It ’s easy to imagine that musicality isa uniquely human joy . However , a head word - bopping cockatoo with a taste for cheesy pop music is showing that other fauna have a astonishingly across-the-board capacity for dancing and can spontaneously wear out a host of unlike move in response to music .
Psychologists at Harvard University and Tufts University inMassachusettshave recently take another face at “ Snowball ” , a sulfur - crest cockatoo who gain viral stardom back in 2008 after a TV emerged of him dancing to the Backstreet Boys song " Everybody" . report in the journalCurrent Biology , they studied some other footage of Snowball boogying to two pop songs : “ Another One Bites the Dust ” by Queen and “ Girls Just Wanna Have Fun ” by Cyndi Lauper .
Snowball had not heard these songs before , yet he was able to ad libitum break out into dance that equate the song ’ rhythm . As this new study highlighting , the parrot is not just merely head - bopping . or else , the researchers mention that the razz seem to display at least 14 dissimilar dance move , account for a “ remarkably diverse ” range of movements using a salmagundi of body parts . The moves include consistency axial motion , animal foot rhytidectomy , head bobs moving in sync with a foot moving-picture show , and head vortex . All of these were perform without any breeding and scarce any boost from his human counterpart .
" What ’s most interesting to us is the sheer diversity of his movements to euphony , " senior generator Aniruddh Patel , a psychologist at Tufts University and Harvard University , said in astatement . This , according to the research worker , suggests spontaneous movement to music is not unique to humans nor merely an arbitrary product of human culture .
Snowball has been the subject of numerous scientific studies . In 2019,a team of scientists , most of whom worked on this raw research , wrote a paperclaiming Snowball might expose some of the first grounds of musical meter perception and synchronization – better bonk as dancing – in a nonhuman fauna . While few have quite the same panache and flare as sure-enough Snowball , other parrots have since been shown to trip the light fantastic toe to medicine . Even chimps , our closest living relatives with whom we share about 99 per centum of our DNA , do not do this .
So , this begs the question : why have a prime few creaturesevolveda taste for medicine ? This is something that psychologist , geneticists , anthropologists , and biologist could discuss endlessly , but loosely speaking , it ’s widely believed to have something to do with communication and a strong ability to recognise patterns . The squad of researchers analyse Snowball argue it ’s in reality a convergence of five different traits : outspoken learning , the capacity for nonverbal movement imitation , a tendency to form longsighted - full term social bond certificate , the power to learn complex sequences of actions , and attentiveness to communicative movement .
