“What we learned is that when it comes to the brain and cooperation, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts,” said Johns Hopkins behavioral neuroscientist Eric Fortune, based at its Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, reports the journal Science. “We found the brain of each individual participant prefers the combined activity over his or her own part,” adds Fortune, who led the study, according to a Hopkins statement.
Fortune's work took him and his team to the cloud forests of Ecuador, on the slopes of the active Antisana Volcano. Why? It's one of the only places in the world where you can find plain-tailed wrens.
Their songs, sung by one male and one female, take an ABCD form, with the male singing the A and C phrases and the female (which seems to be the song leader) singing B and D. “What's happening is that the male and female are alternating syllables, though it often sounds like one bird singing alone, very sharply, shrilly and loudly,” explained Fortune, who spent hours hacking through the thick bamboo with a machete, trying to catch the songbirds in nets. The team then captured some of the wrens and monitored activity in the area of their brains that control singing. They expected to find that the brain responded most to the animal's own singing voice. But that's not what happened. Sharing from
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