Hey birds! So you think you can dance??

So you think dancing is just for humans?  Well up until recently, many scientists would have agreed with you.

“For a long time, people have thought that the ability to move to a beat was unique to humans,” said Adena Schachner of Harvard University, who led one of two studies published today in Current Biology.

It turns out, dancing is for the birds.  The two studies show that vocal-mimicking animals, particularly parrots, are able to dance–they can bob their heads, tap their feet, and sway to the beat of the music.

Don’t believe me?  The video below shows a cockatoo named Snowball dancing to his favorite song, “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys.  When the researches changed the tempo of the music, Snowball would adjust the tempo of his dancing so stay synchronized with the music.

The theory was that natural selection for vocal mimicry resulted in a brain mechanism that was also needed for moving to a beat, and that only animals that can mimic sound should be able to keep a beat.

One of the two research teams watched over 1,000 videos of dancing animals on YouTube, and analyzed the videos frame-by-frame.  Potentially fake videos were omitted, in which the animal was following a visual cue or the music was added in during post-production.

“Our analyses showed that these birds’ movements were more lined up with the musical beat than we’d expect by chance,” says Adena Schachner, a researcher in the study, in a press release. “We found strong evidence that they were synchronizing with the beat, something that has not been seen before in other species.”

Only the vocal mimics (14 species of parrot and 1 species of elephant) showed evidence of being able to keep a beat.

The researchers now suspect that the parrots’ dancing skills are related to another ability they share with humans, vocal learning, implying an evolutionary link between the two abilities.  This suggests that keeping a beat to music relies on the neural circuitry for complex vocal learning, which requires a tight link between auditory and motor circuits in the brain.

“Our data suggests that some of the brain mechanisms needed for human dance originally evolved to allow us to imitate sound,” says Schachner.

The human ability to keep time with music may have also evolved as a byproduct of vocal mimicry–the cognitive processes needed for both actions are related.  Both abilities require you to take in auditory input, and monitor your output and sound input at the same time, which allow you to fix your output and line up better with what you hear.

So what I want to know is….where do I sign up for a job like this???

Aniruddh D. Patel, John R. Iversen, Micah R. Bregman, Irena Schulz (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology, 19 (10), 1-4
Adena Schachner, Timothy F. Brady, Irene M. Pepperberg, Marc D. Hauser (2009). Spontaneous Motor Entrainment to Music in Multiple Vocal Mimicking Species Current Biology, 19 (10), 1-6