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Breaking the Bird Barrier: Scientist Decodes Zebra Finch Language

54 points by yyyk 4 days ago | 14 comments

ileonichwiesz 4 hours ago

Very interesting topic, but a strange choice of source. I'd recommend these instead:

Coller foundation press release: https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/pre...

The actual publication in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482

HarHarVeryFunny 49 minutes ago

Here's a non-paywalled version of the research.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.14.623689v1....

MathMonkeyMan 4 hours ago

It does have the title going for it.

technothrasher 3 hours ago

The title doesn't match the paper though. People had already decoded the bird calls. What the paper was giving evidence to was that the birds themselves are cognitively decoding the calls.

t-writescode 3 hours ago

I’m glad we’re doing this research. It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.

It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).

  All humans are human.
  Babies can feel pain.
  Plants feel.
  Animals think.

Just … So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.

I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.

adjejmxbdjdn 2 hours ago

I don’t believe there’s any evidence behind plant’s feeling or thinking.

Other than that you’re right.

why_at 2 hours ago

Yeah I think there's a lot of science news about how plants are capable of more than the average person thinks, but people tend to conflate that with some kind of conscious experience.

SapporoChris 33 minutes ago

What the average person thinks is a very low barrier but I do not think plants have crossed that yet.

kiproping 4 hours ago

Thank you, I was also looking for a better source and a link to the paper. I thought the paper was this older one https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06394-9 from 2018.

bluechair 2 hours ago

I remember hearing about an interesting paper; it argued that Zebra finch songs were as complex as recursively enumerable languages on the Chomsky hierarchy. I wanted to see if I could find it but came across another paper arguing that their embedded context sensitivity can be explained by simpler rules.

    https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908113106

Just the same, these little fellows are some of the cutest on our planet.

Left this comment as another computer science connection.

ghurtado 31 minutes ago

A lot of interesting information here, but this one paragraph blew my mind:

> Although the birds occasionally made mistakes, they more often confused calls with similar meanings rather than similar sounds. “Their responses indicated they have a mental imagery of the meaning of their vocalisations,” Elie said. “In other words, that they understand the meaning of their call types.”

ChuckMcM 45 minutes ago

No doubts the crows are all having a good laugh at our expense.

esafak 25 minutes ago

Does anyone have a link to a decoded message?

AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago

Another win for machine learning:

>She then applied machine learning to analyse how information was encoded in the calls before testing her findings through behavioural experiments.