Summary Of Birds Can Tell Us A Lot About Human Language

Professor Adam Fishbein is a linguist and philosopher who has an interest in learning the evolution of the human language and cognition. In the article, “Birds Can Tell Us a Lot about Human Language”, by Professor Fishbein, he discusses unanswered questions about how the linguistic ability in humans evolved and how our ancestor’s brains changed to enable future generations to speak. However, since it is hard to study the vocalizations of our human ancestors, many researchers looked to another choice and chose to study birds instead. The reason why birds are chosen for this study is because there is a common ground of vocal learning throughout a variety of species of birds. But even though there is about a 300-million-year separation in evolution
Not only did Professor Fishbein provide his research but he also provided two other studies similar to his. According to research conducted by scientists from University of Texas Southwestern and Duke University, they discovered a new pathway within a songbird’s brain. The scientists did this by injecting a virus into the songbird’s neurons and whenever the bird sang the neurons glowed. What this means is the neurons are sending instructions on how to verbally sing to neurons that hear what is being sung. How this finding can relate to the reporting of Professor Fishbein’s article is it supports the idea about how the pathways in bird’s brains are similar to the pathways in a human’s brain. Also, another type of test that supported the reporting of the article was a study from researchers at Leidan University. What the researchers hypothesized was the parrots shared a common song system with song birds, but later on evolved a new song system that surpassed the old one and improved vocal learning ability. What this means is this study was found to be similar to how human brains developed new languages from their