Dr. Erich Jarvis

Yeah.

So going back to the 1950s or even a little earlier, and Peter Mahler and others who got involved in neuroethology, the study of neurobiology of behavior in a natural way.

Right.

You know, they start to find that behaviorally there are these species of birds like songbirds and parrots.

And now we also know hummingbirds, just three of them out of the 40 something bird groups out there on the planet orders that they can imitate sounds like we do.

And so that was a similarity.

In other words, they had this kind of behavior that's more similar to us than chimpanzees have with us or than chickens have with them, right?

They're closer relatives.

And then they discovered even more similarities, these critical periods that if you remove a child, you know, this unfortunately happens where a child is feral and is not raised with human and goes through their puberty phase of growth,

it becomes hard for them to learn a language as an adult.

So there's this critical period where you learn best.

And even later on, when you're in regular society, it's hard to learn.

Well, the birds undergo the same thing.

And then it was discovered that if they become deaf, we humans become deaf, our speech starts to deteriorate without any kind of therapy.

If a non-human primate or, you know, or let's say a chicken becomes deaf, their vocalizations don't deteriorate, very little at least.

Well, this happens in the vocal learning birds.

So there were all these behavioral parallels that came along with the package.

And then people looked into the brain, Fernando Nadeva, my former PhD advisor, and began to discover the area X you talked about, the robust nucleus of the archipelagium.

And these brain pathways were not found in the species who couldn't imitate.

So there was a parallel here.