• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Birds May Dream, But What Do Those Dreams Sound Like?

April 12, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Have you ever had a conversation in your dreams? Maybe it’s just everyday chatter, maybe it’s an argument with someone, but it’d be pretty cool if we were somehow able to record it. As it happens, birds also seem to get vocal in their dreams, and a new study has been able to translate what that might sound like.

Scientists have known for a while that birds seem to dream about singing – the pattern of neurons that fire while they’re awake and singing can also be seen during sleep, as though they are practicing. Translating that pattern into what the song was, however, proved to be difficult.

Advertisement

Then, in 2018, professor of physics Gabriel Mindlin and colleagues discovered that birds also flex their vocal muscles in their sleep, in the same way they would were they belting out a tune during the day. 

We can’t hear that song though, “since the respiratory rhythm is not altered during sleep, the high-energy airflow needed to start auto-sustained oscillations in the labia [not that one, it’s part of a bird’s vocal organ] and generate sound is not produced,” the authors explain in the new study.

When the researchers identified the vocal muscle movement, they did so using a technique called electromyography. The team has now used data from this approach, with the aid of a dynamical systems model, to translate the songs in the dreams of great kiskadees.

“During the past 20 years, I’ve worked on the physics of birdsong and how to translate muscular information into song,” said Mindlin in a statement. “In this way, we can use the muscle activity patterns as time-dependent parameters of a model of birdsong production and synthesize the corresponding song.”

Advertisement

When getting into a squabble over territory, great kiskadees perform a distinct vocalization known as a “trill”, consisting of a sequence of short syllables (yep, birds have syllables too) sent out at around 10 to 20 Hz. The synthetic songs produced revealed that the kiskadees in the study appear to have been dreaming about confrontation.



“Analyzing muscular activity patterns during sleep reveals consistent activity patterns corresponding to these vocalizations: sequences of brief activation patterns occurring at a rate between 15 and 20 Hz,” the authors write.

Some might find it reassuring to know we’re not the only species that can get a bit het up in dreams, something that Mindlin seemed to resonate with. “I felt great empathy imagining that solitary bird recreating a territorial dispute in its dream,” said the researcher. “We have more in common with other species than we usually recognize.”

Advertisement

The study is published in the journal Chaos.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Factbox-Top announcements from Apple event
  2. WTO chief says trade must do more to address ‘devastating’ vaccine inequity
  3. Internet Figures Out Which Muppets Are Predators And Which Are Prey Based On Their Eyes
  4. AI Discovers New Material That Could Slash Lithium Use In Batteries

Source Link: Birds May Dream, But What Do Those Dreams Sound Like?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Could This Be The Real Reason Humans Survived And Neanderthals Died Out?
  • Newly Discovered Snail Species Named After Studio Ghibli Co-Founder Is A Hairy Beauty
  • 2025 SC79 Is The Second-Fastest Asteroid Ever Found – And Only The Second Within Venus’ Orbit
  • When Red Devil Spiders Arrived On A New Island, Their Genome Dramatically Shrank In Half
  • Is This The World’s Oldest Story? Ancient Human Tale About The Seven Sisters May Be From 100,000 BCE
  • This Pill Is Actually A Tiny Printer That Repairs Internal Injuries Using Biocompatible Ink
  • “This Is Amazing”: Scientists Have Found Evidence Of A Long-Lost World Deep Within The Earth
  • From The Shiniest World To Lava And Eternal Darkness, These Are The Weirdest Known Planets
  • Do Sharks Have Bones?
  • The Zombie Awakens: A Volcano Is Showing “First Signs” Of Unrest After 700,000 Years Of Quiet
  • Two Of The World’s Biggest Earthquakes Seem To Be Synched Together
  • California Has A New State Snake, And It’s A 1.6-Meter-Long Giant
  • Experimental Nanoparticle “Super-Vaccines” Stop Breast, Pancreatic, And Skin Cancers In Their Tracks
  • New Nightmare Fuel Unlocked: Watch The First Known Capture Of A Shrew By A False Widow Spider
  • Peculiar Glow In The Milky Way Might Be Dark Matter Signature
  • “I Was Scared To Death”: Missouri’s Great Cobra Scare Of 1953 Was Eventually Solved After 35 Years
  • Two Spacecraft To Fly Through Comet 3I/ATLAS’s Ion Tail – Will They Be Able To Catch Something?
  • Pioneering Heavy Water Detection Suggests Earth’s Water Might Be Older Than The Sun
  • PhD Students’ Groundbreaking New Technique Rescues JWST’s Highest Resolution Data
  • Popcorn-Like Parasites And Weird Worms Among 14 New Species Discovered In The World’s Oceans
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version