BIRDS may not be “bird-brained” after all. Zebra finches’ brain activity while sleeping looks just like that of a slumbering mammal.
Philip Low at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues monitored five zebra finches during the night, tracking eye and body movements, and brain activity. They found that the birds displayed all of the characteristics of mammalian sleep: slow wave, intermediate and REM sleep, and landmarks in brain electrical activity called spindles and K-complexes (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0703452105).
Since K-complexes had only ever been observed in mammals, neuroscientists assumed that…
