TY - JOUR T1 - Vocal Motor Performance in Birdsong Requires Brain–Body Interaction JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0053-19.2019 VL - 6 IS - 3 SP - ENEURO.0053-19.2019 AU - Iris Adam AU - Coen P. H. Elemans Y1 - 2019/05/01 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/6/3/ENEURO.0053-19.2019.abstract N2 - Motor skill learning typically occurs in a period when the brain needs to navigate a body that is still growing and developing. How the changing body, neural circuit formation, and motor coding influence each other remains unknown. Songbirds provide excellent model systems to study motor skill learning. It has recently been shown that songbird vocal muscles double in speed during sensorimotor learning. Here we argue that these contractile as well as morphological changes stem predominantly from use and only secondarily from hormones or genetic programs. This implies that muscle training constrains skill-learning trajectories. As contractile muscle property changes must require altered motor codes for achieving the same acoustic targets, the final performance results from interactions between brain and body.Understanding how novel behaviors are learned remains a major challenge to modern neuroscience. Acquiring and mastering fine motor skills, from dexterity in piano playing to microsurgery or speech, can take weeks to months or even years and is strongly affected by injury, stroke, and developmental as well as neurodegenerative disorders. Most fine motor skill learning occurs postnatally from infancy to adolescence when the brain needs to navigate a body that is exhibiting large changes due to growth and development. Changes in neural coding and circuit development remain challenging to follow over meaningful timescales in single individuals and are thus typically studied during rather brief periods in adult subjects (Li et al., 2001; Xiao et al., 2006) or during recovery after injury (Nudo et al., 1996; Dancause et al., 2005). Songbirds however, provide a powerful and unique system to study motor skill learning over ethologically meaningful time scales (Brainard and Doupe, 2013).The brain does not function in isolation. All animal behaviors result from complex system-wide interactions between nervous system, body, … ER -