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Listening to songbird dreams for clues to how sleeping brains learn
Entering and manipulating dreams may sound like science fiction, but for Freeman Hrabowski Scholar Walter Gonzalez, these scenarios aren't confined to the big screen.
In his lab at the University of California, San Francisco, Gonzalez and his team are developing sophisticated technology to enter—and manipulate—the dreams of songbirds to better understand how brains learn and communicate.
"I find all those movies fascinating, but I just don't want it to be fiction anymore," Gonzalez says. "I would like to remove the fiction from it and make it real and do some science with it."
Designing new technology to enter dreams
Zebra finches offer a unique opportunity for studying brain processing: The male songbirds have a dedicated brain circuit that allows them to learn and perfect a simple, unique, repetitive song that they use to woo female birds.
Gonzalez and his team have developed technology to simultaneously record activity in hundreds of songbird neurons. They can then use AI to correlate activity in the song circuit with the bird's singing, allowing them to turn the neural firings into music and "decode" the bird's brain activity.
When birds are awake, they sing their song with little variability. The regular pattern of notes vocalized by the birds is the same as the one generated by the decoder.
"We can literally listen to the brain, and it sounds exactly like the song," Gonzalez says.
When birds are asleep, the song circuit is also active even though the birds aren't vocalizing—as if the birds are "singing" in their sleep. When the researchers decoded these firing patterns, they found they correlated with the birds' regular pattern of notes—their learned song—less than 5% of the time. The birds appeared to be "singing" a different song when they were asleep compared with when they were awake.
To try to understand what the sleeping birds are "dreaming" about, the researchers play the notes decoded from the sleeping birds' song circuit back to them. Zebra finches only recognize their own song, so their song circuit becomes active only if they hear their own song.
"Now that we can turn that brain activity into a sound, we can feed that sound back to the bird and basically ask its brain: Is this a sound that you recognize?" Gonzalez says. "It might not sound to us like the song, but it is maybe a fragmented version of their song."
Decoding how learning happens
Next, the researchers want to use their technology to change the bird's behavior to better understand how learning happens.
Juvenile birds learn their song from a tutor—an adult male bird. When the young birds are awake, the researchers want to expose them to two tutors to learn two different songs. The team can then use their platform to decode what song the juvenile bird is "dreaming" about when it is asleep.
The researchers then want to see if they can bias the bird's learning trajectory toward one song over the other. When the bird is asleep, they want to silence neurons that are activated when the bird "sings" one song while allowing neuronal activity associated with the other song to proceed.
As Gonzalez puts it: "Can you change the way a bird learns to sing by playing with their dreams?"
Understanding how brain areas communicate
In addition to studying the song circuit, the team is also examining the bird's visual system during sleep. They are developing tools to translate activity in the visual system into images and testing them with real-life visual stimuli, like the distinctive mouth markings on zebra finch hatchlings that tell parent birds when and where to feed their young.
Next, the team plans to expand their system to visual cues exchanged between adult birds. Much like humans when they talk, songbirds look at each other when they sing. Male birds also perform complex and visually striking courtship dances for females.
Recording activity from the song circuit and visual system simultaneously during sleep could help reveal whether socially relevant sounds and visual cues are reactivated together when the birds are sleeping, providing a more detailed view of sleep's role in learning and social interactions. It could also help researchers better understand what information these brain areas share, how it flows between them, and what happens when they miscommunicate.
Studying the brain during sleep allows scientists to remove environmental effects, like the presence of a female that might affect the bird's song, to focus solely on the neurons and circuits that make up the brain.
"At this point, all that you have is the brain and the only constraints are the circuits that make up the brain," Gonzalez says. "The question becomes now: If you remove the constraints of the environment, how wild does your brain go? How many mistakes does your brain make? Are those even mistakes or do they have a purpose?"
Possible applications beyond birds
While the bird brain is very different from the mammalian brain, the research could help scientists understand general principles about sleep and how it evolved. One hypothesis is that sleep and dreams might allow animals to integrate all the complicated sensory information they are receiving when they are awake, allowing them to think through alternative scenarios and plan for different outcomes.
The work could also open doors to understanding neurological conditions like schizophrenia, which some scientists think may arise because different brain areas are not able to properly communicate.
"I am very much interested in hopefully being able, in the future, to try to open the state of sleep as a potential window into how the brain works, without the external world," Gonzalez says. "If you were to go into a zebra finch that's sleeping, could you make a prediction about how this zebra finch is going to behave in the real world and potentially manipulate it as well? That's the hope."
Who's behind this story?
Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space. Full profile →
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Citation: Listening to songbird dreams for clues to how sleeping brains learn (2026, July 30) retrieved 30 July 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-07-songbird-clues-brains.html
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