Understanding Sleep and Memory in the Avian Brain

How do neural circuits change to incorporate newly learned events? After decades of research, we now have a good understanding of the diversity and duration of memory types, the context-specifics of learning regimes, and the brain areas that are likely to be involved. However, we are still far from a mechanistic understanding of the neural activity required to transform new behavioral experiences into long term memory accessed during recall events. What kind of network activity is required to affect these wide-spread changes in neuronal circuitries? Among current theories of memory in mammals, one of the most intriguing is concerned with the role of large-scale synchronous neural activity, which is thought to enable the transfer of information from the hippocampus to numerous regions of the neocortex. In this contribution, we first review sleep, learning, and memory in birds before highlighting evidence that large-scale synchronous neural activity also exists in the avian brain, making the case that by examining these questions from a comparative research perspective, we gain important insight into the canonical features of memory consolidation.