Regional differences detected in birdsongs

RALEIGH, N.C. — Humans aren’t the only creatures whose regional drawls and twangs give them away. The same thing goes for the songbirds, according to a study at Duke University.

“If you drive around the U.S., you’ll hear the same species of songbirds,” said neurobiologist Richard Mooney, who has developed a unique way to study how birds learn and published his results this year in the journal Nature.

“But if you listen closely, the songs sung by a swamp sparrow from a population in New York sound different from a swamp sparrow in Pennsylvania. … It could be likened to a dialect, or an accent.”

These dialects stem from the way that birds learn to sing — a process that is much like the way humans learn to talk.

For most animals, including nonhuman primates, communicative sounds develop naturally, without the need for tutors. Only select bird species, humans and perhaps some whales incorporate both nature and nurture into vocalizations.

The similarities between the learning processes are clear even on a microscopic level.

“Though there’s a large evolutionary distance between birds and humans, many of the brain mechanisms in the learning process turn out to be remarkably similar,” Mooney said.

These brain mechanisms include a phenomenon known as mirror neurons, which Mooney and his team documented in birds for the first time. Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that fires either because the animal is performing a certain action, or because it is seeing another animal perform that same action.

Using tiny devices mounted on the sparrows’ heads, Mooney and his team at Duke were able to describe mirror neurons that fired in the birds’ brains when they sang their own song or when they heard another bird sing a very similar song. The findings are the first descriptions of mirror neurons in a species other than primates and the first to associate them with vocalizations rather than movement.

Self-portraiture and emerging artistic consciousness in Dafen

Dafen is a village surrounded by the thriving metropolis of Shenzhen, and the origin of most of the world’s reproduction oil paintings. In the popular imagination Dafen’s artists produce anonymous works for unknown customers, operating no differently than a faceless factory churning out counterfeits, replicas and nothing close to what would be considered art.

REGIONAL productively collaborated with the otherwise commoditized community in Dafen by asking selected individuals, some for the first time, to imagine themselves in their professional medium. The final works show the technical, creative, and professional facets of the artists identities subsumed by the styles and relationships they maintain with specific famous artists. The hybrid result of original subject with derivative style comments on originality, global cultural production and REGIONAL’s cooperation with emerging enterprise forms that are internationalizing the village.

The product of the collaboration are sets of images (seen below) comprising a digital photo of the artist in his studio, an indicative painting of their usual output and an original self-portrait. While the final works contain both the creative signature of the original masters and the emergent self-consciousness of the Dafen artists, it is equally important to note that they derived great fulfillment from using their talents freely, and were remunerated at a rate commensurate with the unique international nature of the project.

The series operates as a comment on iconicity in cultural reproduction and consumerism as well as posits strategies for enabling and activating creativity that would otherwise be absorbed by routine production. The works produced with the talent of DAFEN are part of a continuing series of our international collaborations that seek to engage and encourage untapped creative, cultural and economic opportunity around the world.

The paintings seen below are to be featured in galleries worldwide in the coming year.
(Xiao Keman (b. 1980), Shanxi Province, PRC. Painter of DaVinci. Self-Portrait: 72cm x 72cm) Full Story »