 What about, like, some, like, scooping of part of the brain? Welcome, everyone. Good afternoon. So today, it's a very special occasion. We are going to celebrate Professor Yoko Yasaki Sugiyama to be promoted to tenure full professor. And so before Jeff introduced Yoko, I just want to summarize very quickly about the Provost Lecture Series. We started in October 2022. And so the goal is to celebrate milestones in the careers of always faculty members only. So we try to recognize newly promoted professors and also those receive international awards. And so from this map, as you can see, our first one was given by Professor Ichiro Maruyama who retired in late 2022 and followed by many of our colleagues who got promoted and also those who got prestigious awards. And so this year in 2024, so we already went through three lectures given by Professor Takahashi who also recently retired and Yasha Neiman and Satoshi Mitari who actually gave his lecture last Thursday. And so we encourage for the future faculty members, yeah, please sign up early. So March is always a busy time. And so we appreciate everyone's support being here. And without further ado, I just want to finally thank again so many people who made this Provost Lecture Series possible, especially people from Office of the Provost, people from the core facilities, especially in the engineering section, and people, all the members from CPR. So they are here every time recording the lectures and also promoting the event. So thank you and I will let Jeff take over for the introduction. Thank you and welcome everybody. I'm very pleased to be able to celebrate Yoko's promotion and I'd like to provide a little background. Yoko graduated with her PhD from Sophia University in 1999 and then she went to a postdoc at Duke University in Richard Mooney's lab. And there, among other things, she made intracellular recordings from the zebra-finch brain of neurons while playing them songs. Anybody who's tried that knows what a difficult technical achievement it is. Yoko returned to Japan and joined Takao Hensh in 2003 and worked at the Brain Science Institute at Reakin. Here she did important work that connected the maturation of the GABA interneuron system with critical periods for learning. Then in 2011 she was recruited to OIST where she's continued to work and investigate the neural mechanisms of the developmental critical period. Now this critical period is a developmental stage during which sensory experience can shape neuronal circuits. For example, in humans, children learn to speak in their early years at a much faster rate than adults and they learn without effort just from hearing the people around them talk. Unlike me trying to learn Japanese, I have to take ten times as longer as a child does. Now this is well known but the distinctive thing about Yoko's work is really her tenacious investigation of the fundamental mechanisms that underlie how experience is transformed into physical changes in the brain. This requires great technical ability and perseverance and persistence, creative thinking to design tasks that integrate behaviour of birds and experience of birds with cellular mechanisms. Unsurprisingly it's led to publications in nature and science over the years. While at OIST, Yoko has also found time to contribute towards creating the university because it was very young when she came in 2011. I won't list all the things that she's done but I'd mentioned especially her contribution to recruiting Japanese students to the graduate program when it first started and as a member of the establishing board of the Child Care Centre to helping us set up the policies and also communicate them to the Japanese people in the community and making it consistent with the standards around. She also contributed to refinement of the childbirth accommodation policy for students and served as a member of Faculty Council as well as being a supportive and very helpful mentor to numerous students. So now I'd like to ask Yoko to tell us about singing in the brain. Thank you Yoko. Thank you Jeff and Amy for the super kind introductions. It's kind of amazing that it's already 12 years has passed since I joined in here and we have been working on the development so hopefully we also have developed in here. So I've been super happy for working in here first I have to connect the computers. Okay good, coming. So yeah I want to introduce the guy. So today I want to share with you that we have been doing hope you can find something we've developed in here. So I think everybody's believing that I'm working on birds. But I think that many of you know that why we are working on birds, why it's beautiful and in here. So they're singing like in that way, but they cannot sing when they are born. So they have to learn to sing like humans learn to speak. It's really similar in many of the ways. So you probably take too much glad that you can speak. You don't remember when you learn to speak, but you did it. Congratulations you did a great job. So everybody did it amazingly well. But it's interesting that we don't get any rewards for doing that. You don't get any candies, you don't get anything, but you still can do it. And then even you don't get any punishment. It's lucky that if you don't speak, you get the punishment from your parents. It didn't happen. But still you could do it. So it's really amazing. Think of the other animal behavior experiment. I know they have been doing so much training thing. So you have to give the rewards to the mice. You have to give the punishment to the rats. Otherwise they don't learn. But birds just be together with their parents. They can start to think like we do. We start to speak just by naturally, by hearing of the adult speaking. Try to communicate. So being in the society, try to communicate. It's already a reward to the animals. Because we are living in the societies. We want to communicate. It's a huge reward for communicating with the others. So to understand that, this is the really good modeling animals. Because they are learning to speak. They are learning to think. Like humans are learning to speak. But also it's really interesting. It's happening only in the developmental period. It's developmental period. It's matching forests. So even after hatching, even after a bone, we are developing so many skills. So human speech skills, communicating skills are really cognitive skills. Really high cognitive skills. But to get to these higher cognitive functions, we have to develop the relevant skills earlier. So the functional development is not happening randomly. It has to happen in the specific sequential manner. To get the good speaking skills, good communication skills, we have to have the good motor skills. We have to talk. But to get the good motor skills, you have to develop the good sensory skills. Unless you have the sensory detection skills, we cannot get the motor skills. We cannot develop the good motor skills. So to develop the nice, higher cognitive, higher skills, we have to develop the relevant skills nicely orchestrated manner. But to understand that skill, we need a good modeling. So you probably don't understand that the human speech even needs this nice orchestrated development. So as Jeff suggested, Jeff already telling that the human speech skills also depending on the early development of their auditory skills. It's kind of already a famous story in the Songbird field that the Japanese cannot distinguish L and L. Actually, I cannot. I make so much mistake from the spelling of L and L. You can't pick that my proof of being Japanese. But interestingly, what the people already found is that even the Japanese infants, if you were at the early period, it's really early, like a 68-month-old, they can distinguish these sounds almost the same level as American infants. It's really good. But they are losing these skills while American infants increase in these skills when they're getting to almost a year old. So that is really telling that these early period, what they are doing, what we are doing is developing our detection skills. So Japanese babies normally hearing Japanese sounds, right? And then developing our skills to detect the older sounds which are sitting in Japanese. So I can't distinguish the Ame and Ame really well. Probably you probably don't hear the differences. Hashin and hashi is different for us, but our L and L are not different. Japanese intonations and sounds and bowlings, which doesn't have the difference of L and L. And then once getting an adult, we start to learn English and then try to hear the English sound by using our detection skills, our auditory detection skills. So that's a reason that we cannot detect the English world really well while the American infants who trained their detection skills with the English sound, they can distinguish. So that's the limitations. Even we can learn the new vocabulary, we have some limitations because of these auditory skills. So that's a reason that we want to know when the development is happening, how it's orchestrated, and how we can develop these cognitive skills. So we have been interested in how the sequential development is happening, why this time window is limited, but at them we need some good modeling. So to do that somebody is a really good modeling. As they learn first they are the healing of the adult singing. Normally in this species, only male bird sings as a cotsip song. So they're first healing for the father song and then memorizing it. And then slightly later they start singing by themselves and then this moment they're healing their own song and then try to match their own vocalization to memorize father song. And then finally they develop their own song. So in the once becoming adult, they're singing really beautiful song, but they're using this song as an attract to females, so it's really highly cognitive skills. So as you see it in here, they are nicely matching with the cognitive development of the humans. So by looking at that, by looking at this behavior, we try to understand what is happening in their brain. So first I want to show that I want to convince you that they are legally developing the songs. You can hear that how their song sounds like when they are baby first. So when they start singing around a month old, their sounds more like that way. You see more like a super noisy doesn't sounds like a song. But then they keep practicing like a human baby bubbling and almost a month later, their things more like that way. You can hear it's becoming more complex, becoming more like a rhythmic pattern. But they are still not perfectly stereotyped. But once becoming really adult, it's becoming more like that way. You can hear that the repeats of the some praise and then it's more like stereotyped. So it's honestly the the one-boards developing their sound over the months by keep repeating of the keep practicing the songs. So as you see anything here, they start to really noisy sound like a human baby bubbling and then development. But also if they see their father's song, you see they are really similar. Even looking at the structure, you can see some structures are kind of copying. So you see it's a sign of learning. We didn't do anything really special. Just by together with the father, they kind of mimicking it and then develop their own song. So now you hope you understand how they are developing in their song. So then by looking at what is happening to the brain, we try to understand what is happening. But as I say, this is really a natural behavior versus learning to sing just by healing of the father's song. So we can ask, it's naturally happening. Even just going to the wild, it's really happening. So because it's a really natural behavior, we can ask so many biological questions sitting in there. Like they are learning only in the developmental period as I say. So we can understand how this type window is developed. Also they learn only through the social interactions. They are not learning from the speaker playback. They need to interact with living animals. Why it's happening, why it's only happening through the social interactions, but also why it's happening only through the conspicuous animals, the same species. Not happening the close species. So we can ask those kind of interesting biological questions one by one. So I want to introduce some of the story we did in this past 10, 12 years. So first we want to I want to show that what is happening, how they are detecting their own species song. So this is the project down by our first postdoc, Makoto Aleghi. But also we are in the oise, we can collaborate with totally different field of the people. So we are collaborating we collaborate with Professor Bandit at that moment. So as I said, that the birds are, we are learning to speak. But it doesn't matter what kind of gene we have. They have to speak in any case. But it doesn't matter what kind of gene you can learn any of the lungages. Just by depending on the experiences. Even my parents are Japanese, but if I heard some like an English friend Chinese I would speak other lungages. But I can't learn any of the lungages, but if maybe communicating with stock they never ever learn to work. It's really natural. But you see many of the time they are communicating really well, but you never see that it's happening. Why? Why we noted that it's dog barking. Somebody telling that okay this is dog barking you shouldn't tell. You shouldn't learn. When you are talking to babies did you tell that they are human babies, human adult talking to you, you have to learn now. Nobody tells it, but somehow we could tell this is human speech. It's really true for a song bird too. They are in the woods, think of the woods they can hear a ballady of the sound. It's including the voices from the other species bird. But still zebra finch can learn to think from zebra finch sound. It's really important to them because they have to attract the zebra finch females, otherwise their behavior doesn't work out. But nobody would tell the zebra finch babies that this is zebra finch singing, you have to learn it. But somehow they can learn from zebra finch parents. Why it's happening? How they can detect innately their singing? That was our first question. Especially these species it's really interesting because we have a variety of the birds in there. It's looking slightly different in here. But if you hear their sound each one sings different songs. Actually this is really important. This uniqueness is really important because it's their identity, individual identities. Even they are learning from water, they somehow differentiate from water because it's their identities. So even hundreds of birds, thousands of birds sitting in there each one sings their own song. It's really important. But when they think of the babies, baby birds hearing of the zebra finch song still they can hear zebra finch, they can detect all of them as a zebra finch song and then try to learn them. And then when they try to learn from one of them they can try to differentiate. So it's really amazing by all these sitting in there. So they have to balance their individual differences, individual valuations and also the species identities. So how they can balance within, you know, how they can balance these two competing ideas. One is divergence, one is convergent, right? It's different ideas. How they can balance. So that was our question first. And then we'll try to, you know, for answering that questions what we did is that we just raised the zebra finch baby with the other species bird. So this is another species bird called Bengali's finch. It's really similar but it's a different species. So if you hear their song this is So this is zebra finch song and so this is Bengali's finch song. It sounds slightly different, right? You can feel. We probably cannot say how it's different, but you can feel it's different. So what we did is that they're just stealing the zebra finch baby just after watching and then placing it into the Bengali's finch nest and then isolating them in the sound and dimension chamber. So under this condition the zebra finch baby is forced by a Bengali's finch can hear only Bengali's finch song even their zebra finches, right? So for entire life they just keep hearing Bengali's finch song. So under these kind of super crazy conditions, zebra finch babies develop this kind of song so you can hear that it's becoming similar to Bengali's finch. So even you see that even the sound spectrogram you can see this is coming from that one. You see this structure is similar to that one. So you can really identify that the syllables are copied from Bengali's finch foster fodder. When looking at the others, many of the birds raised by Bengali's finch and then just looking at that copy from the Bengali's finch fodder, a good fraction of the elements are copied from their foster fodder. So it seems they are really learning but we could feel that the still sounds like somehow sounds like a zebra finch song. So we wanted to really identify why it sounds like a zebra finch still. So then we also take a look at the how their tempo is like a song tempo pattern. So to look at the tempo pattern we just simply measure the duration of each syllables but also the duration of the silent gap in bitwim. So just recording a bunch of the zebra finch song and the Bengali's finch song also the zebra finch raised by Bengali's finch song and then measuring the duration of the syllables, the duration of the gaps in bitwim. And what we found is that the zebra finch normally has kind of two types of the syllables. One is kind of shorter syllables, the other is longer syllables, why Bengali's finch song has shorter syllables only. But once the zebra finch baby is raised by Bengali's finch, their distribution of the duration of the syllables are becoming more like a Bengali's finch. It's really true, right, because they copy from the Bengali's finch at our foster fodder, the syllables, the distribution of the duration is becoming more like a Bengali's finch. But when we look at the silent gap in bitwim what we found surprisingly is that the normally zebra finch silent gap is shorter when comparing to the Bengali's finch. But even they copy the syllables, how they align this syllable into some rhythmic is still more like a zebra finch, oh sorry. So they can keep this timing, even they copied some words, the timing how they sync this syllable is still more like a zebra finch. So we are kind of joking that they are singing the Bengali's finch song with a zebra finch accent. The rhythm is still more like a zebra finch. So that is really suggesting that maybe they are using this one as an innate coding of the zebra finch songs. So to clue that idea we even go into the neurons and then see whether they are detecting this temporal pattern. So to do that we are just simply recording from the neural activities. So I know there are not many of the neural scientists so we can measure the neural activities. So the neuron has the activities which is basically the information to sending to the other neurons. This is really important because the neurons are sending the information that's the way of the calculations. Their signal is basically the electrical signaling. It's really tiny electrical signaling. So that's the reason that if we insert the electrode closer to the neurons we can clue these electrical signals. So here I just showing as a last upload so you have to believe that this one line is the one spiking activity, one activation of the neurons and activation of the neurons when we pray back these sounds. So even if we pray back the sound, the neuron gets the fire so we can believe that this neuron is kind of responding to our song pray back. So as you see what we found is that this brain earlier we have two types of the neurons and then Borsa nicely responding to the zebrafin song pray back. But when we pray back the white noise they stop responding. So we have one type of onset response and then later they stop responding. So at least we can see that this neuron can distinguish the white noise and the zebrafin song. But interestingly when we pray back this song, it's not called song but we just cutting this white noise into pieces and then make a time alignment more like a zebrafin song. So it doesn't have acoustic feature again song but they have the rhythmic pattern of the song. So if we pray back this song we found that the one type of the neuron start to respond as more like a zebrafin. So it's seeming like this neuron is detecting only the temporal pattern of the song. If the white noise is continuous they stop responding but if they have the temporal pattern more like a zebrafin song they're still responding. And interestingly that neurons did not respond to the other species song but also if we elongate the zebrafin song putting more like an extra space in bit one they also stop responding. So suggesting that this neuron can detect the temporal pattern which is innately encoded to the zebrafin song. So maybe this is within their brain what we could see was that one neuron can detect the more like a sound feature of the elements but they do have the neurons which is detecting the temporal sound of the songs. So then this acoustic feature is representing their individual varieties while the other temporal one is detecting representing the species identities. Even they have the different sounds different words this temporal pattern is still within the some range of the zebrafin songs. So basically their brain is much better than the computers that Mahesh was saying that the computer normally they have to have the header to identify to say something right. So here you have to identify that the following information is saying the information of the species but what zebrafin's brain is doing is just kind of putting this chord into dividing delin and the one and the one is representing the individual variety but the duration of the delor is encoding the species informations. So just even they hear the one song within there there are two information is imprimended one is the individual varieties the other is the species identities just if you're hearing what kind of sound they are producing there are variations in uniqueness of the individuals. But just by hearing of the temporal pattern rhythm of the songs they can hear that this is the zebrafin song. So it's really amazing way and that we can find that this is the way they are detecting the two independent information in one song. So that's the one story we thought. So that's what's happening when they're hearing of the song detecting the sound for memorizing. So the following question we wanted to see is how they are forming the memory, where they are forming the memory. This is the first step they have to do it so because we wanted to see the development so we try to go one by one. So first we want to see that how they are forming the memory. So for that one so another poster did the chronicle recording from the activities and then see what is happening when baby birds are allowed to sing. So what he found was that after hearing of the father song, after memorizing the father song we could find some new ones which selectively responding to the father song. So we pray back the validity of the song like one song, like a father song, their own song or the other zebrafin song, but before running to the tutor because we isolated from the father we couldn't find any new ones specifically responding to the tutor song. But once they hear the tutor song for days we could find some new ones not big fractions but some new ones highly selectively responding to the father song. So seeming like they are forming the memory it's not a big fraction even after days we could find only the tiny fraction only about 15%. But even it's a tiny if the birds didn't have any experience with the tutor we couldn't find these fractions. So we can believe that this is probably the memory trace of the father song in the brain. So this study is even expanded to see why it's happening only through the social interactions by the I don't know postdoc Elena Katik. So what she was really interested in was that as I say in the beginning that the zebrafinch can learn to sing only through the social interactions they can memorize the father song only the case when they are hearing of the father singing. So it's really true that as I say in the beginning that we cannot distinguish English sound of L and L. And then some of you probably thought that maybe you have to pick maybe DVD or something to your babies but unfortunately it's already proved that it doesn't work I'm sorry. But also that they have to say that it's not happening only to Japanese it's happening to everybody. So they did their extended study even to the American inference and they found that the American inference cannot distinguish the Chinese Mandarin sound. It's happening to everybody. It's fair. The science is fair. You have to believe. So if they are raised by the English condition they cannot detect the Chinese Mandarin sound. But if they are raised even it's American they are if they are raised by the Chinese if they are exposed to the Chinese sound with the right condition with the living tutor they can acquire the ability to detect the Chinese Mandarin sound. So it's really telling. It's not depending on the gene it depends on the experiences. But this experience has to happen through the social interaction with the living animals living humans because even if they are exposed to the DVD and they are even human sitting and they are talking to babies it doesn't work. So it has to come through the social interactions. So it's really true for the songbird too. Even the really old paper is showing that they can learn to sing from the tutor, the live tutor. As I said we don't need anything just being together with the tutor hearing from tutor singing they can learn. But if there is a visual barrier in between they stop learning. Of course if just from the speaker they don't learn. Why this is happening? Maybe just a conversion with their visual in the auditory? That's a one idea. But one interesting paper came out almost two decades before. So in there what they did was putting the tutor decoy and in this behavior pallonime only their case juvenile births pectid liver which is sitting next to the tutor decoy giving a the song playback, tutor song playback from the speaker which is sitting in the decoy. So then each time the juvenile births pectid bottom they can hear a sound. So and then during this condition juvenile births learn to sing mimicking even from the speaker playback. But in this condition as you can imagine in here that the juvenile births can hear the tutor song playback with their own timing with their own motivations they know when it's coming because they triggered the tutor song playback. So that's really suggesting that maybe their motivation or attention would be helping. So that's our idea which we wanted to test. So to understand where how the motivation or attention would help where we try to focus is the local cellar this is the terrible name for Japanese. You see like starting with the L so many L and the Ls. So I hate this place but still we needed to work on there. So it's really concept earlier as attention control earlier projecting to every year in the brain and everybody is working. So let me just say LC because it's easy to say it. So we decided to see this earlier because we also learned that this LC is projecting to the auditory area where we found the memory is formed. So now we can see that this is really good power with even the mammalian systems. So now we can see that where are these input from LC which we believe that they know attention control is controlling the memory formation of the juvenile birds when they are healing to tutor singing. So to that first of course she confirms that even she can find the increasing of the tutor selective neurons by healing of the tutor singing. Even she could found that you know exposing to only one hour, two hours is good enough to develop these tutor selective neurons. But then we want to see where are these development of the tutor selective cells is depending on this activity of the LCs. To understand what we have to do is that they're manipulating the LC activities LC input tutor these auditory areas. So what we did we have to use some like a specific tools which called the optogenetics. So this is the kind of the tools developing the neuroscience field by shining the light we can manipulate the activity of the neurons. So what we did is that the manipulating of the time of the LC input to the auditory areas and so each time for the healing of the tutor singing we inhibit the activity of the input from the LC. So even their healing the activity of the LC is inactivated so it doesn't work. So that case what we found is that even their healing of the tutor singing we couldn't see the development of the tutor selective neurons. So it's a good contrast with the control experiment which we don't the neuron didn't get the effect of the shining of the light. So we see that there's no includes of the tutor selective cells and then of course it's important to see that where are these pores could long from tutor or not. So we just lay the pores until the adult and then see where are they learn from tutor. So then we see that if they have the exposure to the tutor but if the activity of the LC is inhibited they didn't develop the tutor selective cells but also they didn't learn from tutor. So suggesting that even communicating because when communicating the tutor the communication is a visual input auditory input coming together it's important but it's not directly important it's important to activating their motivation they're activating their attention. So that might be the reason that they can form a memory in their brain. So then they can they can mimic them later. And then we wanted to see in the beginning that they were forming the memory but as again what I said now is that first they have to form a memory and then later they have to practice by getting the guiding from the tutor memory. So we wanted to see how this memory is guiding the later period of the motor learning but what we have been known so far is that even we could find the tutor selective new loans which we believe that the memory of the tutor some traits in the auditory earlier. So far we didn't know that whether this earlier is connecting to the more like a motor alias which is necessary for singing or even song learning. So we wanted to see whether this new loan the kidneys earlier is connecting to the motor earlier but what we knew is that this new loan is really a portion so we really wanted to target those new loans to see whether they are connecting to the motor alias but unfortunately we don't have a good tools. So new science is kind of amazing field we have been developing so many interesting tools so many cool tools but most of the tools has been developed in the mice conditions. So we cannot use this technique directly in birds so we have to utilize to tweak too much with bird conditions but luckily we have really nice technician our super technician called Yuichi he has been here for in my lab almost 10 years and he has been developing a new technique in our lab even we can use tissue clearing technique he has been developed the virus tools which is fitting to the song board so then we have been utilizing the viral vector tools in the birds actually our lab probably is the biggest lab for using this technique in the song board field we are kind of providing these tools to the all over the world so anyway so we developed one of the really good virus tools collaborating with Dr. Yuichi Junten University so in this virus we can by using this virus we can express the specific genes in the new ones which are getting activated so by using this technique I don't go into the details but by using these virus tools we can express the some like a fluorescence in the new ones which are getting activated by healing of the Tudor song playback so we can see which new ones are getting activated by healing of the Tudor singing and then where they are projecting to so to do that of course we didn't know where these new ones are projecting to so then we have to know where in the whole brain but to that we needed some good tools so luckily I had some like extensive work in the WPI project in the University of Tokyo and then in there another good talent researchers are helping working together us and then they develop the tools for tracking the whole brain tracing within the tissue create tissues I can't pray the video where where is my bags where I go I can pray why it doesn't work I have to go to there why I can't pray the video doesn't work here this is the whole half of the brain you see new ones are sitting in there and then you see fibers are running through many of the places and then even we can do the actual registrations and then see where they are projecting to it's an entire brain it's kind of amazing technique but we somehow made it so by getting the information we could see that the neurons are projecting into the earlier where they are controlling the motor activities it's premotor earlier but amazingly what we found is that they are projecting to the motor earlier only in the juvenile period and then once it's getting adult they are losing these activities so this is kind of motor earlier you see many actions sitting in there but they're not happening so what we could think from there is that during the developmental period even the brain network connection is one time sorry sorry I don't learn sorry I haven't learned how to use the computer even just like 10 years so we are not young enough unfortunately what we found is that they are projecting they are making the connection into some specific moment of the time during the developmental period and then they are retracting the projections they are disconnecting the projections that's also suggesting that there may be this action connection this connection is shaping the time window of the critical period we still want to keep expanding this idea still keep working on that one but I don't know somehow I think in my talk we are working on the song verse because we want to know how our brain circuit developing our brain function developing to get the really high cognitive functions so you hope you can believe that this is really good modeling animals we started from the auditory earlier auditory phase how they are getting the information how they process how they are guiding the later period is the early stage how this early stage learning will instruct the later period so how this time window is developed so we can try to answer a variety of the questions but of course we are also glowing and our lab also has been glowing we have the first PhD student just getting defense last months so hopefully and then we also we also know that we are learning through the communication as I say and I'm super happy for being in and here I'm collaborating so now even our lab has been collaborating one number of the people but we also know that not just for the official collaboration as noted in here we are communicating with you discussing with you has been enormous I learned a lot I'm super happy for being in and here working with all of you it has been really nice thank you so much for your attention we will keep working with you and then happy for taking the question from now so we have time for some questions thank you very much for your talk so from what I seem to understand having this visual component to learn the song is really important so maybe it's too far away but maybe is it a blind can still learn how to talk so how is it still is it a different do you expect a different mechanism for human babies are there blind birds that can still learn how to talk how I think even as I said visual input itself is not important if the visual something is there it triggered their attention or motivations that idea should be the same so the social interactions it's just tapping with them you can feel even you don't see it you can feel that somebody is sitting there it's drawing their attention so this kind of mechanism I can't believe that it's still the same with the human and the song bird case thank you very much very interesting talk my question is related to the reword so you said that song birds does not get any reword but still practicing so then in case of the generation of the song so after first kind of a frame is generated for the perception then probably I don't know but the song bird practice to something repeat what I just bird remember right but in that case are there any intrinsic reword so I can sing something similar to my memory I'm happy or something like that the reword we don't get any artificial reword like food or something but we believe that for Dan even to us because we are not living alone we have to be in the social so being together with the other animals or other individual itself is already a reword so healing of the singing itself should be reword to Dan I think the communication is more like interacting itself should be a big reword for the but however my knowledge is that baby, children birds once got frame then without further they can do it therefore in that part there is no communication but still for forming the memory that's the reason we said the sequential one first they have to memorize it so they need some temperates but once they are making the temperates what they have to do next is they have to practice by themselves that case they are making more like a rhythmic motor pattern in that moment they need or any more like a new input from the father because they already made a temperate so then they are doing the temperate matching that part is not so much social not social they can practice even by I won't in your result you found that some neurons in the HVC projected to HVC contributed to the sensory landing during the critical period I think it contains many neurons cell types do you know which cell type projected to HVC during the time we want to know that's the next step we want to see even I just make the story short so I didn't say they are projecting to the other area too so I can't perfectly saying that only this projection is needed maybe the other projection will be involved so our next step actually there Johanna sitting over there is doing that the cell type is projecting what kind of information they are sending when it's needed so this is kind of the following question we are now tackling with critical periods there is some such kind of neurons from NCM project to the HVC but in the end of this year so can we see that the memory from HVC was transformed to HVC by such kind of neurons yeah that's kind of interesting question that everybody is asking that okay where the memory forms right as I think it's related to Jun's question that they are forming the memory in the beginning it's my idea they are forming the memory it's auditory memories but when they are trying to think they have to have their own motor which should be quite different from not quite but something different from purely the auditory memory of father as I say in the beginning that the father song and their song are similar but they are not identical they have to have their own motor skills so that might be the reason they have to dissociate the auditory memory and the motor part of the link but the memory is not idea is that the memory is not placed only one place maybe they are spraying maybe even they move based on the depends on the time of during the development and I remember through the group in the first day of Texas published some research maybe two years ago they found that the NIF has similarly maybe was what's the difference we don't know NIF we believe that the NCM to HPC is more for the tutor memory but the NIF for the other area projecting to there is more like a motor patterning as I said auditory memory and the motor patterning will be different so for the motor practice their goal is becoming more like their own stereotype patterning even they are hearing with the tutor their goal is not perfect copying the fodder they have to have their own motor temperate that might be the way coming from NIF or the other areas that's my guess Yoko we often hear that memory is not a copy it's a reconstruction and so I'm wondering if you think there might be some reconstruction elements that might contribute to the variation in the song from the tutor to the learner yeah we don't know yeah reconstruction we haven't tested that idea I don't know how we can do it's more theoretical it's a theoretical explanation but just that when we remember events we are not actually remembering the event we are structuring and we experience it as memory and I just wonder if that might be something that also happens in situations like this that might be true what we have been thinking is actually they are moving the places one earlier we could see this kind of responsiveness in Nigeria but the ones going to adult we couldn't see it so maybe when transferring to the other place this kind of thing might happen but I still have no idea how we can test this idea yeah related to Gail's question and also the technology that you developed on AAB you have half the system for doing TETTAC there have you are you considering doing a TETTAC the tetracycline work in BERT so you could actually mark the memory N-GRAP and if you do the memory N-GRAP then you can do exactly what Gail says from the tutor and also the learner and then you can actually compare your anatomically after you clear the brain if these are similar or not yeah we are using the TETTAC on system for tagging their activated cells yeah just have to put the channel of absence so you can actually affect it yeah that's the thing we try to do and actually if we we can use the TETTAC on and off together again labeling the different type of the cells you know pray back the one song with the on condition and pray back the other song with the off condition we could see the kind of different group of the cells are expressing the different colors of the fluorescence the tonigawa type experiment yeah yeah either with channel of absence or dreads yeah I mean that's the thing we are trying to do of course again we have to tackle this just know whether your AAB is good enough that spreads wide enough and you can actually do that that's my question so another follow up to Gail's question so do they ever sing along with the tutor human beings learning languages particularly human beings learning musical instruments will exactly copy in real time what they're trying to learn they do sing by themselves and they practice a lot yeah that wasn't quite what I was asking do they sing along do they try to synchronize singing the same notes with the bird because that's what you do if you're learning a tune what we know is that they yeah during the juvenile period their song still had a huge variations right because one time to the others they are practicing but what we know is that when they are singing to females it's becoming more like a stereotype because they have to sing more like a precise way but then becoming along they're becoming more plastic so maybe the moment they're trying to kind of matching that's the reason they try to they're trying to have a huge variation and see what's the kind of best match with the temperates I don't know we can't guess that's a boy you're asking not exactly it would so I'm thinking about humans it's a piece of approximation yeah it seems to be a piece of approximation so Gales reminds me of a lot of things in learning musical instruments you play and you approximate what you've heard and if you want to really lock into what you're copying something exactly you can either transcribe it or you play along with it and make sure that each of your notes is in register so I was just wondering if there was an equivalent learning process with birds when they checked the register the cheetah by singing at the same time as the cheetah yeah we noted that they are doing so far we haven't nobody has found their kind of ALR signaling copying of their matching signaling because if they give what we believe is that if they have on-time compilator and then giving the kind of ALR signaling if destroying it's kind of modifying these activities they should change the activities so those kind of things didn't happen so far we haven't found yet but we noted if we compromise some of the brain nearly like a nip constantly then they cannot do the matching so we can't believe they are doing this kind of matching one time even they have multiple syllables in there and then giving this kind of artificial stimulation only one note and they mismatch only these specific notes so seeming like a note entire they just give one to one signaling so it's really suggestive that they even some like a rhythmic activity or some like a specific notes to notes in for like an ALR signaling is coming we just haven't found where it's happening in the brain but we believe that this is a similar kind of practice they are doing what is the advantage of a critical period wouldn't it be better if you just remain plastic and adaptive? and then you have to forget everything it's plastic because sounds really cool because we want to learn something new but you have to know that the kids learn something but they also forgetting really easily so we acquire some skills but then we want to consolidate so if the neural wiring is always plastic we can acquire the new skills but maybe two days later you have to forget I think just before we finish I have to present you do you have this and it says Tiyoko in admiration of your relentless experimental efforts and outstanding progress towards understanding our experience shakes brain development congratulations thank you thank you so much for your healing coming to here today