I remember the first time I read about birds singing…in their sleep. In the late 90s researchers found that male zebra finches actually sing while they’re asleep.
At first I envisioned a Three Stooges type of experiment where Larry, Moe, and Curly surround a singing bird with its eyes closed. Since Curly is the head scientist, he keeps poking the bird with one finger, repeatedly asking, “Hey, are you asleep?” “Are you still asleep?” “Wake up and go to sleep.”
But no, actually, the real scientists at the University of Chicago wired up the birds and then studied their electrical brain activity. According to one article, they found that “sleeping birds fired their neurons in complex patterns similar to those produced when the birds were awake and singing.”
Some experts theorize that the sleep-singing birds spend time learning new tunes while also improving on some oldies but goodies. Now my brain brings up a vision of a bird in a sound booth. He’s sitting on a perch directly in front of a microphone, wearing tiny headphones. He whistles a few notes. No, that’s not it. He asks for a B-flat, then tries a slight variation. “Ah, that’s better.”
So the birds study and practice and improve while they sleep. And you thought that YOU could multi-task!
Also, according to the Bird Academy (not making up any of this), songbirds produce their music using an organ called a syrinx. It’s located where their trachea splits into two bronchial tubes. These two tubes are independent of each other. This independence allows birds to belt out two separate pitches at once. Some birds even possess the ability to sing rising and falling notes simultaneously. I have never ever seen that happen on American Idol.
Humans go through our waking hours, and then when we’re asleep our brains take over and puzzle through the pieces of the day. Our subconscious helps us to find answers to questions and deal with feelings that perhaps we didn’t want to actively face.
I wonder how our lives would change if instead we could be like the song birds. Our sleep time would be spent going over the beautiful melodies of our days. We would practice them over and over again, forging improvements along the way.
And if a few discordant notes had popped up here and there while awake, we would rehash those particular portions until they too were beautiful. We’d wake, refreshed, ready to sing our way through a new day.
I don’t know about you, but I’m about ready for bed.
PS – If you’d like to hear some bird songs that were voted as favorites, here’s a site I thought was interesting. http://birdnote.org/show/what-bird-has-coolest-song
To my readers: What song would YOU most like to practice in your sleep?
