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Dancing cockatoo bird10/4/2023 Much like human children, he often went offbeat, but his performance was consistent enough to satisfy Patel. In almost every case, the parrot successfully banged his head and lifted his feet in time. In 2008, he tested Snowball’s ability to keep time with versions of “Everybody” that had been slowed down or sped up. “When someone sent me a video of Snowball, I was primed to jump on it,” Patel says. That elite club excludes dogs, cats, and other primates, but includes elephants, dolphins, songbirds, and parrots. Patel reasoned that dancing requires strong connections between brain regions involved in hearing and movement, and that such mental hardware would only exist in vocal learners-animals that can imitate the sounds they hear. Neither do our closest relatives, monkeys and other primates. Our closest companions, dogs and cats, don’t do that. True dancing is spontaneous rhythmic movement to external music. Some birds make fancy courtship “dances,” but “they’re not listening to another bird laying down a complex beat,” says Patel, who is now at Tufts University. ![]() Some can be trained to perform dancelike actions, as in canine freestyle, but don’t do so naturally. Some species jump excitedly to music, but not in time. Patel, a neuroscientist, had recently published a paper asking why dancing-a near-universal trait among human cultures-was seemingly absent in other animals. When a Tonight Show producer called to arrange an interview, Schulz thought it was a prank.Īmong the video’s 6.2 million viewers was Aniruddh Patel, and he was was blown away. Within a month, Snowball became a celebrity. She took a grainy video, uploaded it to YouTube, and sent a link to some bird-enthusiast friends. ![]() Sure enough, when the center’s director, Irena Schulz, played “Everybody,” Snowball “immediately broke out into his headbanging, bad-boy dance,” she recalls. So in August 2007, he dropped Snowball off at the Bird Lovers Only rescue center in Dyer, Indiana-along with a Backstreet Boys CD, and a tip that the bird loved to dance. His owner had realized that he couldn’t care for the sulfur-crested cockatoo any longer. Before he became an internet sensation, before he made scientists reconsider the nature of dancing, before the children’s book and the Taco Bell commercial, Snowball was just a young parrot, looking for a home.
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