The way Fernando Nottebohm sees it, the collection of groundbreaking discoveries he has made regarding the neural basis of vocal learning in songbirds was mostly a matter of good fortune. "A lot of it was just luck - and making hypotheses that were not tight by any means or persuasive, but that were just kind of groping in the dark and saying, 'If this is so, that might be so,'" he shrugs. "It was not a logically compelling process."












