Video: Dancing Parrot Boogies Better With a Partner

[n2doc]

By Lisa Grossman August 27, 2010

SEATTLE — Snowball the dancing parrot doesn’t just bob to the beat. The YouTube sensation, who proved last year that humans aren’t the only species that got rhythm, gets his groove on better with a dance partner.

“It’s not just an automatic response to sound,” said neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. “It’s concerned with bonding.” Patel presented new research about the boogieing bird Aug. 24 at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in Seattle, Washington.

For the famous sulfur-crested cockatoo, it’s about bonding with his human caretaker, Irena Schultz. Snowball became an online celebrity in 2007 after Schultz, who runs the Bird Lovers Only Rescue Service in Indiana, put a video of him dancing to “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys up on YouTube.

Two papers in Current Biology in May 2009 showed that Snowball — plus a total of 14 species of parrots and one species of elephant — move rhythmically to music in a way that other animals don’t, demonstrating that dancing is not uniquely human. The ability to dance could come from a connection between the auditory centers and the motor centers in avian and human brains, which allows for speech and lays the foundation for synchronizing our bodies to music.



Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/dancing-parrot/

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[femrap]

1. I'd dance with

that bird! He's got the beat!

[pacalo]

2. Awesome!

[WhiteTara]

3. I had a Norwegian Elkhound who

loved to dance. He would go to parties and get in the middle of the dance floor and would dance. He and I danced together a lot. He was a special dog.