INVITED TALK: Neural oscillations, birdsong rhythms and nonlinear dynamics

A. AMADOR

VALPARAISO

Conferencia; XIX International Workshop on Instabilities and Non-Equilibrium Structures INES 2023; 2023

Singing is a complex motor activity that emerges from the interaction between the central and peripheral nervous systems, with the body and the environment. The similarities between birdsong and human speech, both in production and learning, have positioned songbirds as highly useful animal models to study this learned motor skill.In this talk I will show an interdisciplinary approach to study the emergence of behavior. Specifically I will present neuronal recordings in a telencephalic region where a sensori-motor integration occurs, showing the presence of well-defined oscillations in local field potentials, which are synchronized to the rhythms of the canary (Serinus canaria) song. I will also show that there is a correspondence between local field potentials, multiunit activity, and single unit activity within the same brain region. A low-dimensional mathematical model for a neural network will be presented showing it can reproduce the neural dynamics observed in the experiments. This interdisciplinary work shows how low-dimensional models can be a valuable tool to study the neuroscience of perception and generation of complex motor tasks.