Parrots and humans share a brain mechanism for speech

When it comes to speech, parrots have the gift of gab. And the way the brains of small parrots known as budgerigars bestow this gift is remarkably similar to human speech, researchers report March 19 in Nature. 

So far, budgerigars are the only animals known to have language-producing centers akin to those in humans, says Michael Long, a neuroscientist at New York University Langone Health. This “is really the first nonhuman animal in which that has been shown.” Understanding how speech gets created in budgies’ brains could help clarify what goes wrong in certain communication disorders in people.

Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) are tropical-colored, smart cutie pies. Beyond their looks, these parrots are particularly social and chatty, making them interesting research subjects for language studies.

Long and his Langone Health colleague Zetian Yang tracked the behavior of individual nerve cells in four of these birds’ brains as they produced their chirrups. The activity of these cells, nestled in a part of the brain called the anterior arcopallium, is tied to the sounds the birds make, the duo found.

The organization of these neurons’ activity, it turns out, is pretty simple, Long says. He compares this neural organization to a keyboard that can produce a range of sounds — consonants, vowels, high pitches and low pitches. A budgie “is able to generate arbitrary sounds in its universe by just playing this vocal keyboard,” Long says. Overall, this flexible system has a humanlike organization.

The similarities between human and parrot brains may reflect two species solving a problem in a similar way, neurally speaking. These parallels could be “a very tidy example of convergent evolution, where you have humans that have developed this kind of neural mechanism for speech, and these parrots have developed a kind of similar mechanism,” Long says.

Now that scientists know more about how budgie brains help the birds talk, another question dogs Long: What are these parrots talking about?

“We are trying now to translate budgie,” he says, using advanced machine learning to determine what each warble and chirp means. Perhaps their language itself — not just the way their brain creates it — is similar to that of people. With these kinds of experiments, Long says, “maybe we can start to reexamine the notions of human exceptionalism.”