![]() ![]() It was entirely novel we made it ourselves. She says, "Alex had never heard the music we played for him in the study before. But Scachner found that he and Alex were all too capable of dancing to new tunes. It's possible that Snowball's boogieing was limited to music he was familiar with. But statistical tests say otherwise - the odds that he was simply fluking his rhythm were 1 in 500. That's very similar to the way that young human children learn to move to music but Patel quite rightly raises the possibility that Snowball may just have been moving randomly to the music and occasionally synchronised to it by mere chance. He managed to keep time during all the variants of the track, except for the very slowest ones.ĭuring the experiment, Snowball showed sustained bouts of excellent timing followed by periods where he lost the beat somewhat. Patel classified Snowball's movements as "dancing" if he bobbed his head in time with the beats, and he did so in about 60% of the trials. Demonstrating how far people will go in the name of science, Patel created 11 different versions of Everybody by the Backstreet Boys (Snowball's favourite track), that were anywhere from 2.5% to 20% faster or slower. In his lab, Patel showed that Snowball could alter the tempo of his moves as the music he listened to sped up or slowed down. Over the next six years, the man and his daughter danced with the bird using "pronounced arm gestures". Snowball's owner has bought him at a bird show at the age of 6 and noticed that the rhythmic cockatoo would bob his head along to the Backstreet Boys. Snowball himself came to Patel's attention after the young scientist saw the parrot on YouTube. Indeed, after searching YouTube for videos of dancing animals, Schachner only found evidence of moving to beats (a talent known as "entrainment") among 15 species that practice vocal learning - 14 parrots and the Asian elephant. To do this, animals need to have excellent coordination between their sense of hearing and their motor functions. Before Alex's recent death, Adena Schachner from Harvard University (working with Alex's keeper, the renowned parrot psychologist Irene Pepperberg ) found that he could also match Snowball's bopping.īoth groups of researchers believe that the parrots' dancing skills depend on a talent for " vocal learning " - the ability to mimic the sounds of other individuals. Aniruddh Patel from San Diego's Neurosciences Institute found evidence of Snowball's excellent rhythm under laboratory conditions. Snowball and his feathered friend Alex ( the late, famous African grey parrot ) could change all of that. Other animals may produce periodic sounds or perform complex dances, but sensing and moving in time to complex rhythms is a different matter. After all, domesticated animals like dogs and cats don't do it, and they spend their time with humans and have been exposed to our music for thousands of years. ![]() People who've attended parties at scientific events may question the ability of humans to move to a beat, but it's a fairly universal skill and one that many people thought was unique to our species. ![]()
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