Neural dynamics underlying birdsong practice and performance.

ABSTRACT: Musical and athletic skills are learned and maintained through intensive practice to enable precise and reliable performance for an audience. Consequently, understanding such complex behaviours requires insight into how the brain functions during both practice and performance. Male zebra finches learn to produce courtship songs that are more varied when alone and more stereotyped in the presence of females¹. These differences are thought to reflect song practice and performance, respectively^2,3, providing a useful system in which to explore how neurons encode and regulate motor variability in these two states. Here we show that calcium signals in ensembles of spiny neurons (SNs) in the basal ganglia are highly variable relative to their cortical afferents during song

SUBMITTER: Singh Alvarado J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9118926 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature