CORRECTION APPENDED

When Stella A. Barth ’10 was accepted to a summer program at the world-renowned RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan, she knew it would be intense. She just didn’t know how fast-paced it would be—a point driven home one day when she accidentally killed a finch in the lab.

“He impaled himself on my syringe,” Barth said. “When my post-doc came in, he looked at me and just said, ‘I’ll go get you a new one.’ And I was like, ‘no, wait, I need a minute! I killed a bird, and it’s really, really sad.’”

As one of six college students in the program, Barth, a Neurobiology concentrator, spent 10 weeks trying to map specific neural circuits in Bengalese finches—information that researchers hope could one day shed light on how humans process speech.

According to Harvard researcher Antoniu L. Fantana, who taught Barth last year in his tutorial on bird song, only a few animal species have the ability to listen to sounds and replicate them, including songbirds, whales, bats, and humans.

“Essentially, birds can learn by listening,” Fantana said. “No primates can do that, so this makes songbirds ideal models for speech learning.”

In her time at RIKEN, Barth focused on two main experiments: one involved recording neuron firings of finches who are awake, moving, and singing; the other involved playing songs to anesthetized finches and analyzing for neural activity patterns.

Barth’s research involved inserting miniscule electrodes into the finches’ HVC, a brain center critical to controlling song production and coordinating motion.

Her first experiment failed due to an equipment malfunction, but she said she was able to analyze data for three of her five birds, and that other researchers will continue her projects.

Compared to her experience in U.S. labs, Barth said her summer experience was surprisingly workaholic.

“Nobody ever complained about their work, ever,” Barth said, calling the team’s positive attitude “a breath of fresh air.”

But Barth also said the pace was taxing, with married post-docs with families often staying past midnight.

“There was nothing negative about the work environment, well, aside from me, who’s like why am I here till 8 p.m. at night?” Barth said, adding that being the first person to go home was a real taboo in the lab.

“I’d stay until 7 or 9 at night just because I didn’t want to be the first person to leave,” she said.

—Staff writer Helen X. Yang can be reached at hxyang@fas.harvard.edu.

For recent research, faculty profiles, and a look at the issues facing Harvard scientists, check out The Crimson's science page.

CORRECTION

The original version of the Sept. 11 news article "Mapping a Bird Brain in Japan" incorrectly stated that 50 college students participated in the RIKEN Brain Science Institute's internship program last summer. In fact, there were six college student interns.