hok382@houxa.UUCP (01/31/84)
In last week's New Yorker (Not, I'll admit, usually a very scientific source) there was a short "Talk o f the Town" piece on Dr. Fernando Nottebohm, of Rockefeller University's Field Research Center for Ecology and Ethnology. He does research on canary brains. Only male canaries sing and each singing canary learns only one song a year. Singing in canaries is dominated by the left side of the brain and the song-control areas in the male canary's brain are twice as big as normal in the spring when he is learning his yearly song. The swelling of the song-control center seems to be related to production of testosterone, and they could make female canaries sing by injecting them with testosterone. Dr. Nottebohm cautions that what is true for canaries is not necessarily true for human, but there do seem to be some sex-linked differences in human brains; for example, in male brains there seems to be a much greater specialization by area--one place does speech and that's all it does and that is the only place that deals with speech--which makes the male brain much more vulnerable to damage (like strokes).