the internet. Patel had argued in an earlier study that our talent for moving synchronously to a rhythmic beat is tied to our ability to learn and mimic sounds (Morell 2009). There is a connection between the auditory and motor parts of our brains that give us the capability to react to what we hear. It seems that only humans and parrots have this ability.
Patel was interested to see if this cockatoo really had the right moves to the music in person so he visited Snowball in Indiana. He put the bird through a couple of test speeding up and slowing down the music and the bird stay synchronized to the beat. This showed that the bird was monitoring the sound, bobbing and kicking to every beat. These neural abilities are the same as mimicking sound.
Another group of researchers found the same results with 14 species of parrots and in Asian elephants. A parrot name Alex would bob his head and change the beat as the music was changing, just like Snowball. They were fascinated by these animals so they searched YouTube to analyze other types of animals that might have this ability to dance to the beat of music. The team only found vocal mimics such as parrots and Asian elephants that had this type of talent.
Citation Information
Morell, Virginia. 2009 “That Bird Can Boogie” ScienceNOW Daily News [Internet] Washington DC and Cambridge, UK: High Wire Press; 2009 [cited 2009 May 25]. Available from http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/430/1
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