According to the new study made on birds to understand Human speech reveal that alcohol makes birds to slur their songs.
The birds were given alcohol around 0.08 percent of their blood level which is enough as far as the bird’s standard is concerned.
Researchers from the Oregon Health and Science University allured zebra finches with spiked juice to study birdsongs to study more about human speech. Birds learn to sing in the same way as humans learn to talk. In fact it is easy to do the study on a caged bird as compared to a human infant.
So birds do give insight into the brain mechanism that makes the speech possible for human.
There hasn’t been much research on the vocal impairment caused by the alcohol just because of the lack of non-human labs that are capable of ‘speech’ to work on.
“At first we were thinking that they wouldn’t drink on their own because, you know, a lot of animals just won’t touch the stuff, But they seem to tolerate it pretty well and be somewhat willing to consume it.” Researcher Christopher Olson told NPR.
At once the birds hum and started to slur their songs.
Researcher mentioned in the study “The most pronounced effects were decreased amplitude and increased entropy,” which means that the songs got less organized and reticent.
Surprisingly all part of the song were not equally effected. Songs of Zebra finch is composed of specific syllables each with different acoustic nature and some are affected more than the others.
This made the researchers think that alcohol has a different effect on different part of the brain. Further studies may help explore more.
