Snowball, like most dancers, only got better with time. "Parrots have that convergence and we have it, but very few other animals probably have it." 14 distinct dance moves - and 2 combos "It's remarkable that this convergence of this response to music occurs in us and in this very distantly related animal," Patel said. One was an Asian elephant that could sway and swing its trunk with the beat, and the other 14 were parrots. That study's author, Adena Schachner, watched thousands of YouTube videos in search of more dancing animals, and found only 15 species with the same abilities. "We hadn't known of any other cases of animals actually spontaneously moving to the beat of music - something we see in every single human culture."Īnother study that year out of Harvard University replicated Patel's findings with both Snowball and another parrot named Alex, reports The Atlantic. "When I saw this video, I was amazed," Patel said. He had already been studying people's inherent ability and desire to move to a beat, when he came across the grainy YouTube footage of a white parrot bobbing, kicking and squeaking along to Everybody (Backstreet's Back) by the Backstreet Boys. Patel's fascination with Snowball began back in 2008, when the sulfur-crested cockatoo became an early viral video star. "It's an impulse that arises when certain cognitive and neural capacities come together in an animal's brain." Snowball goes viral "We feel that this does suggest that the impulse to dance to music is not just an arbitrary invention of human culture like, you know, coffee cups or bicycles or any of the many other wonderful things we've invented," psychology professor Aniruddh Patel, the study's co-author, told told As It Happens guest host Robyn Bresnahan. The findings were published Monday in the journal Current Biology. Most recently, they've been observing and documenting Snowball's creative tendency to invent and perfect new dances entirely on his own. At first, they were fascinated by his ability to spontaneously move to a beat, a trait previously only recorded in humans. Scientists at Tufts University in Massachusetts have been studying the prancing parrot for more than a decade. Snowball the cockatoo is changing the way we think about music, culture and human evolution with his fresh and funky dance moves. This story was published on July 9, 2019.
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