Singing mice could offer clues about how human brains manage conversation

Enlarge / This singing mouse species (Scotinomys teguina) thrives in the cloud forests of Costa Rica. Their songs could yield clues about how human brains accomplish the "turn-talking" that makes conversation possible. (credit: NYU School of Medicine)

High in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, there's a species of mouse that sings call-and-response duets, similar to the high-speed back and forth humans engage in with conversation. Now scientists have pinpointed the precise brain circuit responsible for this behavior, which may lead to fresh insights into how humans converse, according to a new paper in Science.

Co-author Michael Long of New York University's School of Medicine calls this conversational back and forth "turn talking," likening it to hitting a tennis ball back and forth over a net between two players. "If I were to summarize [the results] in one sentence, I'd say this is the first demonstration of the neural mechanisms that lead to coordinated vocal turn-talking in the mammalian brain," he said. "Our strong prediction from the mouse study is that a similar kind of vocal coordination center may exist in the human brain as well."

Long's lab specializes in the study of vocal communication, something at which human beings excel. We don't often stop to think about the intricate neural processing even a simple conversation requires. The pause time between when one speaker finishes and another begins-called "floor transfer time"-is just 200 milliseconds. But one in ten people experiences some form of communication disorder, whether due to a stroke or a developmental disorder like autism.

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