alt.hn

6/30/2026 at 9:27:15 PM

Breaking the Bird Barrier: Scientist Decodes Zebra Finch Language

 https://www.freepressjournal.in/education/breaking-the-bird-barrier-scientist-decodes-zebra-finch-language

by yyyk

7/4/2026 at 2:56:47 PM

Very interesting topic, but a strange choice of source. I'd recommend these instead:

Coller foundation press release: https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/pre...

The actual publication in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482

by ileonichwiesz

7/4/2026 at 3:13:00 PM

It does have the title going for it.

by MathMonkeyMan

7/4/2026 at 4:19:54 PM

The title doesn't match the paper though. People had already decoded the bird calls. What the paper was giving evidence to was that the birds themselves are cognitively decoding the calls.

by technothrasher

7/4/2026 at 4:33:19 PM

I’m glad we’re doing this research. It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.

It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).

  All humans are human.
  Babies can feel pain.
  Plants feel.
  Animals think.
Just … So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.

I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.

by t-writescode

7/4/2026 at 7:27:47 PM

11 distinct calls is something a rote automaton could easily cope with. So I don't think this study proves much of anything about birds' cognitive abilities.

by mcswell

7/4/2026 at 4:43:26 PM

I don’t believe there’s any evidence behind plant’s feeling or thinking.

Other than that you’re right.

by adjejmxbdjdn

7/4/2026 at 5:16:38 PM

Yeah I think there's a lot of science news about how plants are capable of more than the average person thinks, but people tend to conflate that with some kind of conscious experience.

by why_at

7/4/2026 at 6:04:32 PM

What the average person thinks is a very low barrier but I do not think plants have crossed that yet.

by SapporoChris

7/4/2026 at 7:52:40 PM

Some variety of learnings over the last several years. Many of them are sensationalized; but my simple statement was "plants feel"; and many of these values imply some level of "feeling":

Plants scream when harmed:

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-lou...

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stressed-plants-c...

Plants release VOCs when harmed:

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1lzg4x9/...

(OP's main comment has several sources)

Plants respond to audio stimuli (hearing, sorta):

[3] https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=24-P13-00035&s...

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4102826/

A quick search reveals several other incidences of other "huh"-worthy thoughts; but my goal was "plants feel" and I would argue these are close enough to shorthand to "feel"

by t-writescode

7/4/2026 at 7:20:39 PM

fortunately, there is a lot of evidence behind plant's feeling and thinking; enough so that if you were to expose yourself to it, and if you were willing to update your beliefs based on strong scientific evidence, I believe you'd change your view.

by forlorn_mammoth

7/4/2026 at 6:41:23 PM

I work in the field. The main takeaway is zebra finches (maybe other songbirds) can discriminate vocalizations based on function, even if they sound similar.

Generally, birds can tell apart categories of sounds e.g. vocalizations from different individual birds, male vs female, call vs song, conspecific vs heterospecific etc. The question is if birds can do it for specific function e.g. agonistic calls vs non-agonistic calls. Simple question but way harder to test because of associated contextual info. with vocalizations.

The paper is culmination of last decade of work (includes many of the past works) but this is the new result.

by pks016

7/4/2026 at 6:06:06 PM

A lot of interesting information here, but this one paragraph blew my mind:

> Although the birds occasionally made mistakes, they more often confused calls with similar meanings rather than similar sounds. “Their responses indicated they have a mental imagery of the meaning of their vocalisations,” Elie said. “In other words, that they understand the meaning of their call types.”

by ghurtado

7/4/2026 at 5:24:49 PM

I remember hearing about an interesting paper; it argued that Zebra finch songs were as complex as recursively enumerable languages on the Chomsky hierarchy. I wanted to see if I could find it but came across another paper arguing that their embedded context sensitivity can be explained by simpler rules.

    https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908113106
Just the same, these little fellows are some of the cutest on our planet.

Left this comment as another computer science connection.

by bluechair

7/4/2026 at 5:52:26 PM

No doubts the crows are all having a good laugh at our expense.

by ChuckMcM

7/4/2026 at 6:12:24 PM

Does anyone have a link to a decoded message?

by esafak

7/4/2026 at 5:18:09 PM

Another win for machine learning:

>She then applied machine learning to analyse how information was encoded in the calls before testing her findings through behavioural experiments.

by AndrewKemendo