Learning to play your favorite song on the piano involves a familiar sequence – memorizing, practicing, and performing. But where are these memories stored, and how do we evaluate our own and others’ performances? These questions remain major mysteries in neuroscience. Vikram Gadagkar explores these questions by studying songbirds. Juvenile male songbirds go through a strikingly similar process – they memorize their father’s song, practice it, and perform it to attract a mate. By examining how songbirds assess their own singing, Gadagkar aims to uncover the brain’s mechanisms for performance evaluation – insights that could shed light on conditions like Parkinson’s disease and autism.
By studying zebra finches as they sing, Freeman Hrabowski Scholar Vikram Gadagkar is uncovering how the brain learns, evaluates mistakes, and performs under pressure.