Bengalese finches, songbirds that have been used to research the learning, perception, and production of bird song, are the model system used by Berkeley Lab scientist Kristofer Bouchard and Michael Brainard of UC San Francisco to determine the relationship between song sequence structure and brain activity. As reported in their PNAS article published last week, “Auditory-induced neural dynamics in sensory-motor circuitry predict learned temporal and sequential statistics of birdsong,” the researchers studied how the birds brain forms predictions for the timing and identity of specific “syllables” that it has learned to sing.