Dr. Jarvis studies the brain and how it creates, understands, and learns vocal communication. His research involves birds and mice, although he’s very interested in how the lessons learned from these model organisms can be applied to humans as well.

Dr. Jarvis turned down the opportunity to audition for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Company in order to pursue his degree at Hunter College, where his research led to the publication of seven papers. Staying in New York City, he completed his graduate studies and postdoctoral fellowship at the Rockefeller University, where he first started working on songbirds as a model for understanding brain plasticity (the ability of the brain to rewire itself).

During his time at Rockefeller, Dr. Jarvis created a new method for mapping how bird singing changed the gene expression in the brain. Basically, he wanted to know: how much of each protein is being made from each gene in which parts of the brain? And do those patterns change between singing and not-singing?

The ability to imitate sounds that you hear (called “vocal learning”) is something only six groups of animals (parrots, songbirds, hummingbirds, bat, whales/dolphins, and humans) can do. It is thought that each of these six groups gained the ability to do this independently, given how separated they are on the evolutionary tree. Yet in the brains of all six, the same seven similar brain structures exist. Dr. Jarvis believes that these seven structures are what allows these species to do vocal learning, and that genetics/gene expression can explain why all of these species were constrained to evolve the same way.

To me, the most interesting thing that Dr. Jarvis has shown thus far is that vocal learning overlaps in the brain with movement-related areas. These areas are known to do things like control muscle contraction/relaxation. Based on this, Dr. Jarvis believes that vocal learning evolved as a specialized version of the motor system that controls body movement, and possibly motor learning (for example, learning how to fly). The evidence for this idea is still fairly inconclusive — as he freely admits in the paper where he proposed it — but its an interesting one, and one that is leading to lots of interesting new hypotheses to test.

Dr. Jarvis hopes that some day this better understanding of vocal learning in birds — and how it is similar/different from us —will help us to design better treatments for people with brain injuries that impact their ability to speak.