News Feature: Singing in the brain.

Several times a week, neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, shuttle a furry brown bat named Cooper down the hall to visit a computer that offers sips of fresh smoothie in exchange for conversation. Once inside a customized sound chamber, Cooper lets out a high-pitched trill and cranes his neck eagerly toward a nozzle that dispenses his sweet treat. For the past year, Michael Yartsev’s team has been training Cooper and a handful of other bats to “chat” with the computer. It’s the first step in a project aimed at cracking the mysteries of how human speech works, a component of which is vocal learning, or the ability to imitate and create new sounds. Humans share this ability with a select group of animals, including whales, seals, dolphins, elephants, parrots, hummingbirds, and songbirds (1). Increasing evidence suggests that some bats are vocal learners too (2). That’s welcome news for researchers who use songbirds as the animal model of choice to understand vocal learning. These birds are revealing much about the neurobiology and genetics of vocal learning. Even so, 600 million years of evolution and radically different brain architectures separate birds from humans. As a new mammalian model, the bat could bring researchers even closer to the answers they seek. Many hope that bats like Cooper will help bridge the evolutionary gap between birds and humans. “We have a lot of catching up to do to the bird work, but there’s also the excitement that comes with being a really young field,” says Sonja Vernes, a